Migrating Recurring Gifts

Keith Wilson

Happy New Year BB Community! I am hoping someone on here can educate me on migrating recurring gifts from one platform to another. We are currently using a 3rd party “crowdfunding” solution that offers recurring giving. Our contract is nearing an end and we are not looking to renew it. However, we have about 160 donors with a recurring gift (mostly monthly, but some with weekly, quarterly, and annual frequencies as well) that are currently processed via that third party. Has anyone had success in migrating recurring gifts from a 3rd party into RE? I realize there are all kinds of PCI compliance issues and encrypted tokens, etc. that play into this, so I am hoping to learn from you all what is possible? What works? What are the pitfalls? Of course I anticipate resistance from the 3rd party who doesn't want to release that data as well, so any advise on navigating that challenge is also greatly appreciated.

Austen Brown

@Keith Wilson - I believe this is something BB can assist with depending on where the data is coming from, for a fee - of course; if interested contact you account rep for more information. The alternative is to contact the 160 donors and explain you are making a change and need their cc/banking information again for the new system; it is unlikely that you will get 100% participation doing the migration this way.

Dariel Dixon

@Keith Wilson My organization just moved off a third party platform for recurring gifts, however it was not easy. We were not able to migrate the recurring gifts, and chose to reach out to those donors and ask them to move over to our new system. Like @Austen Brown mentioned, we did lose donors that were unwilling to make any changes, or those who had forgotten about their donations and used this opportunity to cancel them.

There are two things worth noting that we had going in our favor. The first was time. We knew a year in advance that we were planning on making a change, and that we reached out as soon as possible to let the donors know of the upcoming change. Very few migrated over immediately, but we did see an uptick in migrations 30 days before the cutoff date and after several emails and letters. The second thing that we had was a much smaller number of recurring donors on our old system. We moved to a new system a couple of years prior, so only the oldest recurring gifts were still there and needed to be moved; new recurring gifts were already being entered into the new system.

I would really consider the possibility of running both concurrently for a short time to get people time to migrate. Also, this is an opportunity to ask them to increase their recurring gift, if you plan on contacting them. We did have a small number that did increase their donation when migrating as well.

Keith Wilson

Thank you @Austen Brown and @Dariel Dixon. I am leaving this open for discussion in case anyone else has some experiences they would like to share. I will also continue to provide updates as we move through this process. As Austen recommended, I did reach out to our Account Rep who then introduced me to an Account Executive at BBMS who can assist us with this migration. We have had a few email exchanges and it looks very promising! (That is until we see what they want to charge us! LOL!)