Donor Cover info for RENXT donation forms in database view?

Jim Penix

We are looking at RENXT donation forms for the first time. Is there a way in database view to see whether or not the donor covered credit card fees when generating acknowledgement letters using the Mail utility? There seems to be an Online Express Donor Cover gift attribute, but the RENXT donation form doesn't populate this attribute and I don't seem to be able to find a similar gift attribute specific to the RENXT donation form. We'd like to add a message to the donor thanking them for covering the credit card fees to reduce our costs.

Austen Brown

@Jim Penix - Welcome to BB Community! You are correct the custom field/attribute tracking for this information does not exist for NXT donation forms. The only way for you to be able to tell within DBV if a donor covered fees would be to allow the system to create split the incoming gift by fund, dividing the gift into the intended amount and the ‘covered’/additional amount. Personally, I don't like this because I want the full amount of the gift be credited to the donor's selected fund.

Jim Penix

@Austen Brown - In RENXT gift details, there is a message at the top of the screen indicating if the donor covered donation fees. Guess Blackbaud feels paper based customized acknowledgement letters aren't needed where we may include personal messages and/or other materials before sending

Potique Johnson

@Jim Penix
We actually created a separate Fund called “Credit Card Fees”. Then we gave permission on the Donor Cover NXT Donation Form to split the gift. When it comes across to us we can see that the gift was applied to 2 funds. One the fund that they donated to and the other the credit card fee.

Jim Penix

@Jim Penix - Follow-up question - we just activated a RENXT donation form with donor cover. Our staff is concerned that on the payment screen, the checkbox for donor cover defaults to Checked. Has this caused problems with donors who may not have noticed this option at the bottom of the payment screen? Have you had to refund many credit card fees as a result?

Here is a sample payment screen with the default checkbox at the bottom:

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Lee Grisham

@Jim Penix
I haven't seen anything here when using those features across any payment platform, and we've used 5 different ones over the last year and a half for various things.

Not to say that there won't be, but there is always someone who makes a mistake and would like to have you correct it even if they checked it by accident! I would think the data say do it even with the “risk” that a few might complain. This is the way all platforms are moving. It doesn't really even depend on the size of the donation, even those over $1k have covered!

Leah Mihm

@Potique Johnson how did you give permission on the donor cover NXT donation form to split the gift and then designate your “Credit Card Fees" as the fund to receive the credit card fees?

Potique Johnson

@Leah Mihm
Leah, When you first sign up for donor cover it gives you a choice of splitting the fee. If you don't have a seperate “Credit Card Fee” fund set up then the total amount will go to the first fund the donor selects. See below:

Potique Johnson

@Jim Penix
Jim,

We keep track of donor cover amounts when we receive the confirmation to our e-mail that a donation was made. When you make a new donation form under the Confirmation Tab under the Notifications area you can put e-mails where you want notifications of donations sent. An email labeled Notification of Transaction is sent to those e-mails whenever an online donation is made. It tells you which donation form they used and gives you all the gift details including the donor cover amount. This allows us to thank them for the donor cover in our thank you letter that we mail out.

Potique Johnson

@Jim Penix
None at all. Most of our donors like this feature. I have received no complaints.

Potique Johnson

@Jim Penix
You can edit the e-mail confirmation sent to the client under the Confirmation Tab. You can now even include a picture. So you can customize the body of the e-mail confirmation. But we also send out an actual thank you letter too.

Potique Johnson

@Jim Penix
Jim,

Austen is correct. We; however, chose to “split the gift”. We still provide the donor with full donation amount for their gift, but we divert the processing fee to a different fund which we set up called Credit Card Fee. This allows us to keep a running total of how many dollars in credit card fees we have collected. In our thank you letter we give credit for the full amount (including credit card fees) since all are tax deductible and thank them for choosing to cover the fees.

Leah Mihm

@Potique Johnson Thank you! I was able to create the credit card fees fund and change the donor cover designation to that.