How to best notify donors of a failed recurring donation?

Ellie Stair

I am trying to set up a more automated process to notify our donors if their recurring donation fails. I am running into a block with all of NXT's functionality, however, and wondering how you notify your donors when their gifts fail?

With our current setup of using OE donation forms, and then automating the gifts manually, our gifts all run on the 1st of each month. I then go in, look at my list of failed gifts after the 1st, and email each individually. However, we would like to move to the NXT donation forms, which don't allow the gifts to be designated for the 1st of the month. With gifts potentially processing at any point (and hopefully having a huge number of new recurring donors, obviously!) I would like a more automated process to check and notify if the gift failed.

Gift receipting will not allow me to send emails to $0 gifts; workflow designer will not allow a constituent to be added more than once; is there another option that I am missing? I see I can send emails through Marketing, but I am not sure that would be much easier.

Would love to hear the solutions you have come up with to manage your recurring donors!

Lee Grisham

@Ellie Stair this seems like it would be easier to accomplish through Power Automate. Once you migrate over, you can set PA up to pull a list based on the criteria you use to currently email people and then have it populate an email for you.

If none of that makes sense, check out the Microsoft Power Platform discussions to learn more.

Dariel Dixon

@Ellie Stair I think @Lee Grisham has a good idea with using Power Automate, however I would ask what your response is to these emails? I've been a bigger fan of making phone calls for some of these types of gifts just because I've had such a lousy response rate to emails for these communications. I also feel like it's an opportunity for a more personal touch, as generally these interactions can be somewhat awkward.

Hopefully the volume for these is manageable, and it is worth the time and effort into automating these emails. If it's not a large number, it might be more advantageous to just send them by hand.

Ellie Stair

@Lee Grisham thanks for sending me in that direction. I have never used PA but am now looking into it, thinking of all the ways it could help.

Ellie Stair

@Dariel Dixon thanks! Looking into PA.

To answer your question regarding the response - it's actually been pretty great via email. Most folks get back to me almost instantly and update their giving, sometimes increasing the donation now that I have reached out.

After a few attempts via email I do try to give them a call, but I usually don't need to resort to that.

Sounds like for the time being, I may just be better suited to keep on how I have been and doing things manually. May need to revisit if our donor base explodes (good problems to think of, yeah?)