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Managing Declined Transactions

Melissa Stewart

Hi all - I have multiple declined transactions (both credit cards and ACH) on a daily basis. These are recurring gifts. I am not seeing an automated way to communicate with donors that their recurring gift has been declined. How do you all manage your declined transactions? Is there a process I am unaware of that would be helpful in communicating with donors exactly when and why their gift was declined?

-Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

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Comments

Audrey Morris

@Melissa Stewart I don’t have these on a daily basis, but we are a small school. We run recurring on a monthly basis but usually don’t have declines more than 2-5x per year, so I don’t know if my process would work for you with such a high volume.

My first question would be are these all isolated/individual declines? Like each decline is a separate person? Or is it someone who’s on a recurring gift that gets run day after day even though it declines the day before?

Second question set would be what code are you getting for the declines? Are they being processed with BBMS? What form are you using (NXT/OLX/The New form that adjusts per donor)?

When we have a declined recurring gift I will typically send the donor a form email that basically says your donation has encountered an error related to your credit card, please contact your card company. If it is an ISF decline that usually does the trick. If it’s a “call the number on the back of your card” decline, then sometimes it’s the card company putting a stop on the payment because they think it’s fraud. The donor has to tell them it isn’t. I’ll ask them to let me know when they have contacted their card company. If I don’t hear from them in a week I’ll attempt to process again. If it is still declining I’ll typically will reach out by phone or have one of our fundraisers reach out if they have a relationship with the donor and will ask for a new cc #. I have found some card providers are more likely to decline recurring transactions than others. The people that use a bank credit card or debit card seem to decline more than AMEX clients do.

It’s definitely an issue that I wish there was a better solution to, especially when it’s the card company fraud blocking it. If you find a solution definitely post it!

Melissa Stewart

@Audrey Morris Thanks for replying!

Yes, these are all separate individuals. The worst days I am seeing 20 individual declines. They are almost all recurring gifts and we use BBMS as our processor. The decline codes are all over the place. So, it's very inconsistent with the reason for the decline. Since there is no automation for decline communication, I am trying to find a more efficient way to email these folks.

Audrey Morris

@Melissa Stewart gotcha! Thinking about it, you may want to try cross posting in the power automate forums. Someone over there may have created a template that could set up an automated email for you, if you’re processing with NXT that would probably be easier than if you’re processing with OLX, but I bet there’s a way you could set up a daily report and then run the PA based off of that. I’m not experienced enough to tell you how exactly but I dabbled enough to know it’s likely possible!

Dariel Dixon

@Melissa Stewart With dealing with declined credit cards, I think the best approach is a personal one. The reason for the decline is irrelevant, but the donor would probably appreciate getting a note from a staff person. The volume is a bit high now, but I imagine that as you contact donors the volume will decrease. Is the issue just that there's too many to email individually each day?

You might also want to see if you have the credit card updater service available on your contract.

Karen Diener

@Melissa Stewart I think @Dariel Dixon raises an excellent point. This is absolutely a one-on-one type of communication in my opinion. Although it is transactional in nature, it is part of the relationship-building that front-line fundraisers should be doing with donors. You may not reach all of them and get to the root of the problem, but I'm willing to bet you'll get a better response with an individual interaction.

The article explains the various gateway declines - what they mean, and how to handle them.

Deborah Barrette

@Audrey Morris
How do you attempt to process the declined gift with the new card info? I don't see any access to resubmit for that specific scheduled date.

Audrey Morris

@Deborah Barrette
In OLX or NXT? In OLX if you go in to the original pledge you can update the card there. Then run your auto batch like usual (load automatic payments) and when you create the EFT transmission files it will use the new card number you’ve put in the original pledge/RG. It will process immediately and apply to the most recent omitted payment date (so if you’ve been “broken” since August, it’ll apply to August 1 payment, not October 1). You can do an Adjustment to the original gift payment schedule to change the payment dates if you want to actually skip those months. I’ve seen it done both ways and I don’t know if there’s a best practice. I dislike doing the Adjustments because the person before me messed a bunch of them up and it took forever to clean up, so I’m just psychologically gun shy of them, but in reality I suspect that would be the best option. I would personally just let the donor know about the card error delaying their payment, thereby tracking months on to the end of their planned gift. (E.g. if they missed 2 payments on a 12 month pledge that was supposed to end in December now their pledge will pay Jan and Feb as well.) If it was a recurring gift (e.g. no end date) then I wouldn’t think that would matter much to the donor but I’d still make the notification that they paid less than they expected to, so their EOY statement isn’t a surprise. We don’t utilize the recurring gift option due to issues with cards happening so frequently when they used it before my time, so I can’t say for sure how that process works within the framework I gave, but I suspect it’s similar. Hope that helps! Let me know if I misinterpreted your question ?