Automated Recurring Gifts Preview And Coming Attractions!

Jillian Vrba

As mentioned in recent announcements, we're gearing you up for our coming attractions through preview releases — similar to how Hollywood gears audiences for new films.


If you've been tuning in to our recent roadmap calls or the Raiser's Edge NXT community, you've likely heard about the exciting new Gift Management features coming your way. Automated Recurring Gifts is our latest 'preview' and is now available to a limited number of Raiser's Edge NXT customers!


Recurring gifts are a great way to increase revenue and create a more predictable income stream as compared to one-time gifts. While the concept of recurring giving is not a new one, we've made it much easier to add and maintain these gifts and their scheduled payments.

What makes automated recurring gifts useful today?

If you manage recurring gifts in the database view today, it's likely that the first of each month is always a busy day. To process recurring gift payments in the database view, you need to generate batches of gifts, submit them for processing, decide how to handle payment rejections, and so on. With automated recurring gifts, we've eliminated many of these manual steps. Imagine logging in each morning to find a batch of recurring gift payments already processed and awaiting your approval. Within minutes, you're able to create gift records for all of the successful payments — saving you hours of time that can be spent focused on your mission instead.


When you add a recurring gift in the web view:

• Recurring gift payments are automatically generated based on the recurring gift's payment schedule.
• Successful payments are placed in unapproved batches — so you can review them before they’re entered into your database.
• Failed payments can be automatically retried — so you're more likely to capture revenue if a credit card was temporarily declined.

Already have recurring gifts in the database view? Automate them and let Raiser's Edge NXT do the work! Recurring gifts can be converted in the web view if they have:

• A status of Active.
• A schedule with no end date or an end date in the future.
• A scheduled recurrence frequency of monthly, weekly, every two or four weeks, quarterly, every six months, or annually.
• A start date that matches the scheduled frequency.
• A valid token in Blackbaud Payment Services (BBPS).

In the coming weeks and months, additional Gift Management functionality will be introduced. Soon, you'll be able to:

• Configure how many times failed recurring gift payments are retried.
• Enable online donation forms to accept both one-time and recurring gifts.
• Generate receipts for gifts.
• Enable online event registration forms.

How do I add a recurring gift in the web view?

If you have rights to add new gifts, you’ll see Recurring gift as an available gift type when it’s available for your organization. You can add one-time and recurring gifts from a constituent's record, from Home, or from Fundraising, Gift Management.

When will my organization get Automated Recurring Gifts?

Over the next several months, we expect to roll out automated recurring gifts (as well as other Gift Management features) in waves to all Raiser’s Edge NXT customers. To learn more, see this post about our MVP approach to releasing new features. 

How can I learn more? 

• Watch a 4-minute video overview of the automated recurring gift feature (from November 2019)
• View the recording of a webinar with Principal Product Managers Jarod Bonino and Ken Cantu in which they discuss the future of gift management, including automated recurring gifts, in RENXT web view (from July 2019). Launch webinar recording now. 

We look forward to partnering with all of our customers as we continue to evolve our Gift Management features! As you start to work with the features, be sure to discuss your thoughts and share your ideas in the Community to help guide their development!

Aubrye Carr

I currently process recurring gifts every Monday and it's quite time consuming in batch. I cannot wait for this feature to be available to all customers!

Beth Gibney

I'm fairly new to processing recurring gifts.  I never knew just how manual the process would be.  I'm so excited for these new features!

Nicole Holt

Agreed, Beth Gibney: recurring gifts is such a manual process! Excited to gain access to Gift Management (soon?!) to automate!

Vicky Wendt

We are very new to recurring gifts. This is great news and I'm very excited about it being a bit more automated. Looking into the process gave me a headache. 

Abbey Kronenberg

Is this feature available to all yet?  We would like the ability to automate our recurring gifts