Pledges in LO become 'Recurring Donations' in RE NXT automatically

Luis Puesan

Good morning, everyone,

I am wondering if anyone else has dealt with this issue before, where you sync pledges/pledge payments over from Luminate Online to RE NXT and it defaults to 'recurring donations' instead of pledges/pledge payments when synced through the LO connector.

If you have dealt with this issue, how did you fix it? It is causing a ton of issues, and it seems odd to allow pledges in LO but not allow it to sync over properly. Is this a configuration issue?

Edit: After more digging, I need to correct what I wrote earlier. LO does support installment pledges through the Installment Plan Donation Level, but it stores them as a type of sustaining gift and the LO connector then brings every sustaining gift into RE NXT as a 'recurring gift', with later payments linked to it. The field mapping has no option to send them in as Pledges.

So, this is not a configuration issue or a misuse of LO - it is just how the integration is built.

Options I am looking at:

1. Embed an RE NXT Standard Donation Form with pledges (which charges installments automatically) in an LO page, based on Glen's Luminate-OLX-SKY example. His version uses an Online Express "Bill Me Later" form.
2. Build a custom integration that brings LO installment gifts into RE as pledges and pledge payments.
3. Take pledges on an RE NXT form instead of in LO.

If anyone has solved this a different way, I would love to hear it.

Thanks,
Luis Puesan

Will Hull

Hey there, @Luis Puesan

I am a Blackbaud Luminate Online consultant. Can you please share which option you are using as a data sync to RE NXT? Are you using RELO or Omatic? Those are the two I see most often. If RELO, we do have an in-house RELO specialist on staff that could help answer some of your questions above. If so, I would recommend talking with your Account Executive/Manager or your Customer Success Manager to see about getting face time with that RELO specialist consultant. However, if you have Omatic, I recommend speaking with your Omatic consultant about the various options here as a part of the data sync as they likely have seen the scenario in the past and can provide the options in the Omatic profile set up to move the data from LO to RE.

Next, regarding your question, yes, the Installment Plan giving pattern would be best to break up a large gift commitment over a period of time that you allow on the donation form (e.g. 6 monthly payments, 12 monthly payments, 4 quarterly payments, 5 annual payments, etc.), but they do charge as though they are a sustaining gift where a token is captured at the time the first payment is made and it is presented to the payment processor at the time that each subsequent payment is scheduled to process. Similar to a ongoing, never-ending sustaining gift.

For those donors who would like to establish a pledge but not make a payment on that pledge yet, you may want to use a Luminate Online Survey for that information gathering so that there is no transaction at the time the pledge is made and then, on the Luminate Online donation form itself, you may want to add a custom donation form field that is a checkbox or a yes/no kind of question to ask if the gift that they are making on that form is fulfilling a pledge or making a payment against a pledge to indicate that it is a pledge payment. This way, with reporting you can capture the intent of the gift as part of fulfilling a pledge. You would use this method if you are not capturing a payment at the time when a donor wishes to establish a pledge.

However, if you would like to collect payment at the start of the pledge, then an Installment Plan giving pattern is the best way to go.

Unfortunately, I am not a consultant on the data sync side of things (information about who to go to is above in the first paragraph regarding the data sync), but if you were seeking to use Luminate Online to start and collect payments for pledges, this is the way that I have seen it done most often with the many donation forms that I have seen set up by the organizations I have worked with over the years as a consultant here at Blackbaud.

I hope you find this information helpful.

Thanks,
Will
Principal Consultant, Luminate Online, Blackbaud