Standing order status

@Roma Sharma
Hi, Roma. By standing orders, do you mean pledges?

A standing order isn't a pledge, it's an instruction from the donor to their bank to pay out money on a regular basis (so it's a recurring gift). It's slightly different to a Direct Debit (where it's the organisation making the request to withdraw money from the donor's account and would receive a notification to say if it had failed for some reason) as the organisation doesn't hold any information about the status of the standing order and if we're lucky the money just magically appears in our bank account each month We had a campaign to convert most of our standing order donors to Direct Debits a number of years ago, which gave us better visibility of whether regular donors were still active.

If a donor hasn't made any payments for a year, that could be for a number of reasons: cancellation, insufficient funds, change of frequency, account closure etc. Without contacting the donor we really have no way of knowing why it's stopped, but after 2 years it's probably a safe bet that it's been cancelled? If they made another payment tomorrow, would you really want to put that against the existing recurring gift or would you start a new one? If the latter then I don't see any point leaving the currrent one active myself.