Setting Up and Managing Monthly Giving

Hello everybody, welcome back, and hey, seeing some familiar names. Angela Esmeralda, good to see everybody again. Had had a bigger group of registrations for today. Yesterday was foundations, just kind of conceptually, what is monthly giving? What are some of our strategies today? Read More

Hello everybody, welcome back, and hey, seeing some familiar names. Angela Esmeralda, good to see everybody again. Had had a bigger group of registrations for today. Yesterday was foundations, just kind of conceptually, what is monthly giving? What are some of our strategies today? We’re getting into donor perfect, into the database, and some of the tools that you may have available to you. If you’re here, hey, you might not have donor perfect, but if you have donor perfect already. There are some people that just have DonorPerfect, the database, and all of the cool features that come with it, reporting and the mail merges and the receipts, but there’s some extra bells and whistles that I hope you have some payment processing options, maybe some online portals to make our life a little bit easier. We’ll be taking a look at that today. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. I teach people one on one, and every now and then I do get to do the webinars, which is this week talked about monthly giving. Monthly giving programs could work for all types of organizations, but should be tailored to fit the unique needs and goals of your nonprofit, especially when we get to the online portion of this. I did notice that the monthly giving donation page that I had set up had been altered by one of my colleagues that I share this database with, and I’m going to have to make sure that we do allow people the option to select which fund they wanted to go into, which is totally optional, but it’s an extra flavor that we can add to this. But that’s for later. We’re going to start off with the basic structure of how monthly giving is represented within DonorPerfect. It’s something called a pledge. You might even have people that are monthly givers, but they’re giving by cash or check, kind of old school, but 1000s of people do it, sending that in on a regular basis. It’s still this thing called a pledge that is hopefully recording that, and if it’s going to be automatic, where we’re getting their money, it will have to be a pledge. So we’re going to start off there, and then look at how they can do some of the data entry for us by building some effective gift forms. There’s a couple different options for that, and then how everything gets processed through monthly giving. Monthly comes up a lot. It is definitely the most common way that people give recurring day-to-day management options, some of which are automatic by way of notification emails. Whose monthly giving transactions failed? Who was successful? Were there any issues? There should be at least one person set up for this, and just some general best practices overall, and definitely, as always, with all of our webinars, since DonorPerfect is customizable. When we look at the individual data entry screens, which we will hear in a moment, we’re going to add a pledge for somebody, since everything could get moved around. This database is like eight years old, the look of it might just look a little different here and there, more or less the same. Now, ultimately, we are going to put this online. Well, we’re not in DonorPerfect yet, but before we do, we can take a look at what this pledge is within DonorPerfect, and we’re going to see the terminology of monthly all over the place, and this is this is actually true with a lot of our marketing communications, and maybe some of the stuff on our website. When we promote monthly giving, statistically, monthly is the most common frequency. It really could be any type of recurring gift, it could be weekly, it could be quarterly, it could even be annual and automatic recurring. We a lot of the times refer to all of that as one big umbrella, and there’s a few different ways we can get this outside of online, maybe we’re in person on the phone. I know some people still send out slips through the mail and have very risky, not not recommended, but but not everybody’s online, not everybody. Is online, they’re more comfortable doing things a different way. Instead of sending that information through the mail, I think it would be better to get them on the phone once we have a profile for them.

So, if we’re in DonorPerfect, we have a profile for that person. We’re going to want to make sure that the billing address is in there, and then if we go to the gift screen for that person, we have an InstaCharge button. Now, everybody has an InstaCharge button, whether or not it works for you depends on a couple factors that we’ll get into later, mainly the ability to process electronic transactions. It’s free to sign up, but not everybody has it, like I said. Some people do just have the database. So, instead of Sally writing down her information and sending it through the mail, we could punch that information in right from here. Looks like this one’s expired. All these people are fake. It allows me to do fake transactions, but instead of one time, which is certainly an option, we could do a one time donation right now. We could instead choose the monthly option, do select our amount that we want monthly. We entered the billing information already, because we’ve seen Sally before, but if it was new, we might have a new credit card or perhaps new bank information that we wanted to save, and we will have to save it. Everything’s encrypted after we type it in. It’s only ever going to look like this: Visa with the last four of it copies over the billing information from the main screen, and especially for spouses, we might have both of their names, but for billing information, say we’re putting in Sam now. I’m just putting in certain fake numbers. It’ll allow me to do this. You will need real card information, where in your system, if it.. if there was anything wrong with it, you would get a failed message right away. Here, it’s successful, no matter what. For me, but for you, very, very real case that we might see a failed transaction, invalid card number expired. The bank declines a lot of these would mean the user would have to contact their bank, but there also is a payment processing department that I can point everybody towards later on. Now that that first transaction is successful, it is immediately moving me from gifts where that first donation is. We’ve already had our first pledge payment, it’s over there on the gift screen, we can circle back and see it there in a minute, but what we really care about now is the pledge. The pledge is the mechanism that drives the monthly donation. Now, because I used InstaCharge, the first amount was $100 we can leave it at that. That’s what we’ll charge monthly, and we can leave the total as $0 if they intend to give this amount every single month indefinitely. $0 is kind of seen as infinity here, or maybe they wanted to do $100 for 12 months, we could calculate what that would be after 12 months and put that total up there at the top. Otherwise, we can leave that at zero. Frequency has defaulted to the popular one, but we have many others, so No, not exactly with Stripe. You will see some options with PayPal and Venmo, but those are in addition to processing with DonorPerfect, which is free to sign up. I’ll give you the contact information at the end for anybody that’s not signed up, and I can get you the fact sheet with that information, but not Stripe. Correct, Jasper, asking if I were to leave the total at $1,200 would it stop after a year? Correct. Yes, it would. But beware, because the total will default to zero. So, if we do want a fixed pledge, is what we would call it. We would have that total in there, and you’re correct. It looks at the total versus. Is the total paid? There’s a calculated field here over to the right total paid $100 We’ve already had that first gift. It was a successful transaction. Oh no, gotta expand. That’s Jonathan. Yeah, no worries. Please drop questions in the chat as we are going along. At the level that we’re seeing right now, it would be Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, or ACH bank account. We select our frequency, totally could switch it to a different one, as long as it’s not unknown or unusual for loose commitments. We might use these. These options are not automatic. Everything else will run automatic, and there is even an option.

There’s even an option for setting up a monthly giving automatic email, which is already set up. There’s a little bit more work than just selecting an option from a drop down. I don’t know if I’ll have time to show this, but underneath the mailings drop down we have our email template option, that is where you could design an email template that is then designated on the pledge on the commitment, and every single month that particular thank you will get used, not this first time, though. Not this first time. And, besides selecting monthly giving as the thank you, we also want to select the delivery preference of email. A lot of folks will default to letter, but we very specifically want email. So, this combination of these two, and also the fake person here, would have to have an email address that also has to be true for this to work, so Sam and Sally not getting an email in this case, because they don’t have one, but this is how you would set that up on the pledge. In the middle column, we have some very important fields, some are selected for us already, process via monthly giving is yes, and remember capital M, capital G, monthly giving. I put it in quotes, that is just recurring, as long as it is not unusual or unknown. It’s any of these others, it’ll process. That’s just a branded thing. In here it is selecting the new payment method that I just entered a few moments ago, but there is an old one, or hey, I could even add a new credit card or a new checking account, and all subsequent monthly donations will be a different type, and then very important general ledger. I have no thoughts on this other than what your accountant says should go in there, and yeah, not here to say anybody’s doing their fields wrong again. This is all of this stuff is customizable. What you have in your dropdowns might be a little different from what I have, and that’s very true of general ledger campaign solicitation and subsolicitation, general ledger, where that money’s going, how it’s being used. Not everybody uses campaign, but in this system system, we do have an umbrella monthly giving campaign that anything that is related to monthly giving would fall under. And then we have the solicitation, which is of the three fundraising fields really solicitation should be the only one required, and we do have a monthly giving 2026 option. We might see gifts with this code showing up in 2030 and if we see that year tag on the monthly giving solicitation, will know how long they’ve been with us, further showing that reporting cess success on donor retention with our monthly givers, and that’s it. Now we got a pledge, first gift has gone through, that’s going to be our pledge moving forward. And, like I said, the first gift did go through already. It is a Visa InstaCharge, and I didn’t get an error message. You would still have to go back and edit, you would still have to go back and edit that gift, just to make sure that it had all of the appropriate codes now. This one isn’t going to be thanked automatically. I would either have to do it in the batch, or I could use the thank donor button right from here, which, for the first monthly giving donation, yeah, that is a. The way we could go after this, it’ll be automatic, and oops, no email, can’t even go forward, so that’s one way we could charge them right now. Another scenario is that they want to start on a certain day of the month, say they want to start on april 15, the start date of the pledge dictates the day of the month that it’s charged, and in that case, we can just skip over gifts and go to pledges. There’s no gifts just yet. We will make the pledge where the start date is today. We’ve actually missed the monthly giving batch for this day, it happened at 5am between five and 7am Eastern. So, even if they wanted, we’d have to do an InstaCharge if they wanted it today. But let’s say we start on the 15th, our total is what it is, zero, or perhaps it’s fixed.

We have our frequency, and then hey, we could even use the same email template, as long as that email isn’t exclusively, hey, monthly this, monthly that. Thank you for being recurring. We might even have it, might be our harvest circle, or one of our other branded groups that we were talking about yesterday. Now, process via monthly giving, not filled in for us yet. We have to set it from empty and not no, but we want it to yes. And then here is our payment method option. This particular constituent has not had one stored. They may have donated in the past, but it only stores it if we have a monthly commitment, or you go out of your way to store it. Let’s add a new credit card, and again, if they’re new to your database, make sure you get their name and address in there. First, we’re going to need it later. Put in their card info, and off we go. Off we go to wait. Really, still want to set the rest of our fields. and there we go, and now quarterly, monthly, bi weekly, whatever, it’s going to be the 15th, that’s when we’re going to be charged next, so Uh, now when we’re putting things online, a few different things to consider. This is definitely an opportunity to maybe capture their intention when I was doing the recording for the gift, I just arbitrarily picked restricted, but as your general ledger will often represent your different efforts that you’re raising money for, that might be an opportunity to get that information right then and there, because you already have it represented in a drop down, we can get their first monthly gift right there, capture it and keep it going. There are going to be a few different things that you need if we want to scale this up and put it online. You’re going to need your, you are going to need an online giving form for online donations, you may have one already. That’s for one time or recurring. We have two different options for this now, and if you want to process really any transactions, you’re going to need a merchant processor through Safe Save, uh I’m always talking about DonorPerfect, that is the database, but we are owned by a company called Software, and Software has many other softwares, including this thing called the Safe Safe Gateway. The Safe Safe Gateway is your virtual bank teller that is moving money from point a to point b, so as I said earlier, when we were recording that, pledges it’s donor perfect that’s processing it, really it’s safe save, it’s the safe save department of our company, and that is that is who you would have to talk to if you’re not processing with us already, once you do have that, we’ll see that online there are some additional payment options that we’ll have access to, and as a tool, you will also need something called monthly giving, in quotes, branded automatic processing for pre authorized. Electronic gifts, monthly giving is an option in the tasks drop down, so as long as we have access to that tool, you’ll likely do. We can turn on automatic processing. I turned my system’s automatic processing off like 45 minutes ago, just so we can see what it looks like when you turn it on for the first time. It is going to ask for an email address, and I am, I am pretty sure it’ll let you get away without putting an email address in there. Please put one in there, at least one, so that we know if things are going well, especially brand new. If you, if this is a new pattern of giving for certain people, sir, it happens all the time with new donors, like their bank just has not seen a transaction in their giving history, and it got flagged or something like that. If it bounces or it declines, one reason or another, let’s, let’s know about it. Let’s know about it. Automatic receipts, and for our Canadian friends, I didn’t even mention this, but you probably, you wouldn’t be sending a, an email for these.

You’d probably be doing a consolidated receipt at the end of the year, but for everybody in the US, we’re doing automatic receipts, and it does run every day at 5am maybe as late as 7am Eastern, and you’ll get a confirmation email about successes and failures, you must handle those failed transactions if you want to see those people and that recurring donation again. It will try twice, two days in a row, and if nothing changes, that person just lapses for their pledge, and that tool is up in tasks. The white ribbon at the top to the right of the search bar, we have our task checklist drop down, where the third option is monthly giving, and if you’ve never been here before, this is what it looks like, because I turned it off a little bit earlier. There is an option for manual for doing this process manually, which I don’t even talk about. Why we shouldn’t, we can automate this very easily, and saves our save ourselves a lot of hassle. Here’s the automatic processing tab, big green button. We want to click on start automatic processing, and here’s my big on switch from off to on. And then we have our automatic receipts. If I’ve been setting up those pledges with that specific thank you template, let’s have that turned on as well, and here is where I can have a notification email, and then save, and now it’s it says we’re ready to go, we’ll begin tomorrow, april 8, so we didn’t actually miss the morning batch. I just turned it off for 30 minutes to do a quick demonstration. Here we can see if we scroll down a little bit further, we can see that this has been going on for quite some time. The most recent transaction was on april 8, just today. Before that, april 5, and then the 30-first, before that. And we’ll take a look at some of these groups beneath that. It lists out every single day, every single day, regardless of whether or not it actually charged someone. It looks, but if nobody’s due, it just passes on, and we’ve been doing this for 2900 days, apparently. And let’s see these completed. Want to get our eyes on this failed column, especially if you’re following along, and this is something that has been on already. Want to be attentive to these failures, if we’re not getting notified about it, but the successes we can click into the number next to that group. Kristen had a transaction today, and yeah, it was a success. If it was a failure over to the right, we would be seeing why it failed. Bank declined, probably the most common, but yeah, typical stuff: insufficient funds, invalid card number, expired card, you know, the whole gambit. And let’s see if we can find some now. It’s sometimes a little difficult, difficult to replicate reality with a our. Fake nonprofit coral acres that I have this database set up with, but let’s see, failures, failures, failures. Ha, here’s a common pattern that you see sometimes if you’re, if you’re not aware that we’re being notified about these. There was this, there was a failure on 1215 and then again on 1216 let’s take a look, batch 770 ah, Sean McClellan, Sean McClellan, it’s my other Sean, he’s a trainer here, it could have been him leading this webinar, but we get some weird error messages in here, just because we’re not using real money. If you ever see an error message like this, I would, I would encourage you to reach out to the support department, and they can translate what that means. But Paul was a success, Sean has failed, and that was on 1215 We’ll see on 1216 there was only one that day that failed 771 and that was Sean again. So it tried the next day, and this one, give or take a couple hours, 424 Eastern, and we would then, you know, it’s too late at this point. We would maybe want to consider talking to Sean and seeing if he wants to set up a new pledge. If we go over to his gift screen, though, we’re used to seeing the donations that are there, the soft credits that are there, maybe some refunds right at the top. We can also show gifts and failed transactions, which it looks like he deleted.

Normally, you’d see them. There’d be a couple red rows here with those failed transactions. You might see them in your own system. Yeah, and that is that is our monthly giving tool. Be aware of it at the very least, and if you’re getting here and this thing isn’t turned on yet, hold on until at least we get to the reporting part of today’s presentation, because we really should run a report to see if we have any pledges that are lying in wait, if there’s even one pledge that’s in there with monthly giving set to yes, it might have a balance. There could be a card there. Who had this database before you? We’ll talk about it later, and then even more so tomorrow. More on reports tomorrow, and what we’re seeing is the fact that I didn’t update my webinar, these are old screenshots of our classic webinars, our classic, or our classic forums, rather donation solution that we had for a very long time, that is very functional. It can absolutely get it done. It is just a little bit older looking, but it can absolutely get the gift and really the pledge into DonorPerfect. And if you’ve been with DonorPerfect for a while, if you have online payment processing, you might have that already. We’re talking about something new today, though – the drag and drop form coder, the form builder, no matter what you’re using, they allow you to have coding consistency. At the end of the day, we’re just getting data back into DonorPerfect to simplify things, a gross simplification of what we’re doing, but we want to account for these things. What’s the general ledger? Is there a certain solicitation we want to have our finances and DonorPerfect match up with QuickBooks or whatever accounting service you are using back into DonorPerfect? So, if you do have the ability to do payment processing underneath the apps drop down, you’ll have this thing called Processing Gateway. We don’t have to go there, you just have to have it. This is the virtual bank teller, which just needs to exist. The Processing Gateway is what does the monthly giving pledges, the processing gateway is also what moves money around on the online forms, of which we have two flavors for everybody, and they are represented in a side menu. If you’re following along with me, and you’re in the same drop-down menu, you might have online forms, you might not have a drop down on the side. If you are not seeing drag and drop form builder, reach out to the support department and request it, you. It’s free, as long as you’re doing payment processing. It’s free. It’s easier to work with it as PayPal and Venmo, not Stripe. Sorry. And if you did need to reach out to support, that is underneath the help menu, blue ribbon at the top, question mark, the help drop down, chat support, you’ll be able to help get that revealed for you. Definitely need to have a gateway first through the payment processing department, like I said. Online forms, classic. We have webinars about that. It’s perfectly fine. It’s functional. It’s just a little older. This one new sleek intuitive and semi unprofessional, because I think this one’s full of memes, which is okay. It’s not the most unprofessional thing I’ve done. I’m not sure we have.. we have.. oh gosh, I’m drawing a blank because I don’t know my characters. Believe this is a Scrooge Christmas, I think. Light the lamp, not the rat. Don’t know what the reference is. Never a Muppets kid myself, personally. Love the Muppets, though. They’re cool. Whatever image you have there, you might have a donation portal that looks like this that is locked into monthly giving with different donation amounts. Yesterday we were talking about the psychological impact of having an impact statement, which is what we’re seeing here. Two meals is what is provided to our community? If you are a monthly donor, psychologically we’re all giving to help people or help animals or help our community or in the environment or our culture or religion or whatever it is that we’re working on. What is the impact there? Totally optional.

Most of the, well, pretty much all of the elements in the drag and drop forms, you click on it, and then the left-hand side will show you the different options, what it’s going to default to. You can even add a fifth amount if you wanted to, which we always could, but never a sixth. As soon as we start to add more than five options, our conversion rates of people that actually complete the form drop significantly, and actually this would even be a little aspirational, I believe we should maybe even add more time, I would want to skew this down, because yesterday I think my average amounts in this system, if we’re looking for a third of the average gift amount, you can customize these to your mission. Yes, as well, these are actually eight. Is it is one template. I’m just going to save what I’ve done. It’s the publish button at the top right is your save button. And once you land here, if you click on create new template, which I don’t have time for today, there’s really just two template types. If the button has just amounts on it, or if it’s going to have the impact statement, then from there you can customize it. This is just one that I had happened to have pre-built from earlier. The starting point, though, is going to have one time and monthly, which, if you don’t have one of these yet, this should be your main. Everybody’s different, but having both options is a good starting point. However, for our monthly giving webinar series, we would want to go to amount settings. We click on the amounts, and then we scroll down on the left-hand side, we go to amount settings, and we just turn off one-time gifts, leave monthly giving on. And then, because of the template I selected, the impact statement is still there, but we could always turn it off if we wanted to. Good questions. Yeah, we know if anybody else has any others, and yeah, I mean, we’re most of the way towards a monthly giving form style for colors, and then hidden fields is where we design our gift, we get their money, and the pledge is created, but what values are they going to have earlier? I did restricted contributions, and my solicitation code was monthly 2026 Didn’t have a sub solicitation, but I did have a campaign code. Of monthly giving, and there we go. Nobody sees any of this. This is just on the back end. We’ll see this on the gift, and at the very bottom with these, because I don’t have a real gateway, I can’t move real money, so I can’t display the bank option, but you, everybody likely has credit card and bank accounts. I think there were, they were slow to get that option in Canada, but Canada does have bank now, as of 2025 And optionally, if you click on the payment element on the left hand side is PayPal, and apparently PayPal bought Venmo, so if you have a PayPal business account, you just link that and it gets connected. Awesome, Esmeralda. Hey, getting.. oh, cool. Getting started in August. Yeah, come, come back to these free webinars and ask questions. Happy to see it come back, try it, and hope it takes off. Yeah, they have the so if you’re getting started in August, if you had old monthly donors there, they do have what the data transfer there is an option to pay for them to do the data transfer. My understanding is it’s, it’s very expensive, it’s perhaps cost prohibitive sometimes. Even all that information has to stay secure and encrypted from one to the other. So, I get it being a premier service, but you could have one of these ready. And, gosh, was I going to talk about Constant Contact today? No, I wasn’t. But after we make one of these, we publish it, we design it, we have contact information, which I’m ignoring and skipping over. But once we get the link, then we can spread the word through Constant Contact. We get it on our website somewhere, perhaps I and consolidate all that information into DonorPerfect. Please make sure that you have at least one, maybe even multiple people for the daily email confirmation. We want to know about those failed transactions.

If we ignore them, they just get forgotten, and there’s a few other ways we can check how well we’re doing. One of them is right in monthly giving. I actually forgot while we’re in there, I could have shown there is an export option. There’s also email receipt history, which there’s no notifications about if it fails. So, if you are setting up automatic monthly giving, a good idea to check these every now and then. Becky Russo, what’s the best way to check for expiring credit cards? Oh, oh, I got, we’re, we’re two slides away from that, and I’m going to jump to it right now. We’ll look at those reports in a second, because do, do we’ll get, yeah, there is an option. So, if you’re setting up with payment processing, there is an option of account update or service. I’m not a salesperson, I don’t make commission. It does cost 99 cents per card that it updates, and I very.. I’m not always telling people to sign up for things, but it’s only 99 cents, and it will update it automatically. There is no monthly fees. If it finds it, it updates it, they charge you $1 However, if you don’t have that, you don’t need it back in DonorPerfect. In DonorPerfect, we have alerts in the blue ribbon at the very top, if we look over to the right, we can see the alert bell, which I always think of as the Taco Bell logo. That’s where my mind’s at mentally, physically I’m here. Mentally, I’m at Taco Bell, no affiliation. And here we have different alerts, emails that are waiting for gifts, gifts that need letters, maybe transactions from the old forms need to be downloaded manually, or the expired credit cards exist. If memory serves, though, when you get here, I think they’re turned off. There’s a toggle at the top left for active and to show all, and you might have to show all to reveal it, because it might not be turned on. And then expired credit cards exist, which. I don’t, yeah, I don’t have a proper way to demonstrate this, but if you can imagine, it’s very minimal information, like the donor ID, the name, the expiration date, the last four of the card, and you can go through and delete them or edit and update them, and it will let them do It’s manual, though. This thing you’d have to, you’d have to be aware of that alert, which, if you are not doing batch receipts, that alert is always going to be on, telling you that you have at least one thing to do. StonerPerfect is always trying to send out an email or a letter if a specific set of steps aren’t followed, so the alerts are easily forgotten, but right up there in the blue ribbon, it’s where you can check those out, and reports on our success, we saw one already within here directly, but we can also export this. How do you get them to turn? Oh, I’m, yeah, I’m sorry. I should have shown that too. And alert. So let me deactivate this. Let me turn it on, which I’ll show you how you turn it on. If you click on the blue pencil, there’s a little active checkbox next to it that you would use to turn on. So, if you go to alerts, you see some alerts here, but the credit card one isn’t there. You would go to all, and then here it is. Expired credit cards, which you should be able to click on independently of turning it active, and see that report, but you could also go to the pencil and check off active. Ah, if it does not show a pencil, you might not have access to it, Becky, which, which is likely not intentional. It is likely a user management thing. So, if you have any other colleagues, or you, your well, I’ll, yeah, you might need to go somewhere else, but quick detour into user management, because this is, we are good on time. Oh, I made somebody laugh, good, good, because I’m making myself laugh, as long as one, I get a chuckle out of somebody, I’m validated settings user management, this is where you can go to give yourself permission, as long as you have permission and access to user management. Here’s my user ID down here.

We’ll go to the blue pencil, and we have all of the data entry screens that, yeah, maybe if it’s a volunteer, maybe they don’t need delete or addict edit access for certain things, but all the way on the bottom left is alerts, and we, it sounds like what you’re describing is you might not have edit access, which I wasn’t intentional. If you can give yourself access, that’s great. If not, talk to one of your colleagues that does have access, they’ll hook you up. And monthly giving, I guess we can export these. Huh? Where is that export option. Oh no, we have to drill down into it first. Okay, so we drill down into it like we did earlier, and then is it not here? I mean, I’m not sure what the exact benefit would be. Oh, here we go. Oh, why is it hiding? That’s silly. Okay, lower right, there’s it’s hiding from us. We have export templates. If we then wanted to get that information into Excel, export to file, and then it will download a CSV with that daily batch. Oh, that worked perfect. Awesome, Becky. Good to hear. That’s one report we can get. Uh, oh, email receipt history, uh, silently as long as you set up that pledge correctly, you might be blind copying yourself on it, which is a best practice, but underneath receipts we can find out how well those did, whether any of those emails back bounced and. Talking about the batch process today, talking about the automatic process, which has its own tab or email receipt history. Actually, email receipt history shows all emails that have been sent to constituents, but we can definitely single out the monthly giving ones. Where I’m surprised I use a lot of fake emails, none of these failed or bounced good, so we can even see back on July 18, 2025 we had two different emails, uh, oh, that’s a problem, failure reason, oh my gosh, was I seeing this incorrectly, gotta get my eyes checked, total failed zero total cents. I suppose, yeah, if it’s skipping when it didn’t fail, because there is no email to actually see, so that makes sense. April, how did we get to email receipt history? So, just going to reset real quick, going back. It is up in the white ribbon at the top to the right of quick search. We have receipts, and in this area the main reason we end up here is because we want a batch, we want to process a batch of emails and letters as a group, that’s the primary reason we end up here, and we do have a webinar about it, Receding 101 for US and Canada, slightly different procedures, and then from here at the top it starts us off on the receipts tab, we just bump over to email receipt history. Starts us off with all receipt batches, so we had a batch of 3314 were sent, 19 failed. Yikes, most of these are nothing, provided you’re welcome. That’s helpful. No way to automate that, though. And now let’s take a look at some reports. Earlier, I said if you go into tasks and monthly giving and you see that it is not turned on, what you’re going to want to do is run a report first I there was a an ad council commercial. Is that it’s 10pm Do you know where your child is? Well, it’s almost 5am Do you know where your pledges are? Because between 5am and 7am if you plan on turning on monthly giving, DonorPerfect is going to look through the whole database, all of the pledges, maybe even one that your silly coworker maybe entered by mistake, or a previous employee, it could have been, it could have been entered into there, and oh, this is one that has a balance for a while ago. If we turned on monthly giving, this particular pledge that we’re looking at would not be a problem. Robert, you know, he has a balance here, he hasn’t paid in a while, but let’s see, when was the last? Yeah, he’s he’s definitely lapsed by a couple months, which would be a problem, but only if monthly giving was set to yes. Clearly, this one has been turned off intentionally, but we would want to look for pledges like this.

We would want to look for pledges where monthly giving is set to yes, and we will find those pledges in reports and report center. This is where our fact finding almost always begins, and we will be in the financial reports along the left-hand side. It is unlikely to be favorited for you. I have favorited it. It’s called pledges dash listing. This is my favorite one, pledges dash listing, if you do a search for the word pledges at the top right, there’s maybe a 10 that have the word pledges in it, they’re all good in their own way, but pledges dash listing has a lot of information that’s all kind of crammed into one, so I prefer it, we have a tip. Local sidebar, and if you, if you’ve never used this report, very likely it’s going to have a sort by option of name, and it’ll be sorting alphabetically by name, which isn’t as helpful. I don’t think I usually suggest switching it to start date, so we have a chronological listing, or we can maybe do last paid, either way, and then we want to give instructions on the left, because there’s a lot of pledges in here, but when it comes to uh monthly giving, if we’re turning that on, we just want to find where it’s set to yes, and that selection filter that we’re going to use to do that is technically here already. The last time I’ve done this, I clicked on the save floppy disk, and those instructions are still here. Let’s remove it and build one from scratch. I could run it right now, but it would show all pledges. As always, we use a selection filter to narrow down our results. You would use the one that’s already built, but this is how we do it. We’ll add a new filter. We will apply and click add new filter, and the 1pm ones are usually more advanced. Everybody, if you have not seen the selection filters, we’re coming up on the end. I don’t have time to get into the to some of the details, but again, help on demand webinars selection filters 101 We have an hour long session about this, or I believe it’s finding the data you want. 101 we find the data we want with a selection filter. First, pick where our field lives. It is on the gift screen. The field is called monthly giving, and it’s not a favorite field. I’m going to have to show all fields, gonna find our monthly giving drop down. Oh, is that what we have? Oh no, I’m sorry. It’s called process. It’s called process via monthly giving. Process via monthly giving. Double check any report really should start off with an example to help refresh your memory as to what field it is that we actually care about. Clearly, I didn’t do that too many fields. Well, no, there’s uses for all of them, but right now we just want this one as a drop down. We want it to be equal to in box four we’re going to look up codes and select yes, and you know I’m not going to give this a name because I already have this one built and saved, I don’t need duplicates of the same thing, and this one certainly you can use it to keep keep tabs on your ongoing, your ongoing folks, when somebody does stop a pledge, usually we have them set the total to be maybe equal to the total paid monthly giving would be set to no, or even off like this. Oh, that’s taking too long to load. This database only has 200 people in here, and when you’re in DonorPerfect for 40 plus hours a week, your browser does start to act up every now and then. I’m using Google Chrome, deleting my cached images and files. If DonorPerfect starts slowing down and acting up, that is likely the column, the cause of it. Very common, we don’t need to delete our browsing history or cookies or anything else, just cached images and files that almost always kind of kicks it into gear for DonorPerfect, other websites as well. The longer you have that open, the more you use it. It just builds up, causes a backend logjam.

Let’s try that again reports report center and then should have time for one or two more after that pledges listing and there’s my filter run report oh nothing is set to yes. Is that true? Huh? Okay, let’s build our filter again. And I should have given it a name. Our field is on the GIF screen. And the P’s process via monthly giving or gift pledge, I should say, in some, some ways they are kind of the same, a lot of crossover equal to yes or we might see me go through all the different stages of troubleshooting up to and including shutting your browser and opening it up again all Also, highlighting the perils of not turning your computer off. I did leave it on last night, and the night before that. That’s really, really bad. That’s not good for the system, do Good thing we have an hour on just reports tomorrow. Well, reports, there are some automations. Reports are definitely included, I right, let me get my filter back. I put it in a folder. Process is yes, is what I called it, sorted by last paid. Oh, weird. Okay, maybe it’s not me, I could definitely be the cheap internet that I pay for, but yeah, we’re moving on from this 1y’all, It is a good one, I promise. If you’re in your own database, I imagine it’s not doing this, I and I’ll, I’ll redeem myself tomorrow for anybody else who’s coming for day number three, I Moving on, moving on. Pledges listing. I’m disappointed in you. Going to look at another one called Daily Log, Daily Log, and I’m hoping daily log runs. If it doesn’t, I got to talk to my IT people. Assume it’s a local problem before. Hey, not rolling out a donor, perfect problem happens every now and then. For the daily log, though, the daily log is not designed to show us just one type of thing, the daily log is designed to show us yesterday. No, unfortunately, they, they email out the recordings to people that attended. I’m pretty sure, but they do not put them up on the on-demand webinars, unfortunately. Yeah, the one pms you have to show up to live, only the 3pm once they put up there. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t like that system either. But you’re welcome, put it all up there, put it all up if you want to listen to us talk about data databases. Yes, as Marelda did. Thank you for confirming. Yes, if you were there, they do send send one daily log. Let’s tell daily log that we only want to see monthly giving transactions, and in the interest of time, I’m just going to use the solicitation field by virtue of the way that we’re doing our data entry, and we have a unique solicitation, we can just grab our monthly giving one, and drumroll, will it run? Not asking for much. Yeah, so in this time frame, these are the pledge payments that we’ve. Ad this thing could definitely show us non pledge payments, but definitely highlights them pretty well. Yep, after you set it up, keep an eye out for returns, failed transactions, recurring gifts are pledge records. Pledge records are recurring gifts. It could be monthly, but could easily be other frequencies. At the very least, you well, yeah, you don’t need the online giving form. You could absolutely put it all in yourself. You will need the merchant process, or aka the Safe Safe Gateway, the virtual bank teller, getting money into your bank account from theirs. And then, again, like technical, yeah, you could have those gifts and pledges without something that is specifically monthly, but it makes reporting on it so much easier, and yeah, there’s a manual option, but forget about that, make it automatic, so much easier, and if there’s any other questions, I’m not back to back today, so it’ll have to run out, everybody’s been asking questions, appreciate everybody’s participation today, I Feel free to head out if you have a question, though.

Please feel free to pop that into the chat. I’ll hang out for another minute. If not, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow. Bye. Are you welcome, Danica? Take care, Ezra to me too. See you tomorrow, friend. Welcome, Becky. Take care. Looks like that is it for everything. Thank you, everybody. I’ve been Sean Patero. You have been a great audience, and I’ll catch you all tomorrow. Take care.

Bye.