The Ins and Outs of Monthly Giving Webinar

Good afternoon, everybody, or good morning, depending on where you are, or possibly Good evening, even. My name is Shawn McClellan also known as Mac. And I’m going to be wrapping up the ins and outs of monthly giving webinar today. So this is going to be Read More

Good afternoon, everybody, or good morning, depending on where you are, or possibly Good evening, even. My name is Shawn McClellan also known as Mac. And I’m going to be wrapping up the ins and outs of monthly giving webinar today. So this is going to be focused on the tasks in DonorPerfect that you’ll be carrying out as part of the monthly giving process. And it is part of our monthly giving webinar series. So again, that’s me. So before we get started with the presentation proper, I want to cover a few housekeeping items. On your screen, you should see a sample slide and somewhere on your screen, you’ll hopefully see the control panel. If you don’t see the control panel, go ahead and look for the red orange arrow button in the grab tab, it’s probably gonna be along like the edge of your monitor. Usually those of you that pop in early, you know, if you’re working on emails or anything else while you’re waiting, it’ll collapse down, it usually winds up on the left or right side of your screen. So give everybody a moment to get their control panel open.

Once you have your control panel open, I recommend checking out the audio section. By default, it’ll put you on computer audio. If you’d like to switch over the phone call, simply click on that radio button, and then use the phone number and access code to dial in. And while everybody’s getting your audio set up, if you can let me know that you can hear me I’ll do a quick soundcheck use the black, red and that black, red, black, white and green hand icon at the bottom of the grab tab. So again, if you are able to hear me as you get your audio setup, go ahead and let me know by clicking on that black, white and green button.

All right, looks like most folks are able to hear me I’ve been seeing a lot of hands there during the presentation and may also have the occasional informal poll, you can use the hand icon to let me know that yes, you are somebody that is following along with a particular practice. And most of those are going to end up being yes, no questions. There is a handout I definitely recommend downloading it’s the ins and outs of monthly giving just a PDF. Download it if you have access to a printer that’s right by your desk, print it out, use it to take some notes. But otherwise, save it use it in a follow up conversation with your team. Save it as a resource for you know a manual or anything like that. You have any questions during the presentation? Or if the informal poll is something that isn’t just a yes now. Feel free to pop that question into the questions box or respond to my question for the group in the questions box as well. There is a pretty sizable group of people here today. It looks like we’re getting over the 50 and there’s still some people trying to come in. So if I don’t answer your question right away, I promise I’m not ignoring you. I just may might have a few questions all at once. Or I am just trying to sort out the the best order to answer those questions and so I’m gonna give everybody a moment or two just to finish getting set up and then we will get started

alright, so pardon me, this is a quote from a DonorPerfect client. In regards to monthly giving, it does the work for me because sometimes I forget to run donations on the date that they are due. That’s a reason that Craig and their organization utilize the monthly giving process. A quick show of hands. And it’s not you know, I’ll see but no one else will see. So you don’t have to worry. No, no, no. But raise your hand if you have forgotten to process pledges before in the past. Hopefully it was only like a couple of days, maybe maybe a little bit longer. I see one brave soul raising your hand And I’m willing to bet there’s probably at least one more in the group area. But it happens, you know, you’re busy. It using DonorPerfect is probably one part of your job that involves juggling all sorts of plates, spinning plates, wearing all kinds of different hats, sometimes things are going to slip through the cracks. With monthly giving, you can actually set things up to recur automatically and process for you automatically, hopefully taking off and taking a small load off of your shoulders as you’re working to grow your organization and further your mission.

So more, more than 100 DonorPerfect clients have already seen 90% or more retention rate for donors who sign up to donate through monthly giving. So that’s, I mean, again, that’s that’s a fantastic number. Those are people that are donating again and again, and month after month, year after year. And after the initial setup to start that pledge, there’s not a whole lot that your organization has to do to maintain the pledge. Now if the donor reaches out to you, and they want to make a change, you might have to go in and do that. But you know, ultimately set up the pledge, collect the donors information, start the processing, and that’s money that’s just making its way into your bank account on a weekly, monthly, quarterly annual basis, and nothing that you have to really think about.

So today, hopefully they get everybody up to speed with the monthly giving and help you get those tools ready to set up your own monthly giving programs if you haven’t already done so, we’re going to talk about the monthly giving setup.

We’re going to go through the necessary data. We’re going to discuss the two processes. And then we’re going to talk about how you can access the monthly giving activity right at your fingertips. And then we’ll go over some FAQs.

So the first thing you’re going to have to do is make sure you have a safe save gateway account set up. And then hand in hand with that, you will need to have a merchant processor. If you are a US client, your safe save gateway account and your merchant processor both going to be handled by safe save. If you are a Canadian client save save will be your gateway account. But the tool that’s actually processing your payments will be the Paysafe program. No matter which processor you’re using the gateway is going to be the same. So the experience on your end as a user is also going to be the same. If you don’t have a gateway and a merchant processing account, you can reach out to your account manager I have the number up there, I’ll leave it up for anybody to jot down if you need to talk to your account manager, they’ll get you the information you need to get started. And then a couple of days, maybe a week, you’ll have that gateway ready to go. Now once you have the ability to process those payments, you’re also going to need to make sure you have a way to gather information about the donor, specifically their intentions with their pledge. So everybody has access to the first one you have talking to them in person, you’re at an event or you’re in over the phone, we’ll consider that in person. I mean, it could be a bring up the idea of recurring support, get their information. If you have access to dp mobile, or if you have access to a computer, you can add the pledge right there. Otherwise you can jot down the information. You could also create a pledge card. Yeah, have them, mail them in the card that they can fill out their information, mail it back and then you can enter the pledge into the system. You can also use an online form. We have many webinars about online forms if that’s something you’d like to learn more about, but they can your donors can visit your website or social media account, access an online form and set up a recurring donation. And then as I did mention, kind of with that in person option, we also have DEP mobile which can be used to collect information. Once you have some pledges in the system, under Tasks monthly giving, you will be able to process those pledges either through manual batches, which are often scheduled on the first and 15th or you can have automatic daily batches where DonorPerfect will check your system every day for pledges and process the ones that are ready to be processed that day.

So, your recurring gifts also known as pledges can be created from an online form DP mobile or manual entry. As we mentioned. Once the pledge is in the system, it can be processed through monthly giving pledge, the pledge provides information such as the billing amount, it has a link to the credit card, which is stored in the gateway, that information on a regular basis will then be run through monthly giving monthly giving then sends that information to the Save save gateway, and then charges the donors account.

So let’s start by setting up a pledge in DonorPerfect. I’m sure we have somebody who doesn’t have a pledge yet.

Let’s say that we reach out to Katherine and Katherine wants to pledge support to our organization. We can go to the pledge screen we can add a pledge. The date of the pledge is when you are entering it into your database. So and it’s the second so the date of the pledges the second, the start date is when the donor wants their first payment to process. And then when combined with the frequency determines the schedule. So let’s say that Katherine wants to make that first payment on the 15th. For a recurring pledge, if you don’t have an end goal in mind, the total is going to be zero that allows DonorPerfect to continually process the payment. filling them out also that Catherine’s gonna start with $15. And she’s gonna process that once a month. So again, the start date is February 15. That means the first payment will happen in about two weeks. And then the second payment would happen on March 15. The third payment would happen on April 15, may 15, June, July, so on. Of course, you want to have a general ledger for that in those donations to go to so we can say these are unrestricted contributions campaign, it’s not a bad idea to have a monthly giving program code. So we’ll assign that that allows us to easily see the success or progress of our monthly giving efforts. solicitation, I also have a monthly giving code specifically for 2023 sub solicitation, I don’t need a sub solicitation for this particular donation. And like thank you is going to be the monthly donor Thank you. For monthly giving, I want to set that to yes, and then I want to add a new credit card

and

for a pledge we do have to save the payment method. And now we have her card on file. So this pledge will process automatically on the 15th. Now if we want to process today, we’ll just change the date. Maybe she wants it to process on the first of every month. So we’ll change the start date to the first and then it knows to process March 1, April, May, June, July and so on.

So that’s how you can enter that into the system manually. The other option if they want to make that first payment the same day.

If you go to gifts, you can select the Instacharge function. Let’s say that handle wants to make a $25 monthly donation we selected monthly we’ll add a new credit card

And then again, if you want to process it, if you want to save the information, if you want to run a pledge, sorry, you have to save the

code. But this one, what it’ll do is it’ll process the first payment. Then it’ll open up the pledge for us where we can assign the codes

you can see that credit card information is already there monthly giving a set to yes. Now if you do go through that method, you’ll also want to go into the gift screen, and then just make sure that you updated the gift information as well sign the campaign sign the solicitation.

Now, if they have a monthly pledge, meaning that they have a pledge set up to process through monthly giving, it will highlight the monthly donor badge. You can also have donors set up their gifts through online forms. So for example, I’m not going to fill out a whole form. But if you have a monthly donation form, the donor could fill that out, it’ll process the first payment, and it’ll immediately have a pledge ready to go. Christine is asking kind of don’t have more than one monthly pledge set up. Your donors can have as many pledges set up as they are willing to contribute to your organization, I would imagine most donors are probably sticking to one pledge, maybe two, but there is no limit to how many active pledges they can have.

So in order to generate an order to process those payments, you’ll want to go under Tasks. And as you can see, our friend here is highlighting the monthly giving option. So these will provide you with alerts letting you know when information is being processed. If there’s any issues with certain cards. They can be user initiated. If you don’t want to let the system process automatically every day, you can turn that off and run pledges once or twice a month. You can define a specific time period you can even select specific records. If there are fit had failed transactions, the system will stop any attempts at processing until somebody on your team reaches out to the donor and figures out what’s going on. Sometimes it’s a card expired sometimes card was reported lost or stolen or the donor didn’t think to reach out to an organization. I’m guilty of that. And then you can also send thank yous from the gift or you can send thank you letters via receipts.

So ladies asking for the online form is there a certain way to set it up for monthly donations as long as the form has a monthly donation option. So with our drag and drop forms

it’ll look something like see should just have a general donation There we go.

If using a new form as long as you have a monthly option in there. Let’s take a look at so it’ll keep editing the form and I keep meaning to view the form there we go. So if the donor fills out the form if using a new one, as long as it says monthly, and if they select that it’ll process automatically for the classic forms

it’ll depend on exactly what kind of form you’re using. But if you have for example, this is a crowdfunding form it’s not the best for the standard donation form, if there’s a one time or recurring option, if they select your curry, it’ll prompt them and it by default it only has monthly but you can put the other frequencies in there if you’d like.

And then as long as they select the monthly or recurring option, it’ll create a pledge in it addition to the first gift

Celeste asked, is there a downside of just completing the online form for the donor rather than entering it on the back end? The online form, it’ll process the first payment when you finish filling the form. So if they want to set it up the process, like if they’re calling you today, and they want it to process on the 15th, the online form, can’t post date that first charge. But I mean, if they want to process it that same day, there’s nothing wrong with using the form instead, just make sure your form has all the correct code setup. Nancy asks, can you enter bank account information rather than credit card? Yep. And that’s, that’s available both on forms and in doing it perfect. I just happen to know what our test gateway will accept as a as a test card. But the bank account information is available as an option as well. Elizabeth asked, How can I get an alert each time a monthly pledge payment fails? When we get to the alert section, I’ll show you where that email is. It’s not going to send an email, like a separate email for every gift, it sends you an email once a day, if there are any failures. So last ask, can you show us how to set up automated receipts for monthly payments? Yeah, we’ll be getting into that as well. Alright, so if you want to process their pledges manually, under Tasks monthly giving, you can turn off the automatic. If you want to receive notifications, when things process, you just enter in an email address. So that would be the answer for Elizabeth, that’s the answer for your question, you would just put in the email address that you want. If you’re doing manual processes, it just sends the email after you’re done processing, if you have automatic turned on, it sends the email after the system processes, we’ll get into the details of automatic in a little bit. But that’s where your email notifications are gonna come from. If you have automatic processing turned off, you’ll want to run a one time batch. For a one time batch, you can tell the system, just credit cards, just bank accounts or both. pretty much always recommend both. You can tell the system when to include those pledges do so I can say hey, everything up until today, let’s process you can post date the processing time. So let’s say that you’re the payment processor expert on your team and you’re about to go down to Cancun for vacation. If you’re supposed to process on the 15th, and you’re going to be out in the state or out of the country, you can tell the system Hey, process everything on the 15th It’ll queue it up. And then while you’re away, it’ll still run the process.

Otherwise, it’s gonna process same day. If you have any donors that are past you, you can choose to include delinquent amounts if you’d like. That’s always one where we recommend have a conversation with the donor. First, you don’t want to surprise somebody by charging him $100 When they’re expecting to be charged 25. And you can also put in a specific start range. If you want to grab all donations that are going to process between the first and 15th of the month, you can enter that in. And you can apply a selection filter if you need to. If you’re only looking to process certain kinds of pledges, you can do that. You’re going to preview your payments, you can see everything that is ready to go. So Callie de Catherine, Paula Robert Smith, Alison stall, they’re all good. It tells you the amount, the name, the account, the official start date, if there has been a failure on a payment processing, it’ll give you a caution. If there’s been more than one failure, you’ll get a warning. And then you can view the history. So we can we can try to process these if we’d like typically, if you see the warning that’s assigned to reach out to the donor, make sure you have the correct information. It’ll give you a total number of the payments that you’re going to have, as well as a sum total of how much he’s going to receive. And then you click on Confirm payments. You have the ability to put in your email address here. Ter asked can you put in more than more than one person to receive an email? Absolutely. So you don’t want to do the common method. You just wanna click an email on the previous screen. It’s separated with a comma. And then I can process so you know, I’ll get an email Now like my colleague, Shawn will get an email. And then we just give it a moment to process. And you can view the history of a previous batch just by clicking on the batch number. And that’ll let you know what’s processed, how much made the donation. You can also view any status updates. If you’ve ever had an issue where there’s payments, and they’re just marked as pending, and it doesn’t want to update, you can always sync with the gateway to do a manual rethinking of YouTube systems, it’s very rare that you’ll need that, but the option is there.

And we can see it looks like we had six successes, six failures. And for the duplicate transactions, that’s probably just because of the test systems, our data gets a little chaotic. But yeah, I, I would take this information, reach out to the payment processing team, they can help me troubleshoot what’s going on on doing a perfect side. And then with that information, you know, I can give Jane a call, I can give Robert a call. But six of the donations did process successfully. And then if I want to send a receipt that can be done by going into receipts generate we can see I’ve got some monthly donations ready to go.

Let’s see if there’s any questions. That’s asked donors cannot choose a payment date via the online form. Now the form is going to process that day. And that’s going to be the start date. You can always adjust it after the fact if you want to. If that’s something, you’re going to try to do reach out to the support team for assistance just because there’s a couple of things you want to make sure you have set up properly. But if they’re filling out the form, it’s going to process and the schedule is going to be starting with that day, and then monthly quarterly annually.

Now for automatic processing, again, it’s under Tasks monthly giving. You can process those transactions automatically. So what will happen is basically every morning, that’s around I think it’s between like three and 5am. Eastern time, you’re doing a perfect system. If you have monthly giving turned on automatic, it looks through your whole database and finds every pledge where monthly giving is set to yes. So that’s the first step. Then after has all of your pledges were monthly, giving a set the yes, it takes a look at their start dates and their frequencies and builds out their schedule. So that’s the second step. And then the third step is if a pledge is scheduled to process today, you know that morning it processes otherwise, it kicks it out of the process, and it’ll come back to it the next day. So it’s all every morning, it’s basically just checking your system for pledges. If they have monthly giving, they move to step two, if their schedule lines up with the current date and moves on to step three, which is the process

now you can get email notifications for that. If you have more than one email address separated with a comma. You can also send automatic receipts

and there we go, processor runs every day at 5am Eastern time you’ll receive a daily email that comes out within a couple of minutes of the process happening. Any failed transactions again have to be handled manually. So under the tasks monthly giving automatic processing you’ll turn it on. And then for automatic receiving, there’s actually a couple things you’ll need to have setup. So first need to make sure that automatic proceeding is turned on. If somebody is going to get the daily email

enter the email address if there’s a second person to put in their email address if there’s a third person

put in their email address and so on and so forth. And then you click save. Now this now this means that much like what happens in the last couple of days, in a perfect will process pledges automatically. If there are no pledges ready to be run, no pledges will be processed that day. So for example, we had a pledge processing on the 27th 28th. Nothing on the 29th 30th. We had some pledges, nothing on the 31st. We had pledges again yesterday. So if you don’t get an email, that just means there weren’t any pledges to that process. Now, for your receipts, you need to make sure you have two things in place on the pledge you must have a thank you code assigned. And you must have the receipt delivery preference set the email, which of course means that the donor needs to have an email address. So if I want Hannah to receive an email, she has to have a thank you letter code assigned on the pledge. And she has to have an E, she has to have email selected as the receipt delivery preference for that pledge. And then on the main screen

we have to have an email address on there. So again, gotta have a thank you letter code. Gotta have email as the receipt preference on the pledge. Gotta have an email address. Then under mailings, mail, mailings, email templates, you have to have that thank you letter code associated with a template. So if I’m using the monthly donor, thank you as my recurring donor template, I need to make sure that one of my email templates has that code. And what happens is when the payments are processed, and the gifts are saved in the system, they will look to see if they have a thank you letter signed. If and thank you letter signed, it’ll check to see if they have an email preference. If they have an email preference, and they have an email address, it’ll find the linked receipt. it’ll generate the information that needs to from the gift, and it’ll send the receipt automatically.

Celeste asks, is there a space between the email addresses and the comma? No, it’s just just common no spaces. And then, Elizabeth and Lauren, I will circle back to your questions at the end.

So again, through the daily emails, those are sent if transactions are processed or receipts are sent. So if there’s no activity to be had, you’re not going to get an email. So if there’s a day where you don’t get an email, nothing to worry about it just there was no activity that day. With the batch history report, which we’ll look at again, you can export the details, but that gives you information about the pledges. You can also check your email receipt history. And you can also use reports such as the guest by date report, the daily log report and the transaction listing report and receipts to see your process progress in one flagging for example. Under monthly giving, you have the view all batches option here. You can put in a specific processing date range. So if I wanted to see everything from Monday to technically today, tomorrow, but Monday through today, I can view that just those batches

I can select them and then I can see all the information. And then I can also export that data using a template. Your default receeding template that comes with every system will have all the key fields or you can use the default financial template and that’ll just give you everything

you’ll be able to see who ran the process, the gift ID, the donor ID, the date, status, and then it’ll add all of the additional fields

Under receipts you can view your email receipt history

so for example these are receipts that were sent earlier this month actually looks like been earlier this month for donations in the past.

You can also in receipts, run the transaction listing report. So for example I can see everything that we just processed today

here are all of the monthly giving donations we can see the amount we can see the name, the ledger solicitation of a thank you letter code

as far as financial reports, the gifts by date report is of course an excellent tool for keeping track of what you have processing any given day

There we go. So I can update the range and just look for today’s donations. And if it says EFT the EFT code on the gift type, that means it’s processed by monthly giving that just as electronic funds transfer, and that code gets assigned automatically. So you know, I didn’t have to select visa EFT, it’s a code that I have in my database. And by default, it’s deactivated but DonorPerfect is still able to assign it. So I can do ACH American Express. If it if it doesn’t recognize the card holder company it’ll just use credit card otherwise they will use visa American Express Mastercard Discover.

Again, we don’t have to assign that DonorPerfect does that as part of the process and then another good report for keeping track of your processing is the daily log report.

And the nice thing is the guest swipe date report and the daily log report they can both be scheduled if you have access to scheduled reports what I like about the daily log report

is that it lets you know if it was a pledge payment so we can see Hannah had an instant charge donation which kicked off a pledge but it is still a pledge payment and then we have a bunch of EFTPS and then we can see you know I had a donation today just a credit card donation not affiliated with a bunch

so some folks are asking what about the failed payments all of those reports are only going to show the successful payments on their monthly giving that batch report will show failed payments there. And then I believe the adjusted gift report let’s double check that the adjusted gifts report I believe also tracks failed contributions Yes, adjusted gifts will let you know it groups it always groups it by the donors name but if it did fail the adjusted gifts report will let you know about that.

Alright, so some frequent Frequently Asked Questions for monthly giving, after turning automatic processing on When will my payments be processed? If you turn it on today, let’s start the next calendar day. So for example, if you turn on automatic processing on Friday, June 9, doing it perfect will begin processing on Saturday, June 10. And if a donate if a pledge was created to start running today, and you don’t Instacharge the first payment, it’ll process that first payment the next day and get you caught up What types of pledges are included any process with ACH or credit cards, it’ll process any currency, it can process to liquid amounts if you tell it to. And then if it is ready, or if it has a caution status, so maybe there’s one issue in the past, it’ll process if it has a warning status you have has the red box, that’s not going to process automatically anymore. So warning status, or if a pledge has a negative balance, or if the donors account has a negative balance

what is the best way to prevent card failures and save time reaching out to donors for updated information, you can sign up for our optional account Updater Service. So that’s one that you can reach out to the the payment processing team. I believe it is something where you don’t pay unless it’s actually being utilized. And at that point, it’s a 99 cent update, or a 99 cent charge if it updates a card. So if you have a donor whose card expires, and they get a new card, the account updated with CHARGE 99 cents, get the new information and just continue processing, you know, no muss no fuss. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, reach out to the payment processing team. Most likely, you probably all already have it. It’s something that is usually brought up during the conversations to set up a gateway. But if you’re not sure, like I said reach out to payment processing. Are there any additional monthly fees for this feature? No, the only fees that come with monthly giving are the processing fees, which average about 3%. But there’s nothing additional just for turning on the automation.

Since it processes automatically, is there anything that I need to do after it’s set up. I just want to keep an eye out for failed transactions, or the check returns. And then if there are any failed transactions, if you need to get new information, just reach out to the donor, collect the new information and then process the donation. Once a failed donation has been successfully processed, it’ll continue to process automatically so you only have to fix it once

can more than one payment be processed within a pledge for a single billing cycle. Only one will be automatically processed. Anything else like if a donor reaches out and says hey, you know I want to make my next payment in advance, you would have to go in and process that one manually, either by instant charging and then linking it to the pledge or by running a one time batch and and selecting their donate their pledge. But DonorPerfect will not automatically process more than once per billing cycle. And then that billing cycle will be determined by the frequency so most commonly once a month, but it could also be weekly, semi monthly, quarterly annually.

So for the best results, he’s done a perfect payment processing solution launch and keep everything in house under one roof, you have access to a bunch of reports that will be updated as soon as information has been processed. recurring gifts are managed by a pledge record and then each payment becomes a gift record. There are a variety of process options. Some organizations like to do manual and they want the money to come in on the first and the 15th it makes accounting easy and ensures that all of the donations are settled within the same business month. As the detective work by the accounting team becomes a lot easier. Other organizations prefer automatic you know they might try to set up pledges to process on the first of 15th as often as they can. But if a donor has a pledge process on the 27th they’re happy to get the money that day. We do have a monthly giving success hub in the knowledge base. So definitely check that out. It’s got all kinds of tips and tricks that you can use to ramp up your monthly giving and if you give me a moment here I’ll get you the link directly

so here are three links. I’m going to put them in the chat for everybody. So One moment

so you have access to those. Also feel free to join the automatic monthly giving group in the DonorPerfect community and you can talk with other DonorPerfect users have had success with monthly giving in the past and hopefully present.

So this is the fourth out of five webinars for the monthly giving series. The last one will be I believe, next Tuesday. So if you’ve attended everything so far, it join us again on Tuesday, and you can learn about some more reporting. And we did a little bit of reporting about the donations themselves. But this is more big picture, you know, reporting on the success of the overall effort or campaign. If you need to rewatch anything, we have been recording each of the sessions this week. So if you signed up for them, you should have received an email. Otherwise you can access them in our recorded webinar library, it may not be this week’s version, but the information will be the same. Alright, so at this time, if anybody has any questions, I know there have been some popping in so I’m going to just start from where I last left off. But feel free to type in your own and I’ll get to them as we as we run down the line. Okay, so Elizabeth wanted to know, can we review where to enter a monthly transaction with a future date. So you’ll go to a donors record

you’ll go to the pledge screen. Add the pledge. Again, the pledge date is when you entered it into the system. The start date is when that first payment would come in. So we would set the start date is February 15 of 2023. Or maybe we’d set it to like March 1 of 2023. And then that first payment won’t come in until March 1, and then subsequent payments will be based off of the start date and the frequency.

Now, somebody had asked about the thank you code Association, which is going to be two parts. But the first part is on the pledge, make sure you assign your monthly giving Thank you, which you can create at any time, and then assign a receipt delivery preference of email. And then you just want to make sure that you have all of the information that you need to send that email so of course, the donor needs to have an email as well. They know this gift isn’t going to process at all this month, it will only start in March.

So again, now is highlighted as a monthly donor. So the important thing is just make sure the start date is in the future and then the first payment will have a will the first payment will show up on that day. Alright, so let’s see, Laura asked, what is the best practice to change or update the processing date for a monthly pledge? Do I create a new one? Or can I just change the date of the pledge. If it hasn’t processed yet, you can just change the date. And now if I want this to actually process this month instead, I can set that if it is an existing pledge, and there have already been payments made.

Typically what we recommend is close the pledge that exists and open up a new one that prevents them from being any sort of issues where it double charges or it skips a month and misses a payment. If the donor wants to change their giving them out, then they absolutely need to create a new pledge

the best practice would be here let’s see if I have one that actually has like a payment towards it. I’m sure Tony Stark has a pledge

If we wanted to close this, because he actually wants to give us $200 a month, we would take the total paid. Put that here in the total, and then change monthly giving to now. And then we would open up a new pledge for $200 a month. So that’s for monthly. Now that first one charged yesterday, so then we would set up, you know, October 1 of 2023. And fill in our new information. But if you change the pledge amount, what it’s going to do is DonorPerfect is going to retro actively apply that new value to the whole pledge. So if you lower it, donor preference is going to skip several payments, because it’s going to be the system’s going to view that as Oh, they gave us twice as much money when they were only supposed to be donating 50, but they were giving us 100. So we’re going to skip it for the next couple of months. If you bump it up from 100 to 200, it’s going to look back and say, Hey, they’ve been shortchanging us $100 every month for the past six months, we got to charge up $600 To catch them up. So you always want to close the pledge and put a new value in if you are changing the billing amount.

And then there were some questions about the email receipt. So we’ll try to answer those together. So the first one was, if we don’t select a thank you letter, type on the pledge, they won’t be received it automatically. That is correct, if they thank you letter is blank, or if the receipt delivery is not set to email, or if they don’t have an email address, or and I’m going to show you the next part here in a second. If the thank you code is not associated with an email template, it will not send an automatic email. However, the donation will still show up in receipts when you go to process your receipts, just like your regular receipts that you do daily or weekly. So it’s not that DonorPerfect will never acknowledge it, it’s just not going to automatically acknowledge it. Now in order to make sure that your your thank you code is associated with a template, you go to mailings, email templates, access the template you want. And then you have this thank you code Association field. And you just select the code that you want. One template can be linked to multiple codes. One code can only be linked to one template. So I can’t use the monthly donor template on any or code on any other template because it’s here.

If they if they receive the email, it’ll mark it as acknowledged. So it’s not going to prompt you to send like a follow up letter. Through the association that in the future date, Christie said something very nice about me. Thank you, Christy. Elizabeth, you asked about changing the amount from 200 to 300. I hope I answered that for you. Would you open a new pledge when you update credit card information for expired card from Evi. So again, if you have the auto updater, it’s just gonna do it for you. If you need to put a new credit card in, you don’t need to set up a new pledge. You just edit the existing pledge, go to the payment method and then just add a new credit card or a new bank account. And then that one just allows you to continue working same as same as you happen.

All right, I think that was the last question. So anybody is still typing up for us to finish typing up your your question, and I’ll answer it when I see it. But otherwise, thank you so much for joining me. I hope you found this presentation informative. Again, if you need to recap on any of the presentations, if you signed up earlier this week or last Thursday, you should have received an email otherwise we do have recorded versions in our webinar library that you can access. If Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your day. I’ll see some of you perhaps in an hour when we do our last webinar for the week. Otherwise, I’ll see you in a future presentation.

Elizabeth and asked with the online forums if they start their pledge. With an online form do they receive an email? For the classic forms, it’ll send an email but DonorPerfect will still try to send a follow up email because the classic forms don’t fill in the thank you date. For the new forms. It does send an email and fill in the vacuum date. So either way they’re getting an email. But for classic forms DonorPerfect will prompt you to try to send a follow up receipt, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea you can ever say thank you too many times. But yes, they the forms will also send the receipt

All right. Well, I will see some of you in about an hour but otherwise, enjoy the rest of your week. Have a delightful weekend. And we’ll talk soon. Take care. Bye