GOdonate – Recurring Gifts
This article guides you through receiving and processing recurring gifts from GOdonate.
Things to Know
Recurring gifts from GOdonate include a field in GOdonate Settings, a Recurring Gifts table, an automatic workflow, a view, and three email templates. For more information about GOdonate, please see the GOdonate Admin Guide.
Please note that recurring donations are a feature that requires users to be signed in to GOdonate to utilize it. If a user is not signed in or doesn't have an account, they will be prompted to sign in or create an account if they try to use this feature.
Setting Up Recurring Gifts
There are a couple of things you need to do to set up your organization to receive recurring gifts from GOdonate.
Step One: Modify the Email Templates
Part of the recurring gifts process is that the donor receives an email when the recurring gift is set up, modified, or about to be processed.
Three email templates must be tailored to your organization before recurring gifts can be enabled.
Navigate to the Tools workspace, then to the Email Templates table. Find the following email templates and edit them to fit your donors’ experience: GOdonate – Canceled/Expired Recurring Donation, GOdonate – Notification of Status Reason Change, and GOdonate – Recurring Donation Confirmation/Reminder.
Most importantly, you will need to modify the site URL in all three email templates to match your organization’s GOdonate URL.
You can find your GOdonate URL in GOdonate Settings.
Step 2: Enable Recurring Donations in GOdonate Settings
From the Tools workspace, navigate to GOdonate Settings. Open the settings record. In the General Settings section, flip the Enable Recurring Donations setting to Yes.
Once the setting is enabled, donors will see a dropdown during checkout where they can select a recurrence for their donation.
Receiving GOdonate Recurring Gifts
When a donor sets up a recurring gift in GOdonate, both a GOdonate Transaction and a Recurring Gift record are created.
The Recurring Gift record can be thought of as the umbrella under which all GOdonate Transactions, Gifts, and Gift Payments can be found.
Recurring Gift Record
In the Donor Management workspace, there is a table called Recurring Gifts.
The recurring gift record contains all of the information that the donor input when they set it up. All fields in the CRM are locked on existing and new forms. These fields should always be edited by the donor. Recurring gifts should never be created from the CRM.
GOdonate Transactions
Each time a recurring gift is created or processed, a GOdonate Transaction is created. Meaning, that if the recurring gift is set to reoccur monthly, for each payment (month) there will be a separate GOdonate Transaction. These will be associated with the parent recurring gift record and can be viewed in the GOdonate Transactions tab.
The recurring GOdonate Transactions and associated gift/gift payments are created by a daily check workflow called GOdonate Daily Recurring Gift Check. This workflow runs automatically every morning and checks for Recurring Gifts where the Next Occurrence is today. If the workflow finds a Recurring Gift that fits the criteria, it will automatically create a GOdonate Transaction and send an email to the Donor that their recurring gift has been processed.
When are payment reminders sent to Donors?
If their gift is set to recur weekly, it will send the reminder two days before the payment is processed, any other recurrences will send the reminder five days before.
The payment reminder emails are sent from the GOdonate – Recurring Donation Confirmation/Reminder email template.
Gift/Gift Payment Records
The Gift and Gift Payment records will be automatically created from the GOdonate Transaction Record like they are with one-time GOdonate donations. The gift will populate the Gift field in the GOdonate Transaction, meaning, a new gift will be created for each recurring payment.
Gifts associated with Recurring Gifts can be viewed on the Gifts tab of the Recurring Gift record.
Once Gifts/Gift Payments are created, you should process them as you normally would.
GOdonate REcurring Gift UI View
To support the donor experience, a view can be modified – GOdonate Recurring Gift UI view. This is an out-of-the-box system view.
This view determines what the donor sees when they view their recurring donations. Modify this view in PowerApps to change how the donor views recurring donations.
The donor experience for recurring donations has been documented in the GOdonate – User Experience knowledge article.
Recurring Gifts – GOdonate Dashboard
You can view recent Recurring Gift Transactions in the GOdonate Dashboard.