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.
Before You Get Started
Before setting up recurring gifts, it's important to ensure that both the process and the cloud flow named "GOdonate Daily Recurring Gift Check" are active. These components work together to identify existing recurring gifts and determine whether a gift should be made on the current day. First, a user with System Admin privileges should navigate to the Settings gear in the upper right corner of Dynamics, then go to Advanced Settings > Processes > All Processes. There, they’ll find the process labeled "GOdonate Daily Recurring Gift Check" and should confirm that its status is Activated. Next, in PowerApps, they should enter the Production environment, then go to Solutions > Default Solution > Cloud flows. Within that section, they’ll locate the cloud flow with the same name and ensure that it is switched On. Visual references showing the location of both the process (on the left) and the cloud flow (on the right) are provided in the images below.
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.
Because of the GOdonate gift basket, users are able to have one recurring donation split between multiple funds. By adding multiple gifts to different funds to their basket and selecting a recurrence for the donation, this will create a recurring donation that is split between the funds that they selected.
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. Please note that you cannot manually create Recurring Gifts. These records will only be created from GOdonate.
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.
Next Occurrence: The next occurrence for a recurring gift will be determined by the frequency that the donor chose. In the case that a GOdonate Transaction requires manual processing (with a new Donor record, for example), the Next Occurrence date will be set according to the date that the last transaction was processed, to account for delays in processing. This way, a donor will not be charged twice in a period. However, it may change the date that the donor is expecting the transaction to occur.
GOdonate Transactions
Each time a recurring gift is created or processed, a corresponding GOdonate Transaction is automatically generated. For example, if a recurring gift is scheduled to occur monthly, a new GOdonate Transaction will be created for each monthly payment. These individual transactions are linked to the parent recurring gift record and can be viewed within 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 a donor's gift is set to recur weekly, the system will send a reminder two days before the payment is to be processed. Recurrences outside of weekly will send a reminder five days before the payment is to be processed.
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, as 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.