The Ins and Outs of Monthly Giving Webinar

Hello, hello. Good afternoon, and welcome everybody. We have another webinar today in our Monthly Giving series, where today we’re focusing on the basics of monthly giving. With a big caveat on this topic today, monthly giving is a word that we we use a lot. We throw it we throw it Read More

Hello, hello. Good afternoon, and welcome everybody. We have another webinar today in our Monthly Giving series, where today we’re focusing on the basics of monthly giving. With a big caveat on this topic today, monthly giving is a word that we we use a lot. We throw it we throw it around a lot, and it is, in some ways, a marketing term you might hear monthly giving, and it really just be in reference to the databases ability to process recurring donations. And I’ll break down all of that for us today. I actually turned off monthly giving. There’s an area called monthly giving in the database, and if you happen to not have it, not have it turned on, we’ll get to see what that looks like, turning it on for the very first time. There are going to be some things that you need. There are going to be some things that you need first. But before I get into that, hello. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect, often working one on one with clients, teaching them more about the nonprofit industry and the DonorPerfect database. I do get to do these fun webinars.

This is my week, so today and later on, today at three, and then tomorrow, and then the day after. I’ll be doing some webinars this week, starting off with a quote, a quote from one of our clients. A lot of people could say this, it does the work for you, because sometimes you forget to run donations the date that they are due. Now I’m going to be going over automatic monthly giving. There was a time in the distant, distant past where we didn’t have automatic monthly giving. It was a manual process. And anytime we have a manual process, we incorporate the potential for human error, far less error going along with recurring givers.

And a big reason people want to give on a recurring basis is because of the everlasting effect that it might have that is reflected directly in donor retention. The industry standard for donor retention is around 42-43% meaning that if somebody donates in one year, what is the percentage that they are going to donate again next year? And on average, that’s about 43% there are some things that you can do that will increase that percentage, thanking them immediately, thanking them soon, and thanking them often and loudly.

That helps that might boost it up to 60% maybe. Or if you have people that are monthly givers, sustaining givers, we might see that donor retention as high as 90% um, the more and more in the modern era, people are on a lot of subscriptions. We have. We have Netflix memberships, or we have a triple A for when our car breaks down. People are also automating their goodwill. That’s the that’s the main focus of today.

There’s many different ways that we can do it, and I’ll be going over all of them. So monthly giving setup. What are you going to need for this process? Whether it is monthly or quarterly, or weekly or semi annual, there’s a whole bunch of automatic frequencies. They’re all essentially going to have the same prerequisites of necessary data and features. It all boils down to data entry at one point or another.

Then lastly, some tips and tricks, some reports that you can run and different ways that you can stay in the know about these recurring donations before just some general, frequently asked questions that come up all the time. Now this webinar, just like with all of our webinars, when I go into the DonorPerfect database, and we’re looking at individual constituent profiles. Since all of the screens are customizable, my setup might look a little different from what you’re used to seeing. We have our fields in a slightly different pattern from what you’re used to seeing.

The other big caveat is that there are some prerequisites for this. It is possible that you could have gotten DonorPerfect, and it is DonorPerfect the database, and it can connect to constant contact and do mail merges and do receipts and run fabulous reports, but it might not have the ability. 

To process transactions. That’s the most base level of database that we sell is one that doesn’t have the ability to process transactions, and for that, we’re going to need something called a safe save gateway. It’s gone by many different names over the years, the safe save gateway. It is also known as a merchant processor, or a merchant account, is essentially the virtual bank teller that’s moving transactions from one bank account to another bank account you might not have that. I’ll show you where you can locate whether or not you do.

And you’re also going to need to have access to monthly giving in order to turn it on, unless your access has been revoked. Likely you will have access to this. And then all the different ways that we can add to these recurring donations. The only one I’m not going to be able to show to you is DonorPerfect Mobile, although I would encourage you to download DonorPerfect Mobile, the PDF that goes along with today’s topic does have a link with an article that shows you exactly how the DP mobile side of things works. Now, if it turns out that you don’t have this thing called a gateway, we’re gonna we’re gonna look for it in just a moment. If you don’t have this, you should reach out to the support department, or, I’m sorry, actually your account manager, reach out directly to your account manager. Here is their number, and they’ll talk to you about how you can set that up, connecting the gateway to a bank account of yours so that processing can occur. And I’m briefly going to be touching today on our online donation products. We call them online forms, and I’ll show a couple different ones that are set up for monthly giving. Not the main subject of today, if I have a few minutes at the end for questions. Though, I might be able to show you a bit more about the forms, but today, just a quick preview of those. And as we’re going along here, if you have any questions or anything to add, please feel free to chime in into the chat box. It’s not going to let you unmute yourself in zoom webinars, but if you have anything you’d like to ask about the content today, please put that into the chat. There’s also a separate Questions and Answers section. I have that over on the side. I’m going to keep an eye out for any questions that are coming through. I’m just going to turn my camera off as we dive in here today, and we could focus on DonorPerfect. So let’s start out with the necessities, the prerequisites that you’re going to have to have, and one of them is the processing gateway. Now in this apps drop down menu, we have all the different softwares that DonorPerfect could be connected to. This includes the processing gateway, the safe save gateway, the merchant account. This is our online bank teller, which I’m not going to be going into today. I believe that is Thursday, 3pm Eastern, Standard Time. I have a webinar just about processing transactions in general. But you need to have this. It would be connected to a bank account. It is free to sign up for payment processing. There are transaction fees, though, roughly 3% depending on the payment method. So you’ll have to have that. And you’ll know if you have it, if you see processing gateway in the drop down, if you don’t see that in your drop down, again, I’m just bringing up the account manager hotline, 1-800-220-8111, and they’ll get you started on that process.

That’s one thing that you’re going to need to have. The other is access to tasks and a monthly giving which, as I said earlier, someone would have had to go out of their way to remove this access. But I’d still like to point that out, where you can see your user permissions if I go to settings the very. Last option here is user management. And here we can see all of my colleagues and their individual permissions. Here I can go down to me, and I will click on the blue pencil. The blue pencil is always editing whatever that thing is, and here it breaks up my permissions down different areas here, for purposes of monthly giving, if Sean is going to be our monthly giving gift officer, we want to make sure that underneath tasks, that Sean has a monthly giving and so I do that is checked off.

With those two things active and in place, we can start getting some donations through Now, ideally, if you have one of the online forms your constituents are going to be doing that data entry for you. They go online, they pick the amount, they pick the frequency, the start date, all that good stuff, and then it just flows into your database. And there’s plenty of ways that we can report on those once it’s in there, but we also have options to manually record them. I just helped somebody with this the other day. They didn’t even realize that they could automatically charge a constituent directly within their profile. That’s what I’m going to do here with Dr Andrew. I pulled up Dr Andrew from the Quick Search, and I would like to get him on a monthly giving schedule here. If he wasn’t in the database, I would first have to add him. Seems like a silly extra step, but this information is going to be important. Name. Of course, we need the name, but we also need this address as well. We’re going to need this for the billing information. So if they’re not in the database already, take a few moments to create their profile before going over to the gift screen, where, if we have Andrew in person or on the phone. We could get this set up right here and now and charge them their first payment. I’ll click on Instacharge, and we could do a one time transaction and charge Andrew here once, or I could go with the monthly option. Now, the monthly option today, it’s still going to charge Andrew once. Let’s set this up for monthly I’ll say it’s 100 now, we happen to have a payment method stored already for Dr. Andrew, if that was not the case, we can always click on Add New and add our card or our bank account, which is where making sure that we had the address initially is going to be helpful. Either select one of the existing payment methods, unlikely that there would be an existing one in there. More likely you’ll be adding that for the first time. Get the card number, get the expiration, and in this fake database, it will allow me to do a fake transaction. For all of you, if you just put in a bunch of numbers, it would give you an error. It’ll allow me to put a fake one through, and then we’ll process and through the magic of television, we have a successful transaction. From here, we can close the window and it immediately moves me into the pledges screen. Now that Instacharge button was on the gift screen. That transaction did go through. It gave me a green check. It was successful, and it’s there right now. It’s on the gift screen, and we’ll look at it here in a moment. But where it directed me was the pledge. The financial side of a constituent profile is broken into gifts and pledges, where the pledge is going to be the placeholder for that financial commitment. In this case, the date of pledge and the start date is today. Date of pledge is maybe the day they made that commitment. Start day is when they start paying. And because we had a start day, we’re doing this demonstration on October 15, 2024 so that’s our start date. This is also going to decide what the day of the month is that they’re going to get charged. November 15 would be the next time this pledge is charged. The billing amount is $100 that’s what we charge for the first pledge payment. We can see there’s a calculated field. Over here called total paid. It’s already showing us $100 indicating that that first pledge payment went through, and my total is $0 a pledge that has a total of $0 is seen by the system as an indefinite pledge, it’ll keep on going for however many months this payment method is good for until it fails. Or if Andrew just wanted to donate $100 every month for one year, we might set this total equal to 1200 as the months tick on, total paid goes up and up and up, and eventually total paid will be 1200 and as soon as it matches that total, it’ll stop charging. But for our exceptionally generous folks, we can leave that total as $0 monthly giving is set to yes. We want this as yes, if it’s going to be processing automatically again, monthly giving here, that’s a branded term. Now we did charge them the first installment, but at this step, I could pick a different frequency. If I wanted annual, bi weekly, quarterly, semi annual, weekly, any of these options, except for unknown or unusual payment schedule will work for automatic giving. And then we have the rest of our codes. What fund is this going into? Is this a part of a certain campaign? And in my demonstration system, we have monthly giving codes for everything, and we even have a monthly giving Thank you. Oh, that reminds me. I have to update this. The thank you letter field has been renamed to T Y, slash receipt template, no matter what it’s called, there’s a drop down where you can record the different letter and email templates that you have at your disposal. And in my case, we have a monthly giving Thank you, which I could be sending out automatically with monthly giving, thank you selected and a receipt delivery preference of instead of E letter, let me switch this to email the next time Andrew gets charged here November 15, this monthly giving thank you email will go out automatically. Alternatively, maybe you don’t want to send them a thank you every single month. Lot of studies show it’s a good way to go. You could keep that monthly email short, treat it like a newsletter. Adults have small attention span, so, you know, a shorter the better, in general for communications. But all of you, you know your people better than I do. There’s always different preferences in different communities. You could choose do not acknowledge if you wanted to tell DonorPerfect to ignore these pledge payments. But here, if I want to automate them, I’ll set my preferences email, and there I have it at the very bottom. There’s going to be a running list of all the pledge payments right now, it’s just the one from today that’s listed here at the bottom. Now, once I click save, we just have to wait. We just have to wait. And we also have to make sure that the monthly giving modules turned on, which it isn’t. I’ll show, I’ll show, show you how we can turn it on. But functionally, if Andrew is going to be charged again, it is a pledge that is needed. I could go over to the gift screen, and we can see the very first pledge payment today, the $100 and this is my only pet peeve about the Instacharge button.

Now we charge them and we set up that pledge, and I selected the codes for the pledge. But when you go about it this way, the first pledge payment doesn’t have any of your codes, and a gift without codes is a gift that is hard to report on, so having codes on here is going to help me in the long run, and that’s one way we could do it. We could do it manually for them on the phone. There’s also a way to set that up through DonorPerfect mobile as well. And we could charge them the first installment today. Another thing that we could do is we could set up. Pledge to charge them at a future date doesn’t necessarily have to be now. I’ll pull up a different profile that doesn’t have a pledge, and I could add one. We could always do this manually. Let’s select our billing amounts, and we can leave the total is indefinite, with $0 we can select our frequency monthly giving. We want to set this to yes. Regardless of the frequency monthly giving has to be set to yes. And then I can add my payment method again, if our person isn’t in here, take a moment to get their address. Uh, let’s say I’ll add a credit card, because I have the address, it automatically copies it over. We then put in our card number, and this is, this will be the last time we see the full card number.

Once it’s saved, it’ll show you the first and last four. It’ll show you the expiration date too. It’ll even let you change it, but this number will be encrypted Once we save and yeah, we can set it as the default and save and our date of pledges today, but let’s say this person they don’t want to start until later on, we could change the start date so that it starts on the 20th. And again, we can select our codes for reporting, reporting purposes, and my automatic email as well. And now, in this way, in this method, we are still setting up a recurring pledge, but the pledge is not set to start until another five days from now, and that’s how you could do it.

You could set this up for them and then let DonorPerfect take it away, because they do have a pledge. You’ll even see in the donor profile at the top that they are recurring donor. But hopefully you might have an online portal that people could be doing this through, so I can go to those online pages by going to apps, all of our other softwares we’re connected to, even our own product the online forms, is a different software. It just connects very well to the database. Let’s take a look at our newer forms, the drag and drop forms. These just take donations one time or recurring right now, and it could take both one time and recurring, but you certainly could lock in that form so that it is just a monthly giving form. And in this example, these have impact statements on it. Psychologically, people are a lot more likely to donate if they know what the impact of that donation means, depending on where that money’s going. If you’re able to come up with a an honest and accurate calculation as to how this money might be used, people donate to other people, and that’ll go a long way, and that’s what I have in this example. You don’t have to do that. You could just have the donation amount buttons. Generally speaking, though, when people are interacting with a donation form like this, a lot of studies, a lot of studies have gone on around the psychology of humans and the way that we interact with these and in general, if we have more than five donation amounts, people have a hard time selecting. They get analysis paralysis. Myself included, too many options. On the other end of the spectrum, if we had two or fewer options, people kind of feel forced in either direction, not happy with the binary choice. They might not complete the donation, statistically, between three and five is the sweet spot, and these classic forms kind of conform to that. Also something that’s optional is you could let them pick what fund that the money is going into. Here we have the general ledger drop down menu on the form, and we have the different fund designations that they could be supporting with our more popular one at the top, in case they skip over it. Those are the classic forms. Those are our newer products, a Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express bank account. You. And PayPal and Venmo, and that’s our new flavor. Our other flavor is our online forums. Classic been around for a while. These can do everything I the new forms can just do donations one time or recurring. The classic forums is our tried and true product. It looks a little bit older. Let’s look at our monthly giving form, slightly different format, essentially doing the same thing. Here we have the same thing. We have impact statements on these buttons. Looks like I forgot to fill in some of these. The option for what the frequency is could be more than just monthly. We could add other frequencies on here. Same thing for the new forms as well. And ideally, the people will go online, they’ll fill these out, and when they do sign up for that monthly donation. Ultimately, it is a pledge in DonorPerfect that’s going to get created to ensure that the next transaction and the next and the next and the next occurs. Not the focus of today. If anybody wanted to see those forums a little closer, though, let me know. I might have a few minutes at the end. But once all of our pledges are in here, there is still a master command module. We call it monthly giving. It’s the monthly giving module. As long as you have access to it, we can find it underneath tasks and then monthly giving, we’ll be processing them automatically. And there’s even a spot in there where you can enter in an email address. I strongly, strongly encourage you to put in an email address even more than one person, if you can, you can have multiple emails that are in there. Just separate them by commas so that you can be reported on the successes and, more importantly, the failures when it comes to monthly giving, because if a account is closed, a card is stolen, the bank declines it insufficient funds, one of the many reasons a transaction might fail. When that happens, you have about two days to look into it before the system just stops trying to process it. And I’ll show you where you can set up those notifications. You can also turn on automatic receipts if you want. It does require that the data entry on the pledge be set up, and you have an email template set up for that. But there also is just a big button you gotta you gotta flick to turn that on.

And again, more opportunities for notification emails, which will be coming relatively early in the morning since 5am technically, it’s between 3am and 7am but it’s very rarely past 5am it’ll start as early as 3am Eastern, standard time anybody that has a payment due that day. And for those notifications, there’s a bit of a ticking clock on on these transactions. And I’ll show you exactly what I mean here. When we dive in to the monthly giving module. I’m going to go there by going to tasks in the white ribbon at the top, and then from that drop down, go to monthly giving. And now, if you have never been here before, this is likely what you’re going to see. There’s going to be a tab for automatic processing, and you’ll have a big button that says, Start automatic processing. Now I am in a database full of fake people and fake credit cards and none of none of this is real money. If you are finding yourself here an automatic giving. Automatic giving is not turned on. The question you should be asking yourself is, do I have folks with pledges that are set up for automatic giving? If this is your very first time, and perhaps you have a database that’s been around for a while, other people have been in it from previous times, you might want to consider running some reports first looking for some of those automatic pledges. I’ll go over some of those reports that you could do, because once, once I turn this puppy on, it’s going to be looking for any and all pledges. Want to be aware of the impact that we’re having here. Or if we’re enabling something like this for the first time. And once I click on the big green button, here are my switches automatic processing, I can turn that back on. It’s always been on, and I I can tell definitively that it’s been on, because on the right we can see a whole bunch of information about recent occurrences, recent transactions, successes and failures. Here is also where we can turn on our automatic receipts for any of the pledges that are set up for email with a monthly giving template, they will automatically be thanked so they won’t get mixed in with your regular receipt batches. Let’s put in a email address as well, and it could be more than one, if we had to just separate it by a comma and a space, and whoever is listed here will be receiving those daily confirmation emails I clicked on Save says, we’re good to go. And so we are. And now this is what we see when we log into tasks, and monthly giving tells us that it’s turned on, but if we go to Edit Settings, you could always, well, maybe not disable automatic processing, but you could turn off automatic receiving if you have it signed up and it’s working. I think it’s a great option. I don’t know if people go with this and we want to make sure we have our emails, but you could always change this later on, and on the right hand side, we can see all of our recent batches. Now, these are reports, essentially, and there’s really two reports that we could get out of this. One of them is the recent status updates, and the other one is our recent batches. Let’s take a look at recent batches. If I click on view all batches, it’ll show me every day where it tried to process something. And let’s see today, 1015, 2024, there were 21 transactions. Oh boy, 12 were successful and nine were failures. These aren’t fake these are all fake people and I there is a fake credit card number that we use, the number four followed by 15 ones that will work in our demo webinar system for processing. But these nine failures, oh, it could be many different thing. And then sometimes it is a error message that doesn’t make sense. If it ever gives you a string of code in your error message, reach out to payment processing, they will translate the error code for you, but a lot of these errors are just because we’re goofing around with fake transactions. Successes just look like successes. What is going to be more likely are a few failures at a time, and I did find a couple good examples, like, if I go back to the beginning of the month, let’s see. We had one process on October 5, and one in the fail column. And then something very similar. The next day, October 6, we had two transactions occur, and that time, still one failed. And what’s happening here is we’re seeing the same person come up twice. Let’s take a look. If I click on the batch number for October 5, it shows that my transaction failed for one reason or another. Might need to reach out to payment processing to see exactly what it is. A lot of the times it’s straightforward, insufficient funds bank declined, expired, card, things like that. But either way, big, red, failure message, this transaction did not go through. It tried and it failed, and what should have happened was an email would have went out on. That morning to whoever’s email was listed at the time, and it would have alerted them to that failure, and if it’s caught early enough, what could have happened was we could have went to that person’s record happens to be me, and we could have went to their pledge. Oh, boy, I have several here. Could have went to their pledge and then edited it. Let me see which one was this. 

October 5 for $1,010. Ah, okay, so here we see this one was set up in the beginning of September, September 5 of this year, a billing amount of $1,010 and if I scroll down, yeah, there’s there was only the first initial pledge payment. This one came from one of the online forms. There are a couple of created fields at the very bottom, created by, if you ever see WLA, WLA means it was created by the classic forms. If new forms created it, it would say DP forms. If a user created it, it would have that person’s user ID, but only one successful payment. And if I go over to the gift screen, we can see that successful payment. There it is, $1,010 I can edit it. There’s a pledge payment check box that always just checks itself off if it’s attached to a pledge. But right now, what we’re seeing are the actual transactions that went through. What we could do is at the top select this option Show gifts and failed transactions, and what that will reveal is that there were two failed transactions. We saw information about one of them on October 5, it tried it sent out a notification email, and had it been caught in time, somebody might have been able to go in and edit the pledge and then go to the payment method and select a different payment method, or add a new one, or add a bank account, and then save and then monthly giving will try to process it again the next day. Now that’s not what happened. If I go back and look at our failures, it tried again and it failed on the sixth and that’s always going to be the pattern. It tries once and it fails. The same thing happens the next day. I can look at the let me try this again. I can look at that batch on the six. And here’s my failed transaction right next to Sherry’s successful one. So very, very important, make sure that you’re getting, getting those emails so you can catch, catch those transactions and get updated payment information. And that’s just some of the information that we can get out of tasks and monthly giving. It’s the hub. You turn it on, and then it kind of just runs itself. But there are some other reports that we could run. There is a email receipt history. If you are going to automate those pledges, you can check to make sure that they’re actually going through maybe it’s an invalid email. Maybe their servers are blocking it because they marked it as spam, what have you. But you want to make sure they’re they’re actually receiving it. That’s something that you can do. And then in financial reports, I’m only going to show three financial reports. There’s a dozen that I could show that might be good for us to see. You know what? I’m actually going to add a fourth that isn’t on this list, but certainly these three gift by date and daily log very similar. We almost retired the Daily Log years ago, and people were upset about it. They wanted this report because it highlights your monthly giving donations. I’ll show us that. One. And then there is a view within seats where we could also see these. And let’s, let’s start off there, actually. Let’s start off in receipts. White ribbon at the top, next to mailings, we have receipts where we have our ability to generate mass thank yous by letter or by email. We do have webinars about this whole topic. We go over in depth, but I’ll point us towards at the top, where we have different tabs over to email receipt history. Now we do see any and all email receipts that are sent out, maybe as batches, maybe they’re automatic, but if we just want to see the automatic monthly giving ones, we can click on monthly giving at the top to just show those, and it looks like here is our batch from today, 1015, 12 were processed, but only two actually sent. This could be for a variety of reasons, like Jeremy is missing an email. Margaret doesn’t have an email receipt delivery preference, though, it skipped over a whole bunch of these because they weren’t set up properly, but there were two that did go out. Had they failed for any reason, we would be seeing some type of explanation over to the right. 

Uh, the rest of the information we can find out is going to be in the Report Center, which is where most of our fact finding begins. One way is the gift by date. This is almost always the first financial report that I show folks, where we use the sidebar, just like with most reports, to narrow down our results. And I could say, tell gift by date to only show me perhaps certain pledge payments or certain monthly giving related things, it technically could be showing us anything like right now. If I have a date range for this calendar year, it is showing us everything that’s in this calendar year. But I also have a solicitation field on the sidebar, and I’m quite positive we have a monthly giving solicitation.

So, as long as that code was used consistently on the gift screen a solicitation, we should be able to pull those in. So anything that came a part of our monthly giving program, in our database, we have all underneath one solicitation. And for this year, these are all of the transactions, but gift by date. To run this, it would depend on you having some type of, some type of option on the gift screen to record that it’s a part of a monthly giving effort. And these fields, campaign solicitation and sub solicitation, it’s, it’s an art what options you want to have in here, and then how they later affect reports. Another way that I could do this, if I just want to look at pledge payments, is to use this check box anytime we run a report, most of the time it’s it’s wanting us to pick a field to use to determine the output, and pledge payment could be that field if I want to see all of my recurring transactions. Well, without you even having to do it, what they have in common is pledge payment checked off and now running reports is in today’s focus. But anywhere you go and DonorPerfect, you have the ability to put on a selection filter in most places. If you ever have to go somewhere where you have the ability to pick the output a selection filter is going to be included. We have a whole two hours of webinars about filters and reports in general. But let’s do a quick overview this selection filter which of which? There’s many that are already built. I could use one of these existing ones, and I reckon there’s already some monthly giving filters in here that I could reuse from previous times. But let’s make one from scratch. A. Where these selection filters, I like to think of as rules or instructions for my report. This report, gift by date, is just a list of fields and columns, and I need to tell it what exactly it’s going to show me. And to do that, I could use any of these fields. There’s over 750 fields, and you could always create more fields if you wanted to, and any of them that have info we could use to determine the output out of all those fields. In this moment, I only care about this one pledge payment, and it’s on the gift screen. That’s what I’m going to do here with the Selection filter. These always go left or right on the gift slash pledge screen. That’s where my field lives. I can then select pledge payment in box number two. It’s giving me a lot of fields, like start, date, Gift Amount, General Ledger, campaign. What it’s not showing me is pledge payment because it’s not one of the favorite fields. So instead, I’ll select all fields, and then here’s all the fields on the gift screen. When they were teaching me all this. This part intimidated me a little bit, but I don’t care about these. I only care about pledge payment. And if it’s a check box, even easier. A check box is either checked or it’s not checked. That’s it. In this case, I want it to be checked and then continue. And it takes what I selected, in plain English, turns it into this fancy SQL code. See, see a little bit of that. Let’s give it a name, and I can share it amongst my colleagues, and then I can even put it in my own folder if I wanted to. And there we go. And I could actually even use a combination of the sidebar, the fields that are here and the selection filter. Both of them are doing the same thing, narrowing my results down. And if I didn’t have either of those, a selection filter or a date range, and to try to show me all gifts from all time. But now, regardless of the solicitation, what all of these have in common is that their pledge payments, and it looks like for our data entry a couple other, you know, a couple outliers came through. We have some pledge payments for certain events, certain appeals. That makes sense. Our annual appeal might have generated that recurring donation, and we have it marked as such. So, you know, not necessarily one universal solicitation. And at the top right, we have our different pages that I can use to scroll through. And you know what? Now I’m getting bigger results now because I am including different fundraising efforts that could have a recurring program involved. And to verify, I could click on the gift amount of any of these, it takes us in, and lo and behold, pledge payment is checked off, just to verify. And that’s the gift by date report in the Report Center, it should be favorited for you already. It should have a yellow star next to it, so it should be right near the top. What isn’t going to be favorited for you is this next one. But if you go to financial reports, scroll down to the DS, or you could search for it. It’s called Daily Log. And I think maybe like 2017 or 2018 we were looking to trim down on some of the reports that we had available to us, and this, this one almost was removed, but based off feedback, people wanted it in. And there’s one big reason. So this one very similar to gift by date. Let me double check, make sure my sidebar fields aren’t getting in the way. Just a date range of this fiscal year, that’s fine. And then Run Report.

And this one features a column with pledge payment in it, very similar to the other one, a daily log also has flags, so it’ll show you that affiliation, and for each gift transaction, it’ll say no or it will say yes, If it was a part of a recurring transaction.

So and those are the two that I had planned to show you. I’d like to show you at least one other so. And so what we’ve seen so far are essentially lists of gifts. They may or may not be monthly giving gifts. Instead, what I’d like to show you is a list of pledges, a list of recurring, uh, pledges, they may or may not be active, but if you don’t have automatic giving turned on right now. This would be the report that I would run first to see if you have any pledges in your system that are set up for it. This one also isn’t going to be favorited for you, and it’s called pledges dash listing my user ID. I favorited this one before, so it shows up near the top pledges dash listing. And now this one. The last time it was ran, there was a selection filter that was saved on here. I’ll just remove it. The Selection filters will follow you around, and you can save those instructions on a report so that you just open it up and run it. But I want to make a filter to find pledges that could be automatically charged. And the field that I’m going to do out of all 750 fields, if I want to find my folks that have a pledge set up for automatic giving. I want to find where monthly giving is set to Yes. Ideally, when someone stops giving, we’re going to deactivate this. So it does rely on data entry a little bit, but let’s build that selection filter on the gift screen. Again, monthly giving isn’t one of my favorite fields, so I’ll go to all fields where it shows me all the gift and pledge fields. If you’re ever presented with a big list like this, if you start typing, it will recognize your first few keystrokes, if you’re quick enough. And monthly giving is a drop down menu for drop down menus. Most of the time we want it to be equal to and we do in this case as well. And in box four, look up codes and select yes. In this field, we want it to be equal to Y for yes. And then I could give it a name so I could use it again in the future. I’m almost certain I have one in there already, and you don’t need to save these. I could just click on, done. The filter is there? The instructions, the rules are there. Just doesn’t have a name, so I’d have to recreate this again. We didn’t have another one. And then click on run. And then here we can see all of our pledges that have monthly giving set to Yes. Might even be a good idea to change the sort order at the top left. And this one you can change by the start date. And I think that would actually be a better way of looking at this, if monthly giving isn’t turned on and you’re about to turn it on, double check this first Oh Johnny, back in 2017 we have a $25 pledge. We should maybe take a look at this and close it out. Actually. Let’s see Johnny Test, uh, billing amount, $25 total, paid a lot. So this was recurring for a while. We can see it starting in 2017 going through 2018 2019 there’s four pages of recurring donations going all the way up to 2024, and let’s see if I go over to the gift screen, I reckon we might have some failures here. Yeah, we have a few failures. Uh, usually you’d be seeing them back to back. Johnny Test, not a real person, but for your real people, you’ll still want to go in and perhaps change that payment method, or if they are just not active anymore. And this is someone you talk to set monthly giving to no once they’re done, this will help out for reporting purposes if they are no longer an active giver. See, it started in 2017 Oh no, they’re, they’re actually, they’re good, yeah, no, they’ve this fake donor has just been going off that many years. So I was incorrect to assume that they are no longer currently giving Johnny Test in this fake system is contributing to that 90 percentile, uh, recurring donor rate, double check. Your list of pledges first, make sure that we’re just charging the people we intend to so some quick Q and A before I wrap things up as always. If anybody has any lingering questions before we wrap up for today, please feel free to drop them into the chat after automatic processing is turned on. When will my payments be processed now I just, let’s say I just turned it on today for the very first time, and I might have even had a pledge with a start date of today, but if I’m right now eastern time for me, it’s almost 2pm monthly giving checks for pledges between three and 7am so this morning, it’s already ran. It’s not going to process until tomorrow, if we’re just turning it on today. What types of pledges are included, regardless of the payment method, all of them, uh, but within DonorPerfect, it still is just going to be bank accounts, Visa, MasterCard, American, describe, Express or Discover. And of course, it’s going to exclude anybody that has failed twice. What’s the best? Way to prevent credit card failures? Uh, there is an optional service that you could sign up for that will cross reference the expiration dates with what the credit card company has and then update it. It’ll, uh, charge 99 cents each instance of an update, but that that costs something, and you have to sign up for it, not on this slide. But what you can do is go to your alerts. My little bell icon up at the blue ribbon at the very top, and it’s alerting me to two tasks about emails and letters, but if I show all, we can see that we have a potential for an alert of expired credit cards. If I edit this and set it to active, whenever there is at least one open item, one expired credit card, it will give me an alert. So you don’t really need to sign up for the Credit Card Updater. There is a free alert that you could get.

Actually is a fee for the Credit Card Updater. I got to update that slide, but not for the alert, because you could always just go in and I could click into it, and it says Roger sandstone, let’s see as a payment method that expired in June, if I click on the vault ID, it’ll take me directly to the Account screen. Now, whenever you add that bank account or Visa card, it is also adding it to the Account screen that payment method needs to be saved in order for that pledge to go off. And I could go in, edit this after talking to Roger, verify that it’s the same card with a different expiration date, and then update it.

And last common question again, is there anything you have to do after you set it up? You really should run that report first to see if there’s any old pledges that are perhaps lingering or entered not realizing that monthly giving also needed to be turned on. But no, once it’s set up, set it and forget it. And we have one more left in our monthly giving series, and that’s reporting on the success of monthly giving. So if you’re signed up for tomorrow’s webinar at the same time slot, tune in for more about reports.

Kelsey asking a good question, do the alerts show for all users of dp or only for me? It would only be for you. These alerts respect your user ID. So now I edited mine, and I have three alerts now my camera. I usually turn my camera back on at the end. Bell icon now has three alerts because I went in and I revealed all of them, and then I edit it and I set it to active, but this is specifically just for my user ID. Won’t affect other people. Good question, and if there’s any other questions, I’m all yours for another 30 seconds or so, you’re very welcome, very welcome. Kelsey, you.

All right, that looks like it for today. This has been the Ins and Outs of Monthly Giving. I’ve been Sean Potero, and you have been a great audience. Thanks for stopping by. Everybody. Have a great day.