Migrate Recurring Giving Made Simple
Migrate Recurring Giving Made Simple
The question is often asked, "Now that I've chosen Simple Donation, how do I transition from my previous online giving processor?"
Transitioning takes one of two forms, which depends on your current online giving processor and whether they will cooperate in securely transferring recurring payment schedules and payment methods.
Step 1
Ask your current giving provider if they will agree to provide you a list of recurring data (some have functionality to export this from your existing admin control panel) and if they'll agree to migrate the payment methods in a secure PCI compliant manner to another online giving processor.
If they say no, skip to Step 6
Step 2
Get a spreadsheet of the recurring data from your current giving provider (donor's first name, last name, email, amount, fund, recurring interval, start date of recurring, end date of recurring). Simple Donation will import these scheduled transactions into its system and mark them as inactive schedules until the go live date
Step 3
Put Simple Donation in contact with your current giving provider so that instructions can be provided to migrate payment methods in a secure, PCI compliant manner.
Step 4
A time and date is picked for the current giving provider to inactivate and Simple Donation to activate scheduled gifts - ensuring recurring donors will not be double charged.
Step 5 (optional)
Since the transition will be seamless to your donors, you can stop at Step 4. However, some churches opt to communicate about the change. Here's an example of how Bayside Church communicated about the change via email:
Here's what they posted on their giving page:
- If your current online giving processor agrees to migrate data, END HERE.
- If your current online giving processor won't agree to migrate data, then you'll run 2 systems in parallel until all recurring gifts can be migrated.
Step 6
You will install the Simple Donation Merlin giving modal on your page so that all single (non-recurring) online giving gifts will be processed.
Step 7
Communicate to your donors that there is a new system (and maybe some of the why behind the change) and that if they have recurring gifts that they need to cancel their recurring gifts in the old system and set them up with Simple Donation. Setting them up with Simple Donation is Simple. They simply need to give once on the Simple Donation Merlin giving modal and choose recurring and set up their gift.
Basically the process is:
- Login to the old system and cancel the recurring giving schedule.
- Give once via the Simple Donation Merlin giving modal and choose the same recurrence as was with the previous system.
We recommend that this be communicated by email and on the church's giving page.
Here's how one church communicated that on their website:
Note: Follow up emails to those with recurring gifts until they set up the new schedule is a best practice. Once those recurring gifts are down to a manageable amount, you can call them and verbally ask those who haven't acted in response to the emails to delete their old recurring gifts.