(4 min read)

Sustainer giving is an important part of most fundraising programs, so understanding how to update recurring commitments once they’ve been added can help you prevent donor frustration with making changes to their amounts or frequency. And, by tracking these changes, you’ll spot any new trends in upgrades or downgrades happening in your program.


Before you begin, you should review how recurring commitments are added to your database and how to track them using the Fundraising Management dashboard and by using the default reports in Report Manager.

Read more about adding and viewing recurring commitments

If you are wanting instead to track recurring payment processing and identify commitments that are marked as failing, there are several other reports and features that can help you track this part of your sustainer program.
Read more about tracking payments on recurring commitments

Updating with self-service pages

Most donors will expect you to have some sort of self-service portal where they can see their payment history and update their commitments themselves. You can customize a self-service page to:

• show donors a complete history of their giving

• allow them to update their payment information

• change their commitment amount

• address failing commitments

Read more about customizing recurring commitments on a Self-Service page

Manually editing recurring commitments

If you need to manually change recurring commitments, you can do so from the individual contact record.

To edit a commitment, select View/Edit from the action menu (three dots) next to the commitment on the Overview page.

You can also select View next to the commitment on the contact details page.

From the commitment details page, you will be able to:

• Change the amount

• Add an end date

• Change the next payment date

• Add or update payment information

• Add or change details like source code and market source code, attribution, notes, and custom contributions fields

• See whether your donor responded to a recurring upsell lightbox

  • Read more about the recurring upsell lightbox

• View all historical contributions on this commitment and edit individual contributions

Ending a commitment

When you create your Online Actions forms, you have the option to let your donors set an end date when they make their commitment. While most contribution forms will probably not include this option, it can be helpful if you have an end date for a particular campaign and you want to reassure your donors that their commitment will end after a specific deadline.

As a better practice, you can create a customized self-service page that will allow your donors to end their commitments themselves at any time. You can then share this page on your confirmation page for your Online Actions contribution form and in the confirmation emails.

Read more about customizing self-service pages

If you need to manually end a commitment, you can open the commitment from the contact record and select End Commitment from the bottom of the details page.

Canceling a recurring contribution is permanent, so if your donor wants to restart a recurring contribution, you will need to manually re-add it with their payment information or ask them to resubmit their information through an online contribution form.

Creating custom cancellation reasons

To help you track why people may be ending their commitments, you can also add custom Cancellation Reasons which will appear as a selection whenever you manually cancel commitments.

To add custom reasons, search for Cancellation Reasons in the Sidebar to open the list page. You will see a few default reasons listed. From the top of the list page, you can Add New Cancellation Reason.

After adding your custom reasons, you’ll see this as an option whenever you manually end a commitment and you’ll be able to add a Cancellation Reason column to any of your recurring commitment reports.
 

Tracking changes

The easiest way to see changes in your recurring commitments is by using the Recurring Commitment Change Report. This report will show you changes to recurring commitments that were made manually, any automatic updates by your payment processors, or any changes made by donors themselves using your self-service page. (Changes made by the legacy Self-Service Portal are not included in this report.)

 

The Change Source column will tell you more about who made the change to the commitment.