Recurring donations

You can set up recurring donations so that pre-authorized donations can be automatically collected on a regular schedule. This allows your donors to make regular donations without any additional effort. 

Recurring donations are only available if your Wild Apricot site is connected to a Wild Apricot Payments/AffiniPay account.

Once a donor has made a recurring donation, full administrators and donation managers can view, adjust, and delete their recurring donation subscription. Donors can view or stop their own recurring donation subscription but not adjust the frequency or any other details.

What can't you do with recurring donations?

Currently, you cannot:

• Manually set up recurring donations for a donor
• Update an existing recurring donation subscription with new credit card details 
• Restart a stopped recurring donation subscription
• Find out whether a recurring donation subscription was stopped by an administrator or the donor
• Allow donors to adjust the amount or frequency of a recurring donation

Making recurring donations

Once recurring donations are enabled on your site, donors can choose to make a one-time donation or a recurring donation.

Within the Payment frequency section on the donation form gadget, they can choose the One-time option or any of the enabled recurring options.

Once the donor clicks the Pay button, the details of their donation will be displayed on the online payment screen.

Wild Apricot will automatically save the card used for recurring donations. Donors can remove the card using the instructions here without affecting their recurring donations.

When the payment is successfully processed, a donation receipt email will be sent to the donor.

Administrators can manually record donations but cannot manually set up recurring donations.

Setting up recurring donations

To set up recurring donations, you enable one or more donation frequency options that will appear on your donation form. To enable donation frequency options, follow these steps:

1. Hover over the Donations menu and choose the Settings option.
2. Within the Donation settings screen, check the recurring donation options you want to appear on your donation form, in addition to the one-time donation option.
   These options will appear on your donation form along with the donation fields you set up on the Donation settings screen, unless you've disabled any of those fields within your donation form gadget settings. The following common fields will also appear on your donation form unless disabled within your donation form gadget settings: First name, Last name, Email (required), Organization, Phone number.
3. Click the Save all changes button.

Viewing recurring donation subscriptions

To view all recurring donation subscriptions, display the donations list by clicking the Donations menu, then click the Recurring donation subscriptions tab. 

A recurring donation subscription is the schedule of recurring donations for a particular donor.

You can filter the recurring donation subscriptions list by status and/or enter a search string in the search field.

To view the details for a particular subscription, click the next payment date for that subscription.

Within the recurring donation subscription details, you can view payment details, the values entered on the donation form, the last 4 digits of the credit card used for the donation, and a log of already collected donations.

Within the payment details, cycles refers to the number of donation payments that have taken place so far within this subscription.

Modifying recurring donation subscriptions

Full administrators and donation managers can adjust the amount, frequency, next payment date, or internal notes for a recurring donation subscription. To do so, display the subscription details using the instructions above then click the Edit button.

Viewing recurring donations

Within the donations list, the Donations tab displays all donations, both one-time and recurring. To filter the donations list to display recurring donations, choose the Payment frequency filter within the By donation field dropdown and select the recurring donation frequency you want to filter by.

To view the details for a particular recurring donation, click the date of the donation within the list.

To jump from the donation details to the corresponding recurring donation subscription, click the subscription frequency.

Members can view their donations, whether one-time donations or recurring donations, on the Donations tab of their member profile. Recurring donation subscriptions appear in a separate section at the top.

Stopping recurring donations by administrators

A full administrator or donation manager can stop a recurring donation subscription by clicking the corresponding Stop button within the recurring donation subscriptions list...

...or within the donation subscription details.

Once you confirm your request to stop the recurring donation, the status of the subscription will be set to Stopped. No future donations will take place using this subscription. Once a recurring donation subscription is stopped, it cannot be restarted.

Stopping recurring donations by donors

The donor can stop a recurring donation from their member profile. To do so, the donor goes to the Donations tab and clicks the Stop button for that subscription.

Failed recurring donation subscriptions

When a donor is directed to the payment screen to pay for a recurring donation subscription, and then cancels the payment (possibly after a payment failure), the status of the subscription will be set to Attention required. Within the details for the recurring donation subscription, a warning message will appear advising you to contact the donor.

From the Donations tab on their member profile, the donor can attempt to retry the payment by clicking the Try again button for that subscription.

Recurring donation subscription statuses

The status of a donation subscription indicates its current state. You can filter the list of recurring donation subscriptions by status. 

These are the possible statuses: