Giving Form

The skin that surrounds the giving form is 100% customizable to fit your organization and campaigns. Through settings in Path and Pitch setup you can toggle certain aspects of the giving form, but special care has already been taken to reduce the form to as few fields and as few clicks as possible, so there isn't a lot left to toggle.

Adding Gifts

Donors start by configuring the gifts that they want to make. This includes the designation and amount, and the payment schedule; optionally also including a field for special instructions like "in honor of," etc. All gifts configured in a single sitting are considered part of the same Pledge.

We do support a per-transaction-minimum dollar amount, and the default is $5. This means that a recurring $5 pledge would be accepted, but a $50 pledge made in 12 monthly installments would be refused because each monthly charge is below the $5 minimum.

Payment Schedules

The payment schedule is shared by all gifts in the pledge. We do not currently support multiple gifts with different payment schedules in the same pledge -- but there is nothing stopping someone from making two consecutive pledges with different schedules.

There are three types of payment schedules: One time, Recurring, and Installments. Within Recurring and Installments, the donor may choose whether their payments will be made on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. In all recurring/installment cases pledges have a fixed end-date. We do not currently support open-ended recurring gifts.

We do not offer the donor every possible number of months up to the maximum of 5 years, because having too many choices leads to frustration which leads to abandoned gifts. Instead, we offer them 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 month options, because if someone wants to give a recurring gift for 5 years the likelihood of them wanting it to repeat for 58 or 59 months is almost none.

Biographical Information

After gift configuration, we ask the donor to provide some information about themselves. We request just enough to identify who should get credit for the gift; and address information for both payment processing and records updates purposes.

Payment

Lastly, the donor must make a payment today. We do not currently support collecting pledges without at least an initial payment.

In the case of one-time gifts the entire amount is collected. For recurring gifts, the recurring amount is collected. Installments can get interesting when the total amount doesn't divide evenly by the number of payments. Our approach is to round installment payments down to the nearest whole dollar, and add the difference to the initial payment. This does increase the initial payment by a little bit, but makes the installment payments nice and even.

And then?

That's it. At least for the donor. Tell us how much you want to give, and to whom; tell us who you are; and make your (first) payment. Then you just check your inbox for your confirmation email.

Once the gift is collected, a new pledge alert is sent via email to the address(es) configured in admin. We also offer a daily summary email of new pledges and recurring/installment collections.

What about expired credit cards?

I'm so glad you asked! AlumnIQ monitors the status of every credit card on file for recurring and installment gifts. When a card is approaching its expiration date, we automatically send the donor an email warning them that their card is about to expire and remind them that their gift may be discontinued as a result. That email contains a link to a fully self-service form where they can provide new or updated card details.

If the donor allows their card to expire, we'll keep retrying once a day for 5 days. After each failed attempt, the donor is sent another notice that their payment failed with the same self-service link to update their card information. After 5 failed payment attempts, the payment is cancelled. This does not cancel all future payments on the gift, only the one that has been unsuccessfully attempted 5 times. This way, if a donor updates their card information after a payment is cancelled, future payments can and will continue to be processed.