Suspended Pledges
Last updated
Last updated
Sometimes someone will make a gift and things don't go according to plan. It could be because the credit card was declined, or a technical issue like the payment gateway was unreachable. In these cases, we save the pledge with the initial payment still pending. Sometimes those pledges are abandoned. It's possible the card is declined and they decided they just can't donate like they thought they could.
Even though we support retrying payment (i.e. with a different card) sometimes the donor chooses to start over from scratch, which effectively duplicates the records of their gift, but only one is marked paid. As a consequence, the donor will get an email every day for t he next 5 days asking them to update their payment information. This can be especially confusing if they chose to start over and did submit a successful (second) gift. In that case, we're sending the notification because of the failed (first) gift, but they're confused because they know the gift was already paid.
Our solution to this situation is Suspended Pledges. A pledge will be assigned a suspended state when the payment attempt is unsuccessful and then the gift is abandoned. When a pledge is suspended, we will not send payment requests to the donor. They will simply sit in the suspended state until they are cleaned up by school staff.
Pledges may be in one of 4 states:
Cancelled
Paid
Payment Pending
Suspended
The flow from state to state looks like this.
There are two ways to identify suspended pledges in AlumnIQ admin.
For both the chronological and the search results, a new label has been added in the right-most column displaying the state of the pledge.
There is a new tab in reports that lists all pledges that are currently suspended. This report should be reviewed frequently by a gift officer and kept as empty as possible.
Suspended pledges should be investigated, and then a decision between two outcomes should be decided. Either cancel, or nudge the donor to update their payment information.
We debated writing tools to collect a best guess as to what happened with a suspended pledge, but decided that our false-positive and miss rate would be too high to be useful.
You will need to do your own reconnaissance into the situation. This will involve checking whether or not the donor completed a pledge that resembles the suspended pledge. If you're confident the pledge is a duplicate to a completed pledge, you can cancel the suspended pledge. In this case, it is important to choose the option to not send a cancellation notice. If the donor completed a separate gift, a cancellation notice will be confusing. On the other hand, if the suspended pledge is one you would like to see completed, we've added a button to send a nudge email, which will send a request to update their payment information.
A note about nudges: The donor will also have the opportunity to say they no longer wish to complete the pledge.
Pledge state has been added to the following endpoints.
/giving/gifts
/giving/gifts/cancelled
/giving/giftpayments
/giving/giftpayments/cancelled
/giving/pledges
/giving/pledges/{pledgeId}/gifts
/giving/pledges/cancelled
We have also created a new endpoint that will list every pledge state change, in chronological order.
/giving/gifts/statechanges
