Recipe: Consolidate Your Recurring Giving Structure

# Recipes for success

# Fundraising

Move your existing fixed recurring memberships into a cleaner, streamlined variable giving option for customers.

Variable giving means your donors can give at a sustaining level that they’re comfortable with - meeting your donors where they’re at in terms of their capacity to give.

This recipe guides you through a plan to migrate members from your fixed recurring giving structure into the more flexible, variable structure. This will ensure your system is clean, memberships are streamlined, and your reporting is improved.

What you need

Access to the admin, insights and mailings, and sales interfaces.

An understanding of your organisation’s current membership scheme structure.

A list of current recurring donors

Time required

5 minutes per donor over the course of a month

What will this help me achieve?

Make more money through memberships. Variable giving encourages donors to give above and beyond fixed tiers, allowing you to meet your donors where they’re at with more choice for them to set their desired giving level.

Save admin time. You won’t need to manually create new memberships to provide different options to donors.

With fewer memberships you’ll be able to report on your recurring donations more easily.

Concepts we’ll be using

Variable Giving : Your organisation can receive recurring donations through Memberships. Using variable pricing, donors can select the exact amount they’d like to donate.

Auto-renewable Memberships : Used to facilitate recurring giving.

Reports : Extract data from your system to gain insights.

Prep

Determine your membership structure: Identify the fixed memberships you want to retire and set up the new variable memberships you want to replace them with. Make sure your new memberships are set up as auto-renewable and decide if the payment frequency will be annual or monthly.

Run the Membership Activity in the Last 30 Days standard report, using the standard All criteria set. When you scroll down to the bottom of the report, you’ll see a section labeled Due to lapse in the next month. Save this report as you’ll need to reference it again.

Once you have identified the donors who are enrolled in your fixed recurring scheme, stop their current membership. You can do this by going into their customer record > Subscriptions > click into the active recurring membership, and uncheck the auto renewable check box.

Mark the retired memberships as Inactive on Web. To keep your system clean and stop new sales towards the fixed version of this membership, mark your retired memberships as Not Active on Web in the admin interface.

Activate

Transition Customers to the new Membership

With your fixed memberships retired, you now need to smoothly transition your donors into the new variable model.

Over the course of one month:

Check your Membership Activity in the Last 30 Days report every day to see which memberships expired the previous day. You should reference the original version of this report that you have already prepared, you do not need to run this report more than once.

Replace each customer's expired membership with the new variable version of the membership. Override the price to what they were paying in the fixed version. Link their desired card on file to the membership and process their payment.

Variable Memberships in the Sales or Opportunities Interface

Clean up your system:

Inactivate: Once all of your customers have moved over to the new variable membership, mark the retired memberships as inactive.

Review and update: Consider any tags or customer lists that may be referencing your old membership structure and update it to the new one.

Try this Twist

Since you’ll be moving your customers to a more flexible membership, why not reach out to your current recurring donors and encourage them to give at a higher rate?

Send them an email using our integration with Dotdigital, or give them a personal call to let them know that they can give at a rate that best suits their capacity to give. Then, ask if they’d be interested in staying at $X or if they’d like to increase their recurring donation.

More to explore

Once you've migrated your fixed recurring memberships, you'll be able to segment and report on these recurring donors much more easily whilst also providing more opportunities to give.