I think that the key here is that Wild Apricot is one of the best options for small non-profits. Emphasis on NON-PROFITS... which means we are completely and totally dependent on donations and sponsorships.

This is probably why you are receiving such vehement complaints about this kind of functionality not being present. Whenever we have to send our members away from our site to other sites in order to make a $10/month donation - we lose at least half of them. Many of the rest look around the site to see what other non-profits are using that site to get donations. So immediately, we are back in competition to get their hard earned dollars...

We have around 500 members. If 40% of them agreed to give us $10/month donation - that would bring us $2000 per month, or $24,000 per year in donations. That would be absolutely huge for us - the difference between solvency and barely making it.

I hope this helps WA team to understand why this is so critical...

Thanks
liz

This topic was started in what, 2008? Don't you think it's ridiculous that it has been put off this long and keeps getting pushed? Poor customer service.

There is nothing we can do now. As I said, we're dealing with very painful release and we spend all our efforts to finish it up. Right after that we will be working on other features, including this one.

[quote user="Apricot Kernel"]

Recurring donations are in our plans, but we're speaking about next year, not earlier.

[/quote]

In your post from May it was going to be resolved end of this year, now you are saying next year???

This is a HUGE problem for us and we may need to consider going elsewhere because of it. What is the difference between recurring payments and recurring donations? Whatever you call it, the feature is NOT WORKING and has not been working for too long now. It is top on OUR priority list and we urge you to address it by end of year as previously promised. The "work-around" you propose makes US look bad and we have been very patient up till now, but being put on the back burner and told Wild Apricot does not have the resources to address the problem does not sit well with me at all.

Please reconsider your timeline. The fees we pay for your service are generated by this feature you say is not priority, and tho we may loath the idea of a whole different solution that may be what has to happen if this continues to be put off.

Respectfully,

Unhappy Customer

Next year? That is a long time out.

Our organization has lost a lot of money from not having recurring donations going through. Having to ask members to cancel membership in order to renew is not a feasible option. I really think that WA should consider working on fixing this situation sooner rather than later.

Recurring donations are in our plans, but we're speaking about next year, not earlier.

What do you mean that WA does not recognize cancellation correctly? Can you elaborate please? WA is supposed to stop recurring payment attempts after several times. But it is still a workaround, membership recurring payments were designed for renewal payments, not for donations.

For the past 6 months, we have been going to customer support because the workaround mentioned above is failing for 30% of our recurring donations. When there is a cancellation of a recurring membership, Wild Apricot does not recognize the cancellation correctly.

Customer support has told us that we might see better results if we ensure that members are kicked out of the organization when a payment fails, but this is not a tenable solution. We are frustrated that they do not understand that kicking members out of your organization when their recurring donation is interrupted or cancelled is completely unacceptable.

We have grown rapidly over the past year, and we estimate that this problem has cost of several thousand dollars in the past few months.

We really need a recurring donation solution that is not tied to membership. We would prefer to stay with WildApricot as we grow, and we can only assume you would like us to do so as well.

But when we add on the recent lost revenue to the cost of running our Wild Apricot site, a lot of other vendors are competitive.

Do you plan to address this feature request? If so, when?

Another vote from me, too.

We just had our second fund drive, and it has become obvious that we need something on a regular subscription-type basis, more often than once a year, and with the ability to choose timing and amount donated. I really wish we could implement this in Wild Apricot, but currently we will be doing it via email and snail mail, as well as online on our other site which has a plugin for forms. The form we will be using allows maximum admin design, including both dropdown choices as well as fill-in-the-blanks with a minimum amount allowed. We already have too many membership types in order to accommodate other areas where we need more flexibility, so adding even more membership types does not work for us.

I wish we could do this through WA and am really looking forward to being able to make that happen.

[quote user="emilio.coppola@urantiauniversity.org"]Please add support for reoccurring donations such that a donor may select or input a dollar amount and a frequency (i.e. Monthly, Quarterly, Bi-Annual, Annually) for their donation to be auto-charged to their credit card, PayPal, or Bank Account.[/quote]

Chiming in and jumping on board. This feature would be a tremendous offering for us. It has my vote!

Please add support for reoccurring donations such that a donor may select or input a dollar amount and a frequency (i.e. Monthly, Quarterly, Bi-Annual, Annually) for their donation to be auto-charged to their credit card, PayPal, or Bank Account.

I vote to create this functionality sooner rather than later. Thank you!

I understand your frustration but it's not like we've been doing nothing - we have more than 500 high priority things to do in our list and a lot of them require quite a number of time to design and to develop with our limited resources. Each time we need to carefully select what to do.

Still, this particular request is very high in our design queue but not something that is going to be done until the end of this year.

We are new to WA and are still getting our feet wet with this. I'm shocked that this simple issue and request for recurring donations has been out there as a request since January 2008. Are you kidding me? And still it has not been addressed?

I see Wild Apricot ads all over the internet, might I suggest some of those advertising dollars go toward technical upgrades? Don't follow in Google's footsteps. They launch new ideas and programs all the time, that are only moderately functional. Do what you do well and people will come to you and tell their friends about you!

In the mean time, when are we going to get recurring donations?

Thanks.

Currently when our members respond to us by mail, they can make a donation to our Foundation when they pay dues or when they sign up for an event. Some add on an even amount, like $50. Others add on an amount that will make their check an even amount. For example, our dues are $157. Some would add $50 for a donation and write a check for $207. Others would add $43, so they could write a check for $200.

In addition, we have specific campaigns, and when we get close to a target, we have a few members who will give as much as $2000. The mail campaigns for these will say something like "$25, $50, $100, or ____________ (fill in the amount you wish to donate)." I do not want to limit these people to $100. And what about people who would rather donate $75? If we did not have the fill-in option we would miss $25 from them.

We just started a campaign, where the idea is if we got a million people to donate $1 per month, we would get $12 million dollars. (But we only let them pay $12 in advance, not a recurring charge of $1 per month.) Some just donate $12. Some want to donate $12 per month. Some want to make a lot of $12 donations in the names of all their pets. One person donated $200 even though it is supposedly just for $12. I would not like to discourage this kind of donation from anybody who wants to donate more.

And allowing people to donate whatever they want for a cause can tell us 3 things:

1. The cause is very popular. We can spend more money promoting it because lots of people will want to donate.

2. The cause is not popular. We have not explained it well enough or nobody cares and we should change it.

3. The cause is appealing to a different income group than we thought. We should either have larger suggested donation amounts, or smaller suggested donation amounts.

We can show suggested amounts, but I think we always need a way for donors to be able to choose what they want to donate. This situation is very different from dues or events or merchandise, where you have to have fixed amounts and perhaps some kind of discount.

[quote user="AHVMA"]I would like them to be determined by the donors.
[/quote]

can you please elaborate?

Perhaps it is not popular because people aren't doing much with the donations module because it is not flexible. Most of what I would like to see in donations is in the Wishlist. I would like to see recurring donations. (And I would like the fundraising module to be as flexible as the events module). I would like them to be determined by the donors.

Okay, I have found a workaround for this, albeit very time consuming and tedious:

Thankfully the Wild Apricot system allows you to enter FUTURE donations. Thus, regardless of the recurring donation amount (£10/month, £25/quarter, £100/year, etc.), there's nothing stopping you from entering as many current and future donations as you wish.

The benefit is that you can then use the financial reporting features to generate a rough pending income report for any desired time period (next quarter, next two years).

The pain is that for the likes of monthly recurring donations, there are dozens of manual entries for every year you want to forecast forward.

An ability to import an .xls or .csv file of financial transactions (donations) would be very welcomed!

Here is an article about the value of monthly donations: http://www.fundraising123.org/article/how-convert-one-time-or-annual-donors-monthly-givers

"Thinking about monthly giving is one of the smartest things you can do as a fundraiser. At Network for Good, we find that 30-40% of the donation volume for a nonprofit website is monthly giving, and that would be a great situation to find all nonprofits in-thanking people every month instead of asking them for donations every few weeks."

It's really essential to have this feature on a non-profit website.

I would like to add my vote for this before you relegate it. 

If something's already on the roadmap, people may not see the need to reply/vote. We've been waiting 2 1/2 years since the OP for what is a very basic, important fundraising tool.