I'm curious how other institutions are handling recurring credit card gifts through GiveCampus when donors modify the amount after establishing a finite recurring gift.
Here's the challenge we're running into:
When a donor creates a finite recurring gift in GiveCampus, the Affinaquest connector creates a pledge with the associated payment schedule. If the donor later logs into GiveCampus and changes the recurring payment amount, the GiveCampus report does not indicate that the amount was modified. The connector continues applying the transactions against the original Affinaquest pledge.
Because Affinaquest allows a pledge to be overpaid, any payments beyond the original pledge amount are automatically applied to that same pledge, with the excess treated as outright gifts tied to the already satisfied pledge. From a gift accounting and stewardship perspective, we'd prefer those additional gifts to stand alone rather than remain associated with a completed pledge.
The only solution we've identified so far would be to manually update the original pledge in Affinaquest to match the donor's revised payment schedule before processing the next payment. Operationally, however, that introduces additional work because we'd have to identify the change, put the batch on hold, modify the pledge, and then resume processing.
I'm interested in hearing how others are approaching this:
- Do you allow the pledge to be overpaid, or do you update the pledge to reflect the donor's revised recurring commitment?
- Does your institution have a process for identifying recurring payment amount changes from GiveCampus before they reach your CRM?
- Have you developed any automation, reporting, or connector customization to flag these changes?
- If you're using Affinaquest, is there a different best practice we're overlooking?
I'd appreciate hearing how other advancement shops have solved this, or if you've encountered the same issue and what tradeoffs you've made.
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Gretchen Armentrout
Director, Gifts & Records
James Madison University
housergh@jmu.edu------------------------------