Contributions & Finance

Recurring Giving Failure Notices

If your church is using online giving, there will be times that a recurring giving transaction will fail. This might be due to an Expired Credit Card, an Invalid Credit card, insufficient funds, a hold call from their bank account, or some other reason. TouchPoint receives notice of the failure from your merchant provider (TransNational, Sage) and we pass that information on to your Finance users.

When this happens, an email notification with the subject Recurring Giving Failed followed by the URL for your church database will be sent either to all users with Finance role, or to the Email From person listed on the Communications tab of the Giving Page. See below for how to control who receive these.

The notice will contain a link with the Transaction ID # and the reason for the failure.

Action Required

Click the link in the notification to view the transaction. This will display the name of the donor and the amount of the transaction.

Then, you need to communicate with the donor about the failure. We do send an automatic failure notice to the donor, but they do not always pay attention to these. This is why we suggest you contact the person personally to see if he needs help fixing his recurring giving.

When a recurring giving transaction fails, the contribution will not be posted on the person’s giving record, nor will it be listed in the Pending Batches.

This is the only time that is true. When other online transactions fail after the initial processing, they will have already been included in the Pending Batches and put on the person’s giving record. These should be treated just like a returned check.

You can decide whether or not you want to receive email notices from your processor for each individual failure, or if you prefer to log on to your processor’s website and download the EFT Failure Report.

See also

Returned Checks / ACH Rejects
Online Processing: Donations and Payments

Control Failure Notice Recipients

If you would like for the failure notices to be sent only to the person(s) listed as the Email From person on the Communications tab of the Giving Page, you can follow the instructions below. Otherwise, these notices by default are sent to everyone with the Finance role. Your church’s TouchPoint System Admin must be the one to make this change.

Step 1

Go to Admin > Advanced > Settings > Finance > Recurring.

Step 2

Change the Setting Send Recurring Gift Failure Notices To Finance Users from True to False.

Note

If the Email From person does not have the Finance role, the notice will be sent to all users with the Finance role.

Why Send Notices to the Email From Person Only

If your church has users that have been given the Finance role just so they can run reports or oversee contributions, those users probably do not need to receive these notices. You could add just the one user (the person that will communicate with donors) as the Email From person on the Communications tab of the Giving Page. Then all the other Finance users would no longer receive those notifications.

Remember, confirmations will still come from the first person listed as the Email From Person.

Edit Failed Recurring Giving Notice for Donor

We also send an email notice to the donor letting him know that his recurring giving failed. Your system Admin can edit this message in Admin > Communication > Email Templates. The name of this template is RecurringGiftFailedNotice. You can use the email replacement code {message} to display the message coming from the payment processor, and {amount} for the total amount of the failed donation. If you do not see a template named RecurringGiftFailedNotice, but do see one named RecurringGiftFailedNoticeDraft, you will need to rename it to RecurringGiftFailedNotice and TouchPoint will begin using it.

See also

Special Content

You may be interested in some of the following help articles relating to online giving.

See also

Online Giving Overview
Transactions Log
Manage Recurring Giving
Online Processing: Donations and Payments

Failed Gift Tasks

When a recurring gift fails to process for the first time, your System Admin can enable the automated Failed Gift Tasks by updating several settings in Administration > Settings > Features > Tasks & Notes. There is also a Failed Gift keyword in Administration > Lookup Codes > Keywords.

Failed Gifts Tasks

Setting this to True will enable tasks when a recurring gift fails to process. You must also add someone in the Failed Gift Task Owner setting.

Failed Gift Task Owner

Use the people chooser to select the owner of the Failed Gift Tasks. This needs to be someone with the Finance user role.

LimitToRolesForTasksNotes

You MUST add the Finance role to the comma separated list of roles. Do not include any spaces.

Failed Gift Keyword

This keyword will be automatically assigned to all Failed Gift Tasks. This keyword cannot be deleted.

How it Works

  • If a recurring gift fails to process for the first time (not a second time - any that have already failed are highlighted in red), a task is created about the failed gift.

  • The About person will be the donor with the failed gift.

  • The task will say Follow up on failed gift:, followed by the failure reason.

  • The task Owner is determined by the Failed Gift Task Owner setting.

  • The Due Date will be set at 2 weeks from the date of the failed gift.

  • There will be no Assignee.

  • The Failed Gift keyword will be added to the task automatically.

  • The Limit to Role will be set to Finance.



Latest Update

8/13/2024

Updated for RecurringGiftFailedNotice email template