Recurring donor migration

Recurring donors are one of the most valuable cohorts that an organization can build. When an organization starts working with Engaging Networks, ensuring your recurring donors move into the platform smoothly is a top priority.

Coordination between the organization’s existing payment gateway, the new payment gateway, and Engaging Networks is essential. By ensuring that all parties are involved from the start, clients can facilitate a smooth migration. The basic process below can be followed in order to migrate recurring donors.

Migration Process Overview

You will identify recurring donors from your database of record and extract the donation details for their transactions from your existing payment gateway
You will have your existing payment gateway send the tokenized transaction data to your new payment gateway
You will have your new payment gateway provide you with updated tokenized transaction data.
You will securely provide that tokenized transaction data to Engaging Networks in a set format that we will supply to you
Engaging Networks will import the transaction data to begin processing in Engaging Networks

If you are not changing your payment gateway as part of your migration to Engaging Networks, you can skip steps 2 and 3 related to re-tokenizing the data with a new payment gateway.

This migration is typically done as part of onboarding and is facilitated by the Engaging Networks Account Success Manager leading the project as well as the Client Support Specialist serving as the technical lead. Please contact your Account Success Manager or Engaging Networks Support for more detailed information and to start the process.

Key Terms

Merchant processor	This is the entity that manages the schedule for the recurring donations. They pass the token to the payment gateway, who process the donation and relay a response which is recorded by the merchant processor. Engaging Networks is the merchant processor.
Payment gateway	Also called the payment processor, this is the entity that actually processes the donation and indicates if the transaction was successful or not. Examples of payment gateways are Stripe, Vantiv Worldpay, and iATS and a full list of supported gateways can be found here.
Token	This is encrypted credit card or bank data that can be used to process a donation. The format of a token varies by payment gateway but it is typically a numeric or alphanumeric string.

FAQs

No, there is no additional cost for migrating recurring donors into Engaging Networks

Migrating your recurring donors into Engaging Networks can allow for all transactions, both new and existing, to process in a single system.
Users can manage all recurring donations within Engaging Networks.
Supporters with recurring transactions processing in Engaging Networks can use the Supporter Hub to manage their own donations. They can update things such as donation amount, day of charge and also update the associated credit card. The Supporter Hub can also be used to upsell recurring donors.
Engaging Networks offers Marketing Automations to automatically notify supporters if the associated credit card processing their recurring transactions is due to expire, as well as when their donation fails.
Engaging Networks profile and query builder tools can be used to target recurring donors in email or SMS broadcast campaigns and also to show them conditional content on Engaging Networks pages.
Migrating can reduce the number of payment gateways your organization utilizes.

There is not an upper limit for the number of donations that can be migrated, but due to the effort required to migrate donations, the minimum number that can migrated is 25.

There is also an available REST API endpoint that is available to all clients at no charge that can be used to migrate recurring transactions.

Our recommendation is to reach out to donors individually and have them resubmit their payment details on an Engaging Networks page. It is typically good donor stewardship opportunity or opportunity for a recurring upsell campaign.

If our best practices and outlined timelines are followed, no. Please ensure you discuss timelines with your Account Success Manager assigned to onboarding to ensure the timing is such that no transactions will be missed as part of the migration.