Fundraising in ActionKit¶

Accepting Recurring Donations¶

You can accept recurring donations through ActionKit as long as you've configured your merchant vendor account for this. Braintree, PayPal, PayFlo Pro and Authorize.net will all accept monthly, quarterly, and yearly. All merchant vendors except Braintree also accept weekly donations; Braintree does not support a weekly recurring period.

A monthly donation option is included on your standard donation pages if you base your templateset on the Original. You can also configure weekly, quarterly, or annual donations, as allowed by your merchant vendor and account configuration.

If you are using Braintree, pay special attention to the custom retry options for recurring donations.

Pages For Recurring Donation Management¶

You can create pages where your users can manage their existing recurring commitments (including changing their credit card number, billing address, or amount) or cancel them. They will have to set a password and login.

Recurring Donation Email Stream¶

You can set up recurring mailings to help you manage donations. You might want one to users with active recurring profiles whose credit cards are about to expire. You might also consider a mailing that goes out to anyone who attempts a one-time or recurring donation but fails.

Some clients have also had success with a welcome series.

Donation History¶

You can view the user's complete donation history by clicking the Donation History link. Every donation, attempted donation, and recurring payment for the user is shown, most recent first, with the date, order ID, activity type, status, amount, any additional information for the transaction, and action links.

If you click on the row for any transaction, depending on the type of payment (one-time vs recurring) you will see additional information about the transaction, including:

• Payment processor
• Recurring profile ID
• Recurring profile start date
• Recurring profile status
• Recurring profile total paid
• Transaction ID
• Action ID
• Page title and ID
• Action field(s)
• Candidate(s)
• Source

You will also have the option to re-send a confirmation mailing for that donation if a donor has misplaced their original confirmation mailing receipt. Confirmation mailings can only be re-sent for a limited time, and are only available since February 2019.

Click the Expand All link above the donation history table to show the details for all donations.

You can also use the links in the Actions column for managing donations.

Recurring Profile Screen¶

You can reach the Recurring Profile screen by clicking on Manage Profile from the Recurring Donations section of the user record, or by clicking on View Payments from the user's Donation History screen.

The Recurring Profile screen displays information about the recurring profile including start date, number of payments, sum of payments, current charge amount and the date of the next charge.

You can change the amount, credit card, bank information, or billing address for future payments except for PayPal profiles. The billing address is prefilled from the last saved billing address for this profile, and changes to the billing address are only available for Braintree, Authorize.net, and PayFlowPro accounts.

Note

PayPal does not support changing the amount, credit card, or billing address for future payments. To make any changes to PayPal recurring profiles, cancel the old recurring payment and start a new one.

You can also refund past payments and cancel future payments.

Any changes made will be tracked in the Donation Change Log which notes who made the change and whether it was a staff or the user.

It's best to manage all of these options through ActionKit, not directly through your merchant vendor account, so the changes are captured in ActionKit and transmitted to the vendor.

Any changes you make from this screen are processed through a page called admin_update_recurring that has the confirmation email unselected. If you want users to receive an email after staff make changes to their recurring profile, you can edit this page and select the confirmation email.

Donation Snippets¶

Donation Snippets do not include default values. If you target non-donors with an email that has a donation snippet, ActionKit will skip users for whom the mailing would show a blank where the tag is. It's best to target only donors or use a conditional that only includes the relevant sentence if the user is a donor. It's also a good idea to view several proofs when using these tags since the donors are especially valuable to you.

Donation snippet calculations are standardized to match donation stats on the individual user record. Donations are complicated and they've changed over to time to account for various scenarios. The donation stats on the individual user record include only completed donations, include imported donations, exclude donations of $0 (like free product orders), and exclude any payments (first or later) toward a recurring donation profile for the one-time donation calculation and include them for recurring. These Snippets use all the same logic.

You can view the SQL used for the user stats.

The Suggested Ask snippet requires an algorithm for computing the ask value. You specify the algorithm by selecting the page that contains the algorithm in the Landing Page dropdown. Read more in Suggested Ask Rules.

Snippets that include only one-time donations are followed by (single). Those with (total) include one-time and recurring donations.

When using the recurring Snippets, if you have donors with more than one active recurring commitment, the tags will only reference the first recurring donation profile.

If you want to display some text in a mailing that's only visible to donors, you can also use ActionKit's donation snippets with the Django {% if %} syntax to check whether a value for the snippet exists, and then use that logic to display your message.

For example:

{% if donations.highest_previous_all %}
    P.S. Thanks for being one of our most wonderful donors!
{% endif %}

This message will only show for donors.

Built-In Donation Reports¶

Below are descriptions of some key reports, but there are many others included in your instance and documented in the reference. You can view previews for some reports here.

• Recurring Donations Summary Dashboard - Displays year-to-date and month-to-date top-level stats for recurring donations: profiles, payments, new profiles, failed payments, cancelled profiles, and net change. Also displays the top 10 sources, top 10 pages, and top 10 mailings for the year for recurring donations.
• Recurring Donations Summary Charts - Year-over-year visualization of recurring donation payments, active, new and cancelled profiles, and failed payments.
• Recurring Donations Report - Displays monthly and year-to-date recurring donation amounts.

• Basic Product Report - Displays combined sales information by product and accepts start and end dates and product IDs as parameters.

Donations Query Builder¶

You can create queries without writing SQL yourself by using ActionKit's point-and-click query builder interface.

Use the Donations Query Builder type to view counts of orders, payments (completed orders of more than $0), and donors as well as the sum and average of payments. View these totals broken down by page, donation source, type (one-time or recurring), donation status, donor address, etc. Or view a list of orders with related details like amount, account, status, products, donor name and address.