Hi,

 I was wondering how many other organizations have the Raiser's Edge EFT module to deduct automatic payments from donors' credit cards/bank accounts for recurring pledges?  Do you find that many donors want to have payments automatically drawn from their accounts?

 Thanks!

 --Jaclyn Hirschorn

We do monthly/quarterly payments.  I think it's our third year of processing monthly credit card payments.  The bank drafts we were doing from installation of RE.  It works very well for us.  Have seen the number of donors choosing this option grow each year.  It's definitely a 'donor friendly' option. (We have a number of board members who've used this option for years.) 

Only negative - we had to come up with a plan to keep track of card expiration dates so we had enought lead time to contact donor for new exp date.

We also have monthly/quarterly donations through credit cards. We ran into the same issue regarding credit card expiration dates so we set up a query for expired credit cards. I record the expiration date in the individual RE records. I then run the query quarterly and send out a letter that basically thanks them for their continued support and states "our records indicate your information on file needs updating, please take a moment to update your payment info or contact us at....". This was the best way I could come up with to keep track of names and updated information (vs. taking it over the phone). I also have a signed hard copy from the donor indicating changes (vs. hand written message or vm).

Thank you both for your answers!  But do either of you use a special RE module that allows to automatically draw out the payments?  Or  do you use some other program?

One time gifts can be made online through NetCommunity using IATS. We do not have the EFT module. So when a donor indicates a recurring gift - we add that information into a recurring batch in RE and commit the gift using the IATS interface.

There is a little bit more involved - you need to have an IATS account set up to do this - but it has dramatically reduced the amount of time spent processing and managing the recurring gift records. Prior to this arrangement - cards were run manually! It could take over an hour to run credit cards. Now...it is done in less than one minute.

Our credit cards are processed through IATS. Doesn't seem to take any difference as far as amount of time for those batches than it does a cash gift batch.

Our bank drafts batch is exported to a file (option to choose under tools when working in batch) and then we transmitted that file to our bank for processing. 

As I said, has worked well for us.