Migrating Recurring Donors into Kindful – Kindful Help Center

Overview

This article outlines the various ways to bring Recurring Donations into Kindful from the three external payment gateways with which we connect.

Linked Articles:

- Import Stripe Charges and Customers Collected Outside of Kindful

- Connect PayPal

- Bring in Missed PayPal Transactions

- Connect Authorize.Net as a Payment Gateway

Import Recurring Donations from Stripe

You can automatically import historical Stripe transactions by connecting your Stripe account in Kindful's Payment Gateways section. After connecting your gateway in Kindful's Payment Gateways section, a Kindful Care team member can enable a feature we call, "Stripe Create," on your account. Enabling this feature allows Kindful to find successful transactions in your Stripe account, and bring those transactions and customers into Kindful automatically.

By default, this process will bring all historical data in Kindful from your Stripe account. Kindful can help by setting a start date for this sync to begin to help prevent duplication. To request Kindful set a start date for your Stripe Create integration sync, please reach out to support@kindful.com.

Enabling this integration will allow for the following:

Manage online donations (set up and refund) directly from your Kindful account
Automatically pull in pre-existing transactions from your Stripe account into a singular 'General' campaign in Kindful
As future Stripe recurring transactions are created (in Stripe), they will be updated in Kindful
Automatically creates new contact profiles and transactions (auto-merge will occur, see more below)

About recurring transactions automated into Kindful:

Recurring transactions (Payments) setup in Stripe will come into Kindful as one-time transactions. If you want to move the recurring schedule into Kindful so donations will charge automatically in Kindful with the proper Transaction Type (Recurring Transaction), you will need to manually setup a recurring donation for each of these customers using the billing profiles brought in via the Stripe Create sync. This can be done from a Contact Profile on the Payment Info tab. You would then need to delete the recurring transactions setup in your Stripe account so the donor is not charged twice.
To ensure the scheduled recurrences sync over correctly, you need to be sure the donor is setup as a Customer in Stripe, the recurring donation is setup as a Subscription in Stripe and the Credit Card is on file in Stripe. If the donor is not a Customer in Stripe, it is possible you will not be able to bring in these transactions.

Import Recurring Donations from PayPal

The connection to PayPal as a payment gateway is slightly different than other payment gateways Kindful supports. You are enabling in Kindful what is called an (a listener) that will receive notifications from PayPal when there is a successful payment processed in PayPal. Connecting PayPal is a point-in-time connection, meaning it cannot pull in the historical transactions collected inside of PayPal, to Kindful. To get these historical transactions into Kindful, you will want to export the data from PayPal and then import it into Kindful.

As recurring transactions are processed inside of PayPal, these contacts, transactions, and recurring donor flags will move to Kindful and be assigned to a singular 'PayPal' campaign. You will have no option to edit the recurrence dates in Kindful as this data is set in PayPal. Kindful has the ability to read and post it inside of the database. You will see recurring transactions and recurring donor flags appear in Kindful as they happen in PayPal. The options to manage the recurring transaction, in this case, are not present.

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You may find in this process that there are transactions that are occurring in PayPal that are not making their way into Kindful. If this is the case, please reference this article for more information on how to attempt to pull these missing transactions into Kindful.

Of Note: If you use PayPal as your only payment gateway in Kindful, you will not be able to add a donor’s billing information directly into the system. For example, if you wanted to create a donation/recurring donation directly from a donor’s profile, PayPal wouldn’t supply you with that donor’s payment information (credit card number). You would need to connect Bloomerang Payments, Stripe, or Authorize.net for this functionality.

Import Recurring Donations from Authorize.net

If you have used Authorize.net to process your donations, and you have recurring donations setup there, Kindful can bring in those recurring schedules along with donor billing profiles. This allows you to manage a donor’s recurring donation directly in Kindful account. This process will create all new contacts and create a scheduled recurring donation in Kindful. These will all be assigned to a singular campaign.

For this conversion to take place, you must have the donor subscriptions setup in Authorize ARB. Contact Authorize.net to convert your recurring donations into ARB if needed. You will also need to have CIM (Customer Information Manager) enabled in Authorize.net.

This is a very detailed and hands-on approach where you will work with a Care team member who will work with a Product Engineer to get these recurring donations setup in Kindful. There is a fee associated with this effort. Speak to your Care Team representative for more information.

Send a Personal Note

We do our best to provide solutions for you to help ease the burden of migrating your recurring donors into Kindful, and we know this is a large pain-point for users. We have found, however, that with a well-crafted message to your donors letting them know of your move to Kindful can prove effective. It is expected that this process will not capture all recurring donors, but it will be a good start to begin this process. Effective processes we have seen our users perform include sending out small batches of communication over time to get donors converted and setup as recurring donors in Kindful.

Here is a proven example email you can send:

Hi ______! I wanted to let you know that ________ is transitioning to a new fundraising platform. We believe this new tool will help us be more efficient with our time and our fundraising. That means we can spend more time doing _____ and connecting with our ongoing donors like you.

One added benefit of our new system is that you'll be able to log in to update your contacts information, download receipts, and manage recurring payments. Unfortunately, recurring donations set up through our former platform will stop on ________ date. Would you click the link below to set up a new monthly donation and ensure your giving is uninterrupted?

YOURSUBDOMAIN.kindful.com

We advise including a link to sign up for a new recurring donation (hosted campaign page that is tied to recurring donations - donor just chooses the date). You can setup a campaign to accept donations this way, which will create only recurring transactions:

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The donor's experience will look like this upon transaction completion.

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We recommend using one of our email marketing partners to send this email for better deliverability, the ability to add rich HTML content, and better tracking.

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