Installment Gifts and Designated Giving

There are four gift types when it comes to Convio.

• Straight Gifts - the standard "give $10 once" kind of gift
• Recurring Gifts - "I want to give $10 every month for 5 months"
• Sustaining Gifts - "I want to give $10 every month forever"
• Installment Gifts - "I want to give $50 over 5 months"

At first glance, Installment and Recurring gifts look very similar, but they are not - I'll get in to further detail on the differences in another post.   We initially offered donors the choice of all four gift types.  We'd previously used a out-of-the-box Convio formbuilder form for our Annual Giving site and this worked without an issue. 

The next phase of our Convio implementation involved creating custom forms and passing the collected data to the Convio API.  All was well for a while, I figured out how to pass nearly everything to the API, what I couldn't pass I stored elsewhere.  We had developed a scheme where colleges would identify about 20 or so "most popular" funds which would be included in a drop-down, with the ability for donors to select less popular funds and/or write in a designation for their gift. 

The funds in the drop-down were managed within the Convio back-end - the name, description and our internal accounting code was stored there.  The information about gifts was fed to us nightly - designations selected from the drop-down didn't need any further handling, they were ready to be processed within our systems. 

In order for this to work, the custom forms we created need to be submitted against a "Shadow" form - a form that exists within the Convio system that doesn't really do anything except some validation.  All of the mandatory form fields you want to collect data on must exist in the shadow form, again, managed within the Convio system.

Now, to the problem.  There is form a field which collects designated fund information for straight gifts, recurring gifts, and sustaining gifts.  There is not one for installment gifts.  The field simply does not exist in Convio's form builder tool.  There is a field that will allow you collect installment gifts, but it allows only for wirte-in designations, or "the area of greatest need".  Using this field in an installment giving form will result in all donor-selected designations being blank.

Definitely a problem.

We discovered the issue fairly quickly and had collected the donor's designation selection in another system, so all but a very few gifts were corrected.  A few donors needed to be contacted for clarification of their intent, they were very understanding.

The long-term solution to this problem has not yet been addressed - I personally think it will require that every gift use the write-in fields instead of the Convio-managed designations.  But for now, the installment gift type is shelved.

Introductions

My name is Dan Frey, I work for NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  I'm the Technical Lead for Advancement Information Systems.

A big part of my job is managing the online giving aspect of our fundraising efforts.  We use Convio to handle our gift payment processing.  There's not a whole lot of information online about some common Convio issues that I'm certain other institutions and individuals have encountered, so I am writing this to share some of what I've learned and hopefully foster some discussion among others who may need some guidance or who have discovered some novel solutions but have not had an opportunity to share them.