When you switch to Fundraise Up, you will likely have recurring plans that you might want to move over from your existing donation platform. To facilitate this move, Fundraise Up offers a free migration service that streamlines the process.

What is a migration?

Migration is the process of transferring your donors' recurring plans over to Fundraise Up. A migration is completed in three steps:

1. You provide a list of recurring plans that need to be moved to Fundraise Up. You source donor information from your existing donation platform or CRM and correlate these records with payment method details from your existing payments platform (Authorize.Net, PayPal, Stripe, etc).
2. You request that your existing payments vendor transfer the tokenized payment methods for the recurring plans to Stripe. Stripe is the payments platform that you use with Fundraise Up.
3. We create the recurring plans in your Fundraise Up account and connect them to the associated payment methods in Stripe. The recurring plans are then active in Fundraise Up.

Your organization’s assigned Solutions Engineer oversees the migration process. They act as a project manager, ensuring that the migration is completed without disruption to your fundraising operations or the donor experience.

For more information about the migration process, review the migration FAQ.

Why might you want to migrate?

Fundraise Up provides modern features and tools for activating and managing recurring giving, which is why several hundred organizations have already migrated a total of half a million recurring plans over to Fundraise Up! Here’s a list of reasons why organizations choose to move their existing plans to Fundraise Up:

• It’s free: Fundraise Up doesn’t charge any fees to migrate, and our dedicated team will help manage the whole process.
• Upgrade donors easily: migrating gives you access to our Upgrade Links feature, which allows you to easily create links that your recurring donors can use to increase their donation amount (or start covering their transaction fees) quickly and easily.
• Access to the Donor Portal saves time and money: the user-friendly dashboard where donors can manage their recurring plans, increase their amount, download receipts and more. This self-service option saves your nonprofit a lot of time and resources — 30% of donors used the Donor Portal to independently change their payment method in 2023, for example. Whether or not donors can use the Donor Portal to decrease or cancel their recurring plan is up to you.
• Reduced plan cancellations: the Donor Portal also improves retention by providing donors with alternatives to cancellation — 35% of plans that donors were about to cancel were saved in 2023 thanks to the Donor Portal
• Features that promote cost coverage: encourage donors to cover the platform and transaction costs for their donations through the Donor Portal or Upgrade Links.
• Improved retention from automatic card updates: Stripe works with card networks and automatically attempts to update saved card details whenever a donor receives a new card (for example, replacing an expired card or one that was reported lost. If a donor's card expires, Fundraise Up will automatically use information from Stripe to update their details — 15.2% of all subscriptions were saved in this way in 2023. If we can’t find updated information in Stripe, we’ll send emails to remind the donor to update their payment method.
• Centralization: have all of your one-time and recurring donations on one single platform and manage from one convenient Dashboard. This makes it easy to support donor relationships and provide a seamless giving experience, reducing the time spent on email campaigns, report generation, and other tasks.
• Exports and integrations: with all your information in one place, you can create exports at the touch of a button and integrate with any of our range of available CRM services.
• Emails: get access to our comprehensive email base for your recurring donors, featuring a wide range of customizable email templates in 17 languages that are tailored to your organization.
• Localization: the Donor Portal is available in 22 languages, and donor emails into 17 languages. You can use Fundraise Up’s pre-set localized content or add your own in the Dashboard.
• Tribute cards: your migrated donors will be able to send tribute e-cards or physical cards by mail/post for their dedicated donations.
• Save on other costs: migrating means you’re free to cancel your contracts with other merchant processors and save on fees.

Terminology

Requesting a migration

You can request the migration service once you have completed your move to Fundraise Up and provided you meet the minimum requirements for a migration (see below). This means ensuring that links on your website redirect from your previous donation forms to the Fundraise Up Checkout modal or a Campaign Page. We require this step to prevent additional recurring plans from being generated using your previous forms during the migration process.

Minimum requirements

To qualify for the migration service, you must have at least 25 existing active recurring plans that need to be moved to Fundraise Up.

Before requesting a migration, you should also review the “Vendor limitations” table at the end of this article, which outlines the platform vendors that may charge for or not allow migrations from their systems.

If you have more than 25 recurring plans to migrate

• If you have a self-managed account, request a migration by emailing our support team at support@fundraiseup.com
• If your organization has an assigned Customer Success Manager, email them to request a migration.

Migration request form

If you have a Custom account, your Customer Success Manager will provide you with a migration ID. Once you have your ID, you can enter it in the migration request form to create, edit, and track your migration.

If you have fewer than 25 recurring plans to migrate

Given the multi-party process involved (your organization, prior recurring donation processor/s and Fundraise Up) with long lead time work items (e.g. migrating tokens from prior processor, etc.), we recommend you migrate manually if you have fewer than 25 active recurring plans to migrate.

Our customers have found this manual migration process to be beneficial for the following reasons:

• It has proven to be faster for a smaller amount of migrations.
• It is an excellent way to reconnect and reinforce relationships with existing recurring donors.
• It provides an opportunity to advocate for fee coverage and for potential increases in donation installments.

There are two ways our existing customers have managed these manual small-scale migrations.

• Call the donors and use Fundraise Up's Virtual Terminal to recreate those recurring donations in Fundraise Up.
• Run a targeted email campaign for the donors using our URL API to auto-populate the donor information in the link (donor name, email, recurring, amount, etc.). You can use this spreadsheet template to auto-create the donation links. This makes for a frictionless donor experience, as they only have to re-enter their payment method details.

Once the above is completed, cancel each donor’s previous recurring donation in your prior processor.

If you have any concerns or questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at support@fundraiseup.com or reach out to your designated Customer Success Manager

Vendor limitations

Some platform vendors charge for or restrict the transfer of payment tokens, which can lead to migrations that are not successful. Here are vendors that are known to either charge for or restrict the transfer of payment tokens.