Migration service
How to move existing recurring donors to Fundraise Up using our free migration service
What is a migration?
Migration is the process of transferring your donors' recurring plans to Fundraise Up. Upon completion, recurring plans are stopped in your legacy payment/merchant processor, imported into Fundraise Up, and re-initiated. As a merchant processor, we don't handle or store sensitive payment information. Therefore, payment tokens must be transferred from your legacy processor or Stripe account to a connected Stripe account within Fundraise Up. For plans migrating from PayPal, Billing Agreements must be extracted from the legacy PayPal account and imported into a connected PayPal account within Fundraise Up.
Why might you want to migrate?
- Centralization - Migrating allows organizations to have one-time and recurring donations all on one platform, making it easy to manage donor relationships and providing a seamless giving experience.
- Cost - Allows organizations to cancel contracts with other merchant processors.
- No Fundraise Up Cost - Fundraise Up has no fees to migrate. This service typically cost thousands.
- Anti-Fraud - AI-powered anti-fraud tools that prevent security issues and costly chargeback fees. Stripe and Fundraise Up have increased anti-fraud protection rules.
- Donation Source Filter - Real time easy to access consolidated management dashboards on all recurring donations (migrated & new).
- Retention - Higher digital donor retention. The donor portal allows donors to update their payment method and mitigate plan cancelation. “Installment failed” emails limit the number of failed transactions and reduce lapses in giving. In 2022, these emails had a 70.3% open rate and a 45.4% save rate!
Terminology
| Merchant processor | The front-end (donor-facing) stakeholder that maintains the merchant's account to initiate and authorize transactions. Merchants are not dealing directly with the processor during the payment process. It is important to note that Fundraise Up is a merchant processor and not a payment processor. |
| Payment processor / Payment gateway | The back-end stakeholder that is responsible only for processing payments and routing the information through the card network to the customer's issuing bank for authorization. For example, Stripe is our primary payment processor, and PayPal is a secondary one. |
| Payment token | A unique, secure representation of sensitive card or bank account information. It's used during transactions to protect the actual data, reducing the risk of fraud or unauthorized access. |
| Stop processing date and time | The specific date and time when recurring plans that are going to be migrated should be stop being charged by your legacy payment or merchant processor. |
| Back-charge | The charge made to collect a transaction incurred but not charged in a previous billing period. It can be due to lack of payment by the recipient of services or goods, an adjustment, or to collect an expense that was not billable until a later period due to timing issues (charging donations not charged between the stop processing date and the migration date). |
Migrating more than 50 recurring donors
Migrating your existing recurring plans to Fundraise Up involves requesting that the payment tokens associated with each plan be transferred from your current donation platform to Stripe.
To ensure PCI-compliance, the migration is completed directly between payment processors. You cannot provide us with a file of donor payment details.
Please reach out to support@fundraiseup.com or your designated Customer Success Manager who can share with you the first step to get the Migration process started.
Migrating 50 or fewer recurring donors
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 for you to migrate manually.
Our customers have found this process to be beneficial for the following reasons:
- They have found this to be a faster process.
- It is an excellent way to reconnect and reinforce the relationship with the recurring donors.
- Provides a way to advocate for fee coverage.
- This conversation allows you to inquire about the potential upgrade of contributions.
Here are two ways customers have managed 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 it a frictionless donor experience - only having to re-confirm their payment info.
Once the above is completed, for each donor, cancel their 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.
| Vendor | Issue |
|---|---|
| ActBlue | Transfer not allowed |
| Authorize.Net | Fee charged |
| CardConnect | Transfer not allowed |
| CardPointe | Transfer not allowed |
| Classy | Fee charged |
| CyberSource | Fee charged |
| Eway Payments | Fee charged |
| Ezidebit | Fee charged |
| GlobalGiving | Transfer not allowed |
| Neon One | Fee charged |
| MinistryLINQ | Transfer not allowed |
| Network for Good | Transfer not allowed |
| Paperless | Transfer not allowed |
| Pushpay | Transfer not allowed |
| Safesave | Fee charged |
| SecurePay | Fee charged |
| TrustCommerce | Fee charged |