Installation

Installing the Charitable Recurring Donations plugin is the same as installing any other Charitable extension. If you’re not sure how to do that, we recommend first reading our guide to installing Charitable extensions.

Getting Started

Adding recurring donations to a campaign

By default, Recurring Campaigns are not enabled on campaigns. To enable them, you must choose a “Recurring Donations Mode” from the donation options for your campaign. You can add support for recurring donations to your campaign in the following modes:

• Simple: Adds a checkbox, ex: “Make it Monthly”
• Variable: Allows donor to choose the frequency from a list
• Advanced: A tabbed display showing buttons with suggested amounts

Once a mode is selected more options will become available.

New Custom Emails

• Admin notification of new recurring donation
• Admin notification when a recurring donation is renewed
• Donor notification of new and renewal donations
• Donor confirmation of cancelled recurring donation

Email Hierarchy

If you have enabled both the “Donor: Donation Receipt” and the “Donor: Recurring Donation Receipt” emails, a recurring donation will trigger the “Donor: Recurring Donation Receipt” and not both receipt emails. If only one is enabled, then a Donor will receive the enabled email as their receipt. This separation allows you to optionally fine tune the emails sent to recurring donors.

New Email Shortcodes

Recurring Donations adds a new shortcode for emails:

[charitable_email show="recurring_summary"]

This shortcode adds a new table displaying the recurring donation’s amount, frequency, status, and start date.

Gateway Setup Instructions

Depending on which payment gateway you use, you may need to follow some extra steps to get Recurring Donations up and running.

Stripe

As of Charitable Stripe 1.3.0, no additional setup steps should be required for Recurring Donations to work. Charitable handles everything under the hood.

Note: If you are using a previous version of our Stripe integration, or you notice that recurring donations are not being marked as active automatically, you may need to manually set up a Stripe webhook. Find out how to set up a Stripe webhook.

Authorize.Net

As of Charitable Authorize.Net 1.2.0, no additional setup steps are required for Recurring Donations to work. Charitable handles everything under the hood.

PayFast

No additional setup steps are required.

Cancelling Donations

As of Recurring Donations version 1.1, recurring donations can be cancelled by the site owner from the admin or by the donor from the My Accounts area.

Note: Once a recurring donation is created, the automatic renewals are handled by the payment processor and will continue to be charged even if you deactivate the Recurring Donations plugin or Charitable itself.

Cancelling in the Admin

When view the details for a particular Recurring Donation, you will see Cancel in Gateway as an option in the Donations Actions meta box for recurring donations made via a gateway that supports this feature. You may need to update your gateway plugin to see this feature.

Clicking the Cancel Recurring Donation button will cancel the recurring donation with the gateway, mark the recurring donation as cancelled locally at your site, and if enabled at Charitable > Settings > Emails, send the donor an email confirming that their recurring donation has been cancelled.

Note: If you do not see the “Cancel in Gateway” option it means that the recurring donation cannot be cancelled by Charitable. Make sure that you are using the most recent version of Charitable Recurring Donations as well as the payment gateway integration you are using.

If you are using the most recent versions of all extensions and you still do not see this option, you will need to cancel the recurring donation within the payment gateway settings.

Cancelling from the My Donations area

It’s also possible for the donor to cancel their own subscription from within their My Donations area. By default a link to a donor’s Recurring Donations will be added to the output of the [charitable_my_donations] shortcode.

Once they view their Recurring Donations, they can “View Details” of a specific recurring donation, depending on whether the gateway supports cancellation, they will see a “Cancel” button under Actions.

Shortcodes

If you wish to hide the link to a donor’s Recurring Donations from their “My Accounts” area, you can modify the [charitable_my_donations] to hide shortcode by adding the hide_recurring=1 parameter (ex: [charitable_my_donations hide_recurring=1]).

Recurring donations supports its own [charitable_my_recurring_donations] shortcode if you’d prefer to list the recurring donations in an alternative location.

Incompatibility

Please note: Recurring Donations does not work with the following extensions:

• PayUMoney
• Easy Digital Downloads Connect