Let regular donors pause before they cancel

A supporter has given $40 a month by card since early 2024. In June the rent goes up, and the household sits down one evening to go through everything that comes out of the account each month. The regular gift is on that list. Nothing about the organisation has changed, and the supporter would happily give less for a while, or nothing until spring. The receipt in their inbox offers one way to arrange that, which is to email the office and wait for a reply. Their bank can stop the payment tonight, so that is where they stop it.

In many regular-giving setups, keep or cancel is the whole menu. A donor with only those two choices will cancel when money gets tight, and a gift the donor can pause, lower or move to a new card from their own inbox should get through the months that would otherwise end it.

Why a tight month ends a regular gift

Cost-of-living pressure has been on Australian households for a few years now. A regular gift is exposed in a way a one-off gift is not: it turns up on the statement every month, so it is one of the first lines a household finds when it goes looking for savings, and the donor who finds it is deciding about the next twelve payments rather than the next one.

In a lot of programmes, changing the amount of a regular gift means an email, a reply from someone in the office, and a staff member editing the payment record by hand, usually during business hours. Pausing for three months is often not something the setup can do at all. Cancelling is the one change the donor can make alone, so it is the one they make.

Plenty of these donors think of themselves as committed supporters who give on their own terms, which is a broader idea of regular giving than most fundraising teams work with. What they lacked was a way to say "less, for now" that took no more effort than stopping.

Left alone, the $40 gift is worth $480 over the calendar year. Cancelled in June, it has given $200 and the organisation is back to working out when a win-back ask should go out to someone who never really meant to leave. Paused from June to August it gives $360, and halved to $20 from June it gives $340, and both are still running in September. Even the halved gift finishes the year $140 ahead of the cancelled one, and it keeps the donor in the regular-giving file.

What a donor can change from their own inbox

Together gives every donor who has given through it a portal for their own giving, called Your giving, at alltogether.giving/giving. There is no password. The donor enters their email address and gets a link that lasts 15 minutes and works once, and opening it keeps them signed in on that device for a week. Four of the emails Together sends a donor end with a "See all your giving" line, and so does the screen they see straight after a gift goes through, so the way in is already sitting in their inbox. It is on for every organisation, on every plan, with nothing to set up.

Opening a regular gift shows the amount, how often it is charged, when the next payment is due and what it has given so far. It also carries six things the donor can do without contacting anyone:

• Pause it. Skip the next charge, or pause for one, two or three months. Nothing is charged during the pause, the amount and schedule stay as they were, and the gift restarts on its own.
• Change the amount. The new amount applies from the next payment, within the minimum and maximum on the donation form the gift came through. The pause screen offers this too, as "Or keep it going at a smaller amount".
• Update the card, for the supporter whose bank reissued it after a fraud alert.
• Move between card and direct debit, through Stripe's own bank form, which carries the direct debit authority naming the organisation.
• Pay a missed payment, when the last one failed, with a second confirmation that names the amount before anything is charged.
• Cancel it, with an optional reason shared with the organisation. "I can't afford it right now" is one of the choices.

Each change emails the gift's own donor, which catches the case where somebody else made the change from a forwarded link. Each one also lands on the organisation's audit log, attributed to the donor, so the team can see that a gift was paused until November without anyone having rung to say so.

Letting a $40 gift become a $20 one

The obvious objection is that a smaller amount on offer will tempt donors who would otherwise have stayed at $40. Some of them will take it. That is a cost, and a team that watches its average regular gift closely will probably see the number dip.

Against what the same donor was about to do, the trade looks different. By the time someone is reading the pause screen they are already going through the household budget, and the $40 they were weighing it against was $0. Offering "less, for now" at that moment keeps a payment running and keeps a supporter in the regular-giving file, where a well-timed upgrade ask can reach them once things ease. That is an inference from the arithmetic above, not a measured retention figure. How many paused gifts resume, and how many of those cancel later anyway, is a number a team can only get from its own data after a few months.

A pause also ends by itself, which removes a job from the office. A donor who writes in to ask for three months off depends on somebody remembering to restart the gift in September; here nobody has to. The resume date is when collection restarts, and the first charge after it falls on the gift's usual charge date, so a gift paused until 21 November charges on its normal December date.

Where the portal stops

A pause cannot be undone from the portal, so a donor who changes their mind contacts the organisation and the team restarts collection. Moving from monthly to yearly also still goes through a person, because the schedule cannot be changed there. A gift with a failed payment behind it cannot be paused, re-priced or moved to direct debit until that payment is settled, and the catch-up control settles only the most recent missed payment, so a gift that has failed two cycles running can be paid and still show as behind. Direct debit is offered only when the organisation's Stripe account can collect it.

Pauses and amount changes send no webhook event, so a CRM fed by Together's webhooks will not hear about them, and the audit log is the place to look. The link also goes to whoever holds the inbox, so a shared household or office address shows the giving of everyone recorded under it.

The portal is for the decision a donor makes at 10pm on a weeknight, and a fundraiser is still the better answer for a donor who is struggling. Routing every change through a staff member is one of the costs of older fundraising tools that rarely gets counted.

Before the next regular-giving appeal

A team can get a rough read on how much of this applies to them by pulling the regular gifts that ended in the last twelve months and setting aside the ones that ended on a failed card. What remains are the donors who chose to stop. The ones who had given steadily for two years or more and then cancelled outright are the group a pause was built for, and counting them gives a team its own version of the $200-versus-$340 comparison above. If that group turns out to be small, this matters less to that team than the rest of this article suggests.

A donor who wants a person also needs to be able to reach one. A pause can only be undone by the organisation, and the portal's contact line for gifts a team recorded itself uses the website on the organisation profile and the sender address under the Engage settings once that sending domain is verified, so both are worth checking.