Set Number of Recurrences in a Subscription
under review
Ben Meredith
Some users want the ability to allow the donor to select how many recurrences in a subscription for recurring donations. It's not possible currently.
Ben Meredith
We debated internally (and researched extensively) including an option allowing donors to choose how long a donation recurs, and we decided against it for a couple of reasons.
First, we have the ability for an organization to set a specific time-limited subscription if needed, by creating an admin-defined recurring form. That covers nearly every need for having to set a specific amount of recurrences (annual membership? make a recurring form that recurs monthly for 12 months!).
Second, allowing the donor to be the one to choose the number of recurrences at the time of initial donation will lead invariably to less donations, as it increases friction on the transaction. It makes the donor evaluate future reality in addition to current reality. "Am I still going to be able to afford $___ this time next year?" is not what you want a donor contemplating at the moment of commitment. You want instead to assure donors that they can cancel anytime. Reduce friction.
A final bonus reason that we don't offer that functionality is that very few of our competitors do, and very few folks have asked us for it.
If this post gets a bunch of interest, we might be persuaded to change our minds!
Shiva Durga Temple of Atlanta
This feature is important for my subscribers. We want ability to my subscribers to select how many months they want to do recurring payments.
G
Geisimar Rech
This feature is extremely important.
I believe that in Brazil, people feel safer when they can control signatures or donations.
In our case, donations are linked to purposes.
Example, I will make a donation purpose of 50 for 12 months.
In technical parts, the admin has the option to enable or disable this feature.
Appreciate with affection.
In Brazil 350 dollars is more than 1 salary :(
Ben Meredith
Merged in a post:
Recurring period selected by the donor
C
Caroline Sehlinger
As an admin, I want to allow my users to select for how long they want to donate recurrently - for 6 months, 1 year, indefinitely.
And as a donor, I want to be able to define for how long I want to recurrently donate to a website.
Christi Yarema
Gravity Forms has this requested functionality: https://docs.gravityforms.com/subscription-transaction-type-paypal-addon/
Ben Meredith
Merged in a post:
User should be able to select the number of recurrences of a recurring donation
Matheus Martins
As a donor, I want to be able to select for how long I want a donation to happen on my account.
For example, I want to be able to donate monthly for 6 months only, or weekly for 4 weeks, but I want to be able to select for how long.
Z
Zakir Faizal
Hello, I feel that this is an option that should be available to the admins and can be checked (enabled/disabled). It should be a choice that the organization should have.
I support a non-profit that runs short campaigns (10 days) and would like to automate payments for 10 days. However, there is a hard stop end date and giving the user the choice to donate 10 days or 9 days depending on the time that they start donating in the 10 day campaign is critical. Pre-defining 10 days when they start donating on day 2 (meaning they only have 8 more days to donate) would mean they donate 2 days after the campaign and people won't like that. We do this campaign in the last 10 days of the holy month of Ramadan and people increase their donations in these 10 specific days. Thus giving them the freedom to choose the number of days in those 10 days would only make them more willing to donate. This would be a unique form of course. We have other forms where people can make general donations.
Really love this plugin and hope you guys will implement this feature.
Ben Meredith
under review
We're still open to looking into this, and using this feedback as a gauge to see how much interest there is! Vote and comment here!
Kevin Dees
Ben Meredith: Having read many of the comments and thoughts on this request I still think having this feature would be greatly appreciated. While many of the usability/financial points your team has made are valid, being able to make that choice on our own would be nice. Adding a checkbox (as pointed out before) so that an admin can enabled/disable the "term/num-occurrences" option would be huge for my client's website. The main benefit is that they can have 1 form to rule them all vs having to send donors to multiple forms in various places (UX nightmare for the admin and customer). Give WP has been a huge win for us so far but this would be very much appreciated.
C
Chris Yerges
I do think the ability for an admin to better dictate reoccuing terms would be very helpful. Im working on a capital campaign for a new chapter facility for my fraternity chapter. Our giving levels are set for 5 years (ie $10,000 total given over 5 years). Right now I can not properly set this up because of the limitations on the back end. I would love to have the ability to say here is the giving level... its going to be capitalized in 5 years.. would you like to pay? annually, quarterly, monthly? etc.. and let the donor choose how often withdrawals are made. All I can do now is set a fixed monthly payment with no cut off and "catch it" when the total amount has been recieved to cancel it.
Ben Meredith
We debated internally (and researched extensively) including an option allowing donors to choose how long a donation recurs, and we decided against it for a couple of reasons.
First, we have the ability for an organization to set a specific time-limited subscription if needed, by creating an admin-defined recurring form. That covers nearly every need for having to set a specific amount of recurrences (annual membership? make a recurring form that recurs monthly for 12 months!).
Second, allowing the donor to be the one to choose the number of recurrences at the time of initial donation will lead invariably to less donations, as it increases friction on the transaction. It makes the donor evaluate future reality in addition to current reality. "Am I still going to be able to afford $___ this time next year?" is not what you want a donor contemplating at the moment of commitment. You want instead to assure donors that they can cancel anytime. Reduce friction.
A final bonus reason that we don't offer that functionality is that very few of our competitors do, and very few folks have asked us for it.
If this post gets a bunch of interest, we might be persuaded to change our minds!
Ahmet Gencer
Ben Meredith: I believe you need to implement this feature. We're already using some other platform for recurring donations in which user can select their donation period and it works without any problem. We've bought the Give-WP Recurring Donations Plugin since it has better graphics but unfortunately, we can't use it without this feature.
As for your concerns:
1) "First, we have the ability for an organization to set a specific time-limited subscription if needed, by creating an admin-defined recurring form. That covers nearly every need for having to set a specific amount of recurrences (annual membership? make a recurring form that recurs monthly for 12 months!)."
You can't give enough freedom to users with current abilities.
First of all, you can't define the max time for the custom amounts.
Secondly Let's say you have 100, 250, 1000, 5000 dollars as amount selections if you try to create predefined recurring options like 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 18 months.
You need to create 4 (different amount) * (4 durations) = 16 selections
And this would be really ugly.
Example:
100 dollars - 3 months
100 dollars - 6 months
100 dollars - 12 months
100 dollars - 18 months ...... so on
2) "Second, allowing the donor to be the one to choose the number of recurrences at the time of initial donation will lead invariably to less donations, as it increases friction on the transaction. It makes the donor evaluate future reality in addition to current reality. "Am I still going to be able to afford $___ this time next year?" is not what you want a donor contemplating at the moment of commitment. You want instead to assure donors that they can cancel anytime. Reduce friction."
Unlike your logic above our donors want to be able to set how long they will donate and create their budgets according to that. We collect pledge amounts from our donors and they give every last cent they can to help others.
3) "A final bonus reason that we don't offer that functionality is that very few of our competitors do, and very few folks have asked us for it."
If I find a program that offers that functionality I'd buy it immediately. And I probably will request a refund from Give-WP because it doesn't give us this freedom.
You should be able to differentiate yourself from others by adding other functionalities that your competitors don't offer.
We're talking about donations here and you're defending only capitalism. Please donate some amount of effort yourselves.
And you can always put a checkbox in the admin panel which only interested people can turn on this option.
Sincerely
Ahmet Gencer
We are also willing to pay if you make customizations because this feature is really important for us.