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Data Migration - Active Recurring Subscriptions
Data Migration - Active Recurring Subscriptions

How to migrate active recurring donation subscriptions from an external platform to Funraise

Tony Sasso avatar
Written by Tony Sasso
Updated over a week ago

Services in this article may not be included in every Funraise plan.

This article covers the process to migrate active recurring subscriptions to Funraise. You can migrate your recurring donation subscriptions to Funraise from another platform in many cases, but not all. Our ability to migrate subscription data is dependent on your previous system and payment processor. The process will require coordination between us, you, and your external platform.

To get started with a recurring subscription migration, contact us at our Service Desk.

You're responsible for your migration

While our award-winning support team is available to guide your way, migrations can be a challenging process if not well organized. The state of your data, your team's resources, and your previous system will determine your migration experience.

Funraise does not analyze, structure, or organize your data - this is your data and you know it better than anyone. You are the leader of your migration.

Required data

  1. Payment method data (the actual credit card information). Your current payment service will securely share this data with our vaulting partner, Spreedly.

  2. Subscription details: Information about the supporter, amounts, frequency, payment date, etc. for each subscription. You will export this data from your previous platform and enter it into a template Google Sheet that we provide.

Step-by-step instructions

Step 1

Organization

Contact us at our Service Desk and let us know you're ready to begin a recurring migration.

Step 2

Organization

Contact your payment service to let them know that you want to start the process of migrating your recurring subscriptions.

  • Here are some ready-made email templates when migrating from Stripe and WePay.

  • For other services, reach out to your previous payment support representative with this message:

Hi previous platform,

We are moving to a new payments platform and will be migrating our recurring donor payment data to the new gateway that will be processing our payments.

Previous platform please conduct our migration of recurring payment methods from Stripe to Spreedly.

We would like to export all our recurring payment methods to Spreedly, a PCI level 1 payment vault. You can find their AOC and latest scan here: https://spreedly.com/pci

When the export details are ready, please send the encrypted credentials and file names to support@funraise.org and reference my merchant name.

Thank You!

Step 3

Previous payment service

  • Securely shares payment method data with our vaulting service (Spreedly). Timeframe and cost for this process will vary by your previous payment service.

Step 4

Funraise vaulting partner (Spreedly)

  • Securely receives payment method data from your previous payment service

  • Provides tokens representing imported payment methods back to Organization and Funraise. These tokens will be matched with subscription data in step 5.

  • This step typically requires at least one week

Step 5

Organization

  • Confirm with previous payment service when subscriptions will stop charging in the previous environment

  • Prepare the subscription details import file using exported data from your previous system. This is a template Google Sheet, which we'll share with you.

Funraise

  • Help match tokenized payment methods to subscription data

  • Adjust start date for subscription processing based on organization input

  • Finalize subscription data import file for organization approval

Step 6

Organization

  • Provide final approval for import

Funraise

  • Import final subscription data

Notes

  • This process can take a few weeks to a few months. It entirely depends on the quality of your data and the payment platform you're migrating from

  • Timing is important. You'll need to coordinate the cancellation of your existing subscriptions and the import to ensure no payments are missed or duplicated.

  • Additional charges may apply if you are migrating subscriptions from multiple sources.

☝️ Note that your migration will change the gateway that is processing your subscriptions. This can mean that there will be verification checks that were not present at your previous gateway. In the case of Funraise Payments (powered by Stripe), you will have Stripe Radar rules by default that verify the address and CVV of credit cards to help prevent fraud.

If your previous gateway did not enforce these checks, you may see payments start to fail based on these checks, but you are able to configure if they are enforced from within your Gateway Account Settings.

It is possible that there will be some payment methods that will not be successfully imported to the vaulting service. Possible reasons include:

  • Payment method/subscription was created after the request for export was sent to the previous payment processor

  • Data provided by the previous payment processor was insufficient to be imported into vaulting service

When a payment method is not successfully imported to the vaulting service, it is not possible to import the subscription to Funraise either.

  • It is possible that some payment methods are imported with errors, such as invalid expiration dates. While it is still possible to import this subscription, the subscription will fail to charge. It may be preferable to exclude such records from the import process and reach out to those supporters directly to create new subscriptions in Funraise.

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