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How can I send out notifications to my sustaining donors when their card is declined?
How can I send out notifications to my sustaining donors when their card is declined?

Setting up the Donor Self-Service Widget and Declined Payment notifications

Ashleigh Alldredge avatar
Written by Ashleigh Alldredge
Updated over 4 years ago

You can send out two types of notifications for sustaining donors and their card information from the platform; additionally, you can allow donors to update their payment information through the use of our Donor Self-Service Widget. 

This widget allows the donors to update their billing address information and the credit card used for their plan. Additionally, donors have the option to temporarily suspend their recurring donations. If donor's would like to stop the recurring charges, they will need to contact you to do so.

Website set-up:

The first thing you need to do is set up a page on your website for the DSS Widget to live. Once you have that page set up, you can embed the snippet code for the widget. The DSS widget snippet code is found under "Widgets" within the main Organization tab:

Click on the brackets underneath "Snippet" to copy the code to embed on your site:


This is how the widget will appear on your website:


Notifications to Donors:

After embedding the widget on your website, you will need to include the URL of that specific page to your Recurring Payment notifications.

Those notifications are also located within the main Organization tab, you will need to click on "Recurring Payments":


There are 2 notification types: Proactive and Declined Payment.

Proactive emails are triggered when the system notices a donor's credit card is amount to expire; an email is sent out to the donor letting them know the card for the plan is about to expire. 

You can customize the messaging sent out to donors, but clicking the "Edit" button on the right-hand side of the Proactive Email Notifications section:

This allows you to enable the feature, add in custom content, and add in the URL of your website page where the Self-Service widget lives:

Decline Payment emails are triggered after the limit of consecutive declines has been met; an email is sent out to the donor saying their card was declined.

You can customize the messaging sent out to donors, by clicking the "Edit" button on the right-hand side of the Declined Payment Email Notifications section:

This allows you to enable the feature, set your consecutive declines limit, add in custom content, and add in the URL of your website page where the Self-Service widget lives:

Our best practice recommendation is setting the Consecutive Declines to more than 1:

The reason being that once the consecutive decline limit is hit, it puts the plan in "Error" status, emails the donor, and does not attempt to process the charge afterwards. You want to give the system multiple opportunities to process the plan before stopping the plan altogether.

Additionally, there are multiple reasons why a recurring payment is declined that does not have to do with the donor's card information being bad/outdated. For example: if your gateway provider had an interruption in service while the recurring payments were processing, that would trigger a decline of those payments. The donor's card information is fine, the gateway just had an issue; you don't want to send out a notification to the donor saying their card was declined when it was actually the gateway having issues. 


That is how you set up the Donor Self-Service Widget and enable notifications to your donors about their card information. If you have any questions about this process, please contact enterprise-support@givegab.com. 

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