Donors can set themselves up as monthly givers by donating through your online donation pages and selecting Recurring Monthly Gift as their gift frequency but there may be times when your staff may need to set them up manually. This might be when your donor is giving through the mail or over the phone. 

To set up a new monthly giver you will manually create a recurring billing subscription in the Automated Recurring Billing (ARB )service in the merchant interface of Authorize.net. 

To create a new subscription in the Merchant Interface:

  1. Log into the Merchant Interface at https://account.authorize.net
  2. Click Recurring Billing in the main left side menu.
  3. Click Create a New ARB Subscription
  4. Complete the payment and subscription information.
  5. Click Submit to create the subscription.
Recommendations for creating subscriptions:
  • Input the donor's name into the Subscription Name field. This will help you find the subscription later if it needs to be edited. 
  • The Description field should include information on what the donation is designated for. Input both the gift designation and the name of your fundraising campaign. You'll want to match this up to the campaign in your 4aGoodCause account by including the Campaign ID (see below) from the campaign these monthly donations should be attributed to. Sample Input: Annual Campaign (1ecd0ae1-584a-4ad6-a8d2-db58470b50d9), Gift Designation: Where the need is greatest.
  • The Start Date you enter will be the date when the first monthly donation will process. Subsequent donations will occur on this day of the month going forward. 
  • Select your subscription to process every month with no end date.
  • Be sure to enter an email address for the donor. 
How to acquire your Campaign ID
  1. Login to https://4agc.com as a Nonprofit User. 
  2. Click on Campaigns on the left menu.
  3. On the right, click the Menu icon next to the campaign in question. 
  4. Select Copy Campaign ID from the menu. 
  5. This will copy the ID to your clipboard. 
  6. Paste this ID into your recurring billing subscription as noted above.

Importance of the Campaign ID 

Each month as donations are processed in the ARB service, your 4aGoodCause account is alerted via a Silent Post operation. When you include your Campaign ID in the Description field of your subscriptions, we can assign the donation to the matching campaign. This also allows the campaign to send a monthly email receipt to the donor if you have that optional feature enabled. It also allows our platform the ability to assign those dollars to that campaign. If you do not include a Campaign ID on your subscription the donation will come in as "Unassigned" and be placed in the main donations report in 4aGoodCause.