Sync Donorbox Recurring Plans with Salesforce Recurring Donations

Salesforce is one of the world’s leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. In addition to connecting marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, and IT teams from anywhere, Salesforce is a database system that creates one-time and recurring donations for nonprofits. In this post, we’ll share how Salesforce recurring donations work and how Donorbox recurring plans map to Salesforce.

2 minutes read

Our native Salesforce integration now supports sync with Salesforce recurring donations object. It is an optional feature which can be enabled by Donorbox support for you. By default it is not enabled when you connect your Salesforce account to Donorbox. If this feature is not enabled then your recurring plans would sync with Salesforce as simple opportunities and would be marked as recurring through a checkbox field on those opportunities. Once the advanced sync with recurring donations is enabled then it is a different ball game altogether.


How Salesforce Recurring Donations work


Salesforce creates two types of recurring donations:

  • Open ended recurring donations
  • Fixed length recurring donations

We are only concerned with Open ended recurring donations as Donorbox only supports open ended recurring donations. Recurring donations in Salesforce have a forecast months setting which is set to 12 by default. This NPSP setting controls the number of pledged opportunities that are created as part of a recurring donation record. Here are a few scenarios to help you understand what this means:

For the below scenarios, we would consider that the NPSP forecast months setting: 12

  1. We create a new recurring donation record whose recurrence period is set to monthly. This would create 12 pledged opportunities linked to our recurring donation record
  2. We create a new recurring donation record whose recurrence period is set to quarterly. This would create 4 pledged opportunities linked to our recurring donation record
  3. Finally, we create a new recurring donation record whose recurrence period is set to yearly. This would create 1 pledged opportunity.

Now Salesforce automatically manages the number of pledged opportunities at the start of each month. This means that it would create 1 more pledged opportunity every month for the monthly recurring donation. It would create 4 new pledged opportunities for the weekly recurring donation and 1 more pledged opportunity after 12 months for the yearly recurring donation.


How Donorbox recurring plans map to Salesforce recurring donations


Everytime a new recurring plan is created in Donorbox, a corresponding recurring donation record is created in Salesforce. The integration marks the first pledged opportunity as closed won at the time of creation. Subsequently, as the next donation for that recurring plan in Donorbox matures on its said date. Our integration picks up the next pledged opportunity corresponding to the recurring donation record that we created and change its stage from pledged to closed won.

Donorbox allows the following changes to recurring plans and all of them are catered for in Salesforce recurring donations sync too:

  • Pause/Resume a recurring donation
  • Cancel a recurring donation
  • Change the amount of the recurring donation
  • Change the recurring donation date

All of these are handled natively by the integration and you don’t have to worry about anything. Even if there are any errors during the sync, they are logged on Donorbox on the Salesforce error logs page. You can always reach out to our support and we will ensure that they are resolved at the earliest.

Donorbox supports sync with enhanced recurring donations in Salesforce. If you have already migrated to enhanced recurring donations model in Salesforce, please feel free to reach out to our support if you want it enabled for your account. Here is a link that explains how the sync with enhanced recurring donations works in our native Salesforce integration.

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Product Manager - Integrations @ Donorbox

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