Import active recurring donations

When you move to Donately, your monthly donors should not have to do anything, and should not miss a month. Donately can recreate their active plans so they keep giving on the same schedule.

This one is run by the Donately team, not self-serve. A recurring plan is a promise to charge a real card, so the importer that creates them is staff-only while it is being proven out. You prepare the data, we run the import. Contacts and past donations you can import yourself: see Import contacts and past donations.

Step 1: get the cards into Stripe

This is the part that has to happen first, and the part that is outside Donately.

An import never creates a payment method. Each plan we create has to name a Stripe customer whose card is already saved in your Stripe account. The donor, their card and their history all come from Stripe; your spreadsheet only says what to charge and when.

If you are not already on Stripe, or your cards live with your previous provider, ask Stripe to migrate them. Stripe handles the transfer of card data itself, in a compliant way, through their PAN import process. Start here, because it takes time and everything else waits on it.

We can only import recurring plans from Stripe. PayPal recurring donations cannot be migrated this way.

Step 2: export your customers from Stripe

In the Stripe Dashboard, open Customers and use Export.

Choose the date range you need, and set the columns dropdown to All so the export includes customer_id and payment_source_id. Those are the ids that tie each plan to a saved card.

Step 3: build the spreadsheet

Turn that export into one row per plan you want recreated. Required for every row:

• Stripe customer ID, in the form cus_xxxxxxxx.
• Amount to charge each time.
• Start date, the date the plan should next run.

Optional:

• Payment method ID (card_xxxxxxxx), if you do not want the customer's default card.
• Frequency. Monthly if left blank. Other values include 7.day, 14.day, 2.month, 3.month, 6.month and 12.month.
• Currency, which defaults to USD.
• Campaign ID (cmp_xxxxxxxx), to earmark the gifts.
• Send receipt, set to false if this donor should not get an email receipt.
• Comment, for your own notes. It is not imported as data.

Start dates must be at least two days out. No plan should be charged on the day it is created. Leave more headroom than that in practice: allow at least seven business days before the first plan is due, or that donor may not be charged until the following month.

Step 4: send it to us

Email the spreadsheet as a CSV or XLSX to support@donate.ly, or raise it through Support & feedback in the dashboard. Tell us if you also want mailing addresses or other personal details brought across, which is a separate pass.

We aim to complete an import within seven business days. We run a dry run first, which validates every row and reports what would happen, then create the plans once the report is clean.

Once the import lands, the plans are active and you manage them from Recurring Plans like any other. See Recurring plan statuses.

Step 5: cancel the old subscriptions

This part is yours, and it matters. Once the plans are live in Donately, cancel the matching subscriptions in your previous platform. If you do not, your donors get charged twice.

Do it promptly after the import completes, and check the first billing date on both sides.