How to Handle Failed Recurring Donations on Pure Charity

Pure Charity provides nonprofit admins with a Failed Recurring Donations dashboard that shows all recurring (monthly) donations that have failed or encountered errors — across all fundraisers and sponsorship programs. This tool helps your organization monitor donation health, understand why payments are failing, and take action to recover lost revenue.

What You Can See in the Failed Recurring Dashboard

The Failed Recurring Donations view provides the following information for each failed donation:

  • Donor’s name and contact information
  • The fundraiser or sponsorship program the donation was designated for
  • The donation amount
  • The reason the donation failed
  • Available error messages from the payment processor
  • The number of retry attempts made

How Pure Charity’s Automatic Retry Process Works

When a recurring donation fails, Pure Charity automatically retries the payment up to 9 additional times — one attempt every 5 days — before the recurring donation is canceled. Each time a payment fails, the donor automatically receives an email notification with instructions on how to update their payment method and resolve the issue.

If the donation is successfully processed during any of the retry attempts, the recurring schedule resumes normally. If all retry attempts are exhausted without success, the recurring donation is automatically canceled.

How to Access the Failed Recurring Dashboard

Step 1: Sign in to your Pure Charity account at purecharity.com/signin.

Step 2: Navigate to your Nonprofit Dashboard.

Step 3: Click “Failed Recurring” under the Accounting section in the left-hand menu.

What to Do About Failed Donations

From the Failed Recurring dashboard, you can:

  • Monitor active retries — See which donations are still in the automated retry process
  • Identify exhausted retries — Find donations that completed all retry attempts without resolution
  • Contact donors directly — For donations that have exhausted all retries, reach out to the donor using their contact information to help them update their payment method or resolve the issue

Proactively reaching out to donors with failed payments is one of the most effective ways to recover recurring revenue that would otherwise be lost.

Need Help?

Contact the Pure Charity Support Team at help@purecharity.com

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