📌 Note: Support for third-party payment processors is being phased out. If you'd rather move your recurring donations onto NationBuilder Payments, see our Recurring Donation Migration Support Guide instead. This article is for nations staying on a third-party processor that want donor history to stay complete in NationBuilder.

Recording your externally processed recurring donations into NationBuilder allows you to centralize giving history alongside everything else you know about a supporter: their memberships, their engagement, their communications, all in one place. That gives your team an accurate, complete view of every donor, which is what makes it possible to build trust and engage each supporter appropriately, rather than working from a partial picture.

Using the NationBuilder API, or a Zapier integration built on it, you can automatically record each externally processed payment in NationBuilder as it happens, tied to the donor's recurring series.

You can connect individual transactions to an existing recurring series by adding the series' ID to the donation as its recurring_donation_id.

Recurring series created via API or Zap are still processed by your third-party processor, so they behave differently from those processed through NationBuilder Payments:

A membership can be created at the same time as the recurring series, or added to an existing series afterwards. In the latter case, the membership is applied retroactively to every donation already in that series. If you set an expiration date on the membership, an annual membership payment reminder email can be sent.

The recurring donation can be cancelled via the API which will cancel the associated membership. You can also choose when the associated membership will expire.

Memberships linked to externally processed recurring series will display normally in the supporter portal, but without a cancel option. They can only be canceled via the Recurring donation API.

You can't delete a donation while it's part of an active recurring series. To delete one, disassociate the donation from the recurring series first, then delete the donation.

If a donation is submitted with a page ID and send_donor_receipt set to true, the donor autoresponse email tied to that page sends when the donation is recorded. Control panel user notifications fire according to your existing notification settings whenever send_donor_receipt is true.

This capability is built for certified developers working against the NationBuilder API, and is also available as a Zapier action. If you're not a developer and want this set up for your nation, work with a certified NationBuilder developer, or use our Zapier integration.