DONATION RECOVERY
Win Back Abandoned Donations Automatically!
Automatically capture donor intent on your fundraising forms and send a personalized reminder email when a donation is left incomplete
Donation Recovery automatically captures donor intent on your fundraising forms and sends a personalized reminder email when a donation is left incomplete. When a donor returns via the recovery link, their form is pre-filled so they can complete their gift in seconds.
Key Features
- Silently tracks donor activity (email, name, amount) as donors fill out donation forms
- Automatically detects abandoned sessions using a background cron job
- Sends a branded HTML recovery email with a one-click “Complete My Gift” link
- Pre-fills the donation form with the donor’s previously entered details when they return
- Built-in unsubscribe mechanism on every recovery email
- Per-campaign scope control: choose exactly which campaigns participate
- Dedicated Reports tab with date-filtered stats, a sessions table, and CSV export
- Recovery stats surface directly in the Reports Overview tile
How It Works: From Abandoned to Recovered in One Click
Donation Recovery operates quietly in the background, handling everything from intent capture to form pre-fill with no manual work required.
Silent intent tracking: As a donor fills out your form, Charitable captures their email, name, and donation amount in real time. Nothing is shown to the donor and the form experience is completely unchanged. Data is only recorded once a valid email address is entered.
⚡ Automatic abandonment detection: A background job runs every 5 minutes. When a session exceeds your configured abandonment cutoff (the default is 60 minutes, but you can set it as low as 15 minutes or as high as 24 hours), it is automatically marked abandoned and a recovery email is queued.
🎯 Personalized recovery email: About an hour after abandonment is detected, your donor receives a branded HTML email addressed to them by name. The email names the specific campaign they were donating to and includes a single, prominent “Complete My Gift” button. No generic messaging. No broken links.
💰 One-click pre-fill on return: When the donor clicks the recovery link, they are taken directly back to the page where they started their donation. Their email, name, and amount are already filled in. They pick up exactly where they left off and complete their gift in seconds.
Full Control Over Every Campaign
Not every campaign needs recovery tracking, and Charitable gives you complete control.
🤝 Campaign-level opt-in: Recovery is disabled by default. In the settings panel, you choose which campaigns participate. Each campaign in the list shows its all-time session count, recovered count, and recovery rate right in the settings UI – so you can see at a glance which campaigns are performing.
🛠️ Configurable timing: Set the abandonment cutoff anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours to match your campaigns. A time-sensitive matching campaign might use a shorter window; an evergreen cause fund can afford to wait longer.
✅ Automatic inclusion for new campaigns: Enable the “Include new campaigns automatically” option and every newly published campaign is added to the recovery scope the moment it goes live.
More information
Get started with the Charitable Donor Recovery documentation.
Minimum requirements:
- PHP 7.4+
- Charitable Pro 1.8.13+
