Best practice for sending a notice about an upcoming recurring contribution

Question

We have a contribution page that creates automated recurring contributions on a yearly basis.

Because 12 months is a long time to remember that you have a recurring contribution set up, we want to send out a courtesy email 2 weeks before to let people know that we are going to take a payment and give them the opportunity to cancel it if they want to.

Is anyone else doing this? How do you do it? A scheduled reminder based on civicrm_contribution_recur.next_sched_contribution_date would be nice but I know that isn't possible at the mo. Are there any other ways people are doing this?

PS. I know that we could use membership end date if they were members but we don't want to go down that route - we want to tie it to the recurring contribution.

Answer 1

CiviRules + emailapi extension. Scheduled reminders is too inflexible as you can't control the criteria - with CiviRules you can build in whatever conditions you like. Looks like you'd need to add a new "CRON trigger" to CiviRules for recurring contributions but we already have that for activities and for memberships so would be pretty easy to do and will help a lot of people.

With that you can build "reminders" that can target specific paymentprocessors, specific contact types etc.

Answer 2

I feel it should be doable using reminder screen via extension by implementing token hooks and Civi listener.