How to show custom data on subsequent recurring contributions or how to setup anonymous donations?

Question

Drupal 7.69 CiviCRM 5.20.0 iATSPayments 1.7.2

How do we get custom data to show with subsequent contributions in a recurring series or to have recurring anonymous donations? We use a custom data profile so donors can select that "they want this donation to be anonymous." If they check this box, we need this information to continue on with each recurring contribution. In the reporting, the staff can see the donations to projects they oversee. If the donor was anonymous, they do not see the donor info just the amount. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to accomplish this since subsequent recurring contributions no longer carry the custom data forward? It used to work using custom data. This is a mess for our office staff because they have to try to catch these anonymous donations and manually add the missing custom data before the other staff see the the names.

Answer 1

where are the custom field stored right now? on the 1st "payment" of the recurring donation or on the recurring donation itself?

Anyway, we had similar problems with tracking the source of the donation (say if the recurring donation came from a specific campaign or mailig, we want the subsequent contributions being attributed to the initial campaign.

We had to write custom code for that, as it's not necessarily universal that whatever custom field you filled at the initial contribution ought to be duplicated to each new monthly donation.

I can see three paths:

• you modify (or pay/convince someone to do it) iats extension so it does copy the custom fields. as I mentioned, it might not be what every user of this extension wants, so might be trickier

• you write a custom extension that checks if a new contribution has the relevant custom fields, and if not checks if it needs to duplicate them from the recurring contribution. This might have the benefit of working as well if you use another payment provider than iats (and could help someone else that has similar needs)

• you modify the report(s) so they do not only anonymise the donor info if the "want the donation to be anonymous" is set on the specific donation, but as well if it's set on the recurring contribution itself