Allow recurring donations in price sets

[valerietai]

We want a donation campaign with a price set of two options:

* One recurring donation of $32/month
* One recurring donation of $16/month

However, CiviCRM currently doesn't support recurring donations in price sets.

We found a proposal for this feature for CiviCRM 4.2, written by Joe Murray. I am not permitted to post a link, so add an http:// to this URL:

wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Price+Sets+for+Recurring+Contributions

We'd like to find out how much this feature will cost to develop.  If it helps at all, we're the Ada Initiative, supporting women in open source and also one of the top tweeters about CiviCRM.

[JoeMurray]

Hi varlietai,

Thanks very much for the offer to help with this functionality. It is coming out with version 4.2, which should be released in the next week or two, thanks to sponsorship by the United Church of Canada. You need to select a payment processor that supports recurring payments, and then the option appears on the Manage Contribution Pages' Amounts tab. I've configured non-working credentials for PayPal Pro on the sandbox site and created a contribution page so you can review this at http://sandbox.drupal.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/contribute/amount?action=update&reset=1&id=4. You'll want to create your own priceset and select it on that page.

Cheers!

[valerietai]

Thanks for the information!  Is this feature included in any of the 4.2 betas?  I'm using 4.2 beta4, and don't see this option.  I did the following:

* Added PayPal Payments Standard as a payment processor
* Created a new contribution page with recurring payments enabled
* Attempted to create a price set

The price set page did not include an option for specifying a recurring payment.

This is pretty urgent for our next fundraising campaign and we're happy to help.

[Dave Greenberg]

(pasted from IRC chat)
actually i'm not completely clear on what you want on the contribution page

[5:01pm] dgg: it "sounds" like you want to give me a choice between contributing $32 a month (recurring) OR $16 a month (recurring) - which wouldn't require a price set

[JoeMurray]

To use pricesets on a recurring contribution page, just set up the priceset as a normal priceset, and set up the contribution page as a normal recurring contribution page. Nothing special about recurrence is present when configuring a priceset.

[valerietai]

Hi,

I see everyone is thinking about this like a programmer.  Yes, it is entirely *possible* to make a recurring donation in a variety of ways.  However, we are thinking in terms of the likelihood of the donor actually completing the donation we desire.  Every interaction required to complete the donation reduces the chance of the donation actually occurring.  So the feature we want is a recurring donation that is pre-configured as the default, with a radio button allowing selection of some other recurring donation option, and no other option showing.  Other options (like displaying the recurring donation option and asking the donor to fill it out) will not be successful for our campaign.

David Lobo tells us that for technical reason, the PayPal Standard processor doesn't support this, but PayPal Pro does.  We were using PayPal Standard.  We can't use PayPal Pro because we can't afford PCI compliance.

The only other option appears to be using jQuery to modify the page to pre-select and hide the options we want.  That sounds bug-prone and will require more development and IT time than we have.

We are now investigating using Google Checkout directly and not using CiviCRM for this campaign.

Thanks for everyone's responses!

[Dave Greenberg]

You can get that behavior with "required auto-renew" monthly memberships. You might not like the "membership" language though?? Take a look at this page (out of the box 4.1):

http://old.drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=4

Contrib page configuration is here (w/ PayPal Std):
http://old.drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/contribute/settings?reset=1&action=update&id=4