What happens when a recurring charge fails?

Is your monthly giving program springing a leak?

It happens all of the time: A donor's credit card expires, and their charge fails quietly. 

They don’t receive any kind of notification of the failed charge. Unless they’re regularly checking statements, they probably didn’t notice. 

You might not even realize they’re gone until you run the numbers on your monthly revenue. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What’s at stake

According to M+R’s 2026 Benchmarks report, only 71% of new monthly donors remain active after a year, with 10% dropping off in the first two months alone.

The report specifically flagged credit card theft and the scramble to update payment info as big factors in sustainer attrition.

And that attrition adds up. NextAfter’s 2025 Recurring Giving Benchmark Study found that the average lifetime value of a recurring donor is $594. 

In other words, every monthly donor you lose to a billing error is hundreds of dollars in future revenue, gone.

Catching monthly donors before they lapse
The International Rescue Committee proactively watches for two types of monthly donor churn. 

A monthly donor who manually cancels their recurring gift might face financial strain, so they offer downgrades or switching to a less frequent cadence (quarterly or twice/year).

Passive cancelers are the sneakier problem. They often don’t realize their card has expired or is no longer working.

IRC uses automation to catch lapses ASAP and partners with CRM and gift processing teams to flag issues before they turn into lost revenue.

ActionKit also makes it supremely easy to build an email series notifying recurring donors of a credit card that is about to expire.

Four questions to answer this week
Is your retry logic turned on? Many CRMs and donation platforms offer automatic retry for failed charges. 

But what happens after those retries are exhausted? If you don’t know, check!

Do you have a failed payment email? An automated email that triggers with the lapse can make a real difference.

Even better: A simple automated email series starting in the weeks before the user’s card is about to expire, with a direct link to update their card.

And if those donors don’t respond to automation, consider versioning future email content or sending a follow-up text if they’re opted in to SMS to scoop them up later.

Does your platform support a card updater? All major credit card networks offer programs that automatically refresh stored card data when a card is reissued. 

Several major donation platforms already include this through Stripe, so make sure you know what’s available with yours!

Do you have options for monthly donors who manually cancel their recurring gift? Again, several major CRMs and donation platforms offer customization for the frequency of a recurring gift or the option to change the amount.

A quarterly gift beats that donor dropping off altogether.

The bottom line
Monthly giving is still a powerhouse. But every program has donors quietly disappearing because a credit card expired, and they didn’t realize it.

Check your retry settings, add at least one recovery email, and ask your platform about card updaters. 

An afternoon of work could help recover thousands in revenue.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara