From 21 February, NAB and many other large banks have discontinued the use of AMEX cards in Australia. Unfortunately, this will affect your organisation receiving payments from regular donors using AMEX as these payments will be declined.

To ensure the loss of funds from this change is kept to the minimum it’s important to contact the affected supporters as soon as possible.

Now you can use a call centre to call all affected donors but these services while effective (if you can get hold of your donor) it can be very expensive at roughly $11 a call. 

Emails are another way to contact affected donors but the read and response rate on emails can be quite slow, and some supporters may miss it completely. 

SMS with a pre-filled link is the key contact method we are recommending to clients. 

This is because SMS is fast, with almost all text messages being delivered within 15 seconds. It is effective with 95% of all messages being read within 3 minutes of being sent. And it’s relatively low cost with each text (160 characters) costing 9c, which is a lot cheaper than $11 a call.

By using a pre-filled link for supporters to update their details it’s also a very quick and easy process for your donors to complete. All they have to do is confirm their details and update their payment method.

We have been working with a number of charities who have been quick to react and have been contacting their donors via SMS to renew their credit card details. 

Here is an example of a text sent this week: