Our organization wanted to set up the Gift Service Center, allowing our sustaining donors to update their billing information and terminate their gift. We thought this feature was a neat idea that would save us time and empower our donors.

Little did we know that to access the Service Center, the donor requires a user account (username and password), and that there's no way for the donor to create such an account when they make their gift. Instead they need to jump through the following hoops to gain access the the Service Center (confirmed by BB support, see case no. 017826382):

1. Click the Service Center link in the autoresponder

2. Click the "Forgot Password?" link on the login page

3. Fill the "Forgot Password" form with their username and email address

4. Click the link in the reset password email

5. Fill in the "Reset Password" form

6. Click the Service Center link in the autoresponder again

7. Fill the login page with their username and password

Expecting our donors to go through all those steps is ridiculous and I can't imagine that the feature was intended to work this way. The only way for donors to create a user account is for them to click the "Forgot Password?" link and reset it? Really? Furthermore, there is zero mention of the above requirements for donors to access the Service Center in the BB Knowledgebase or Luminate help documentation.

I'd like to propose a solution to the problem and how I expected the feature to work: When a link to the Service Center is inserted in a donation form's autoresponder, have the link tokenized so that when the link is clicked, donors are auto-logged in and have immediate access to the Service Center, without having to create a user account and log in.

And here's an alternative solution, if donors must absolutely log in with a username and password to access the Service Center: Allow donors to create a user account and set their username and password from the donation form. That would allow them to have access to the Service Center as soon as their gift is made without having to go through all of the aforementioned steps.

As it stands, the Gift Service Center feature is unusable for us. The number of support requests and complaints we'd get from donors would be unmanageable.