Donor Tools

If you’re not doing online donations yet, this will make you want to start. We’ve made it so easy to set up online donations that all you have to do is put in your email address.

First off, if you don’t have a PayPal or Amazon Payments account for your non-profit yet, go get one. It’s easy: for PayPal, go to https://www.paypal.com/nonprofits, and for Amazon Payments go to https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/nonprofit.

Set up PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay (or both)

To get started, go to Settings, and click Online Donations. Then, click either PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay to begin setting up the gateway.

1. Click the slider to enable PayPal
2. Enter your mail address. This email address should be the one you used to set up your PayPal account. (If you haven’t set up a PayPal or Amazon Payments account yet, this would be a good time to do it. See below, under Additional Resources, for some links to get you started.)
3. Select a default source. (more about sources)
4. Save PayPal settings.

That’s it – you’re now set up to receive online donations! You can either stop here and stick with your plain-jane donation page, or you can read on to learn about fundraising pages and advanced options.

Your Fundraising Pages

Raising Money for a Fund

Setting up online donations automatically activates your fundraising pages. Each fund that you choose can have its own fundraising page. If you set up PayPal, then a “Donate Now with PayPal” form will show up on that fund’s page, and if you set up Amazon Payments, then a “Donate Now with Amazon” form will show up. If you set up both PayPal and Amazon Payments, then, you guessed it, both forms will show up on that fund’s page.

Here’s how to set up a fundraising page for a fund.

First, go into the fund you want to edit, or create a new fund. Then…

1. Set a goal for the fund (optional). If you set a goal, the thermometer widget will show up on the fundraising page.
2. Write a description (optional). Tell people a little (or a lot) about the fund that you’re raising money for.
3. Check the box for “Create a fundraising page”. (Make a note of the web address – this will be your fundraising page’s url.)
4. If you want the public to see how much money you’ve raised for this fund, check the box for “Display amount raised”.

That’s it! Save your fund, and then go visit your fundraising page.

Advanced Settings

Global Donation Settings

1. Default Fund
   You can set a default fund for donations that come in online. If the fund specified by a particular donation doesn’t match, or if there’s no fund provided, Donor Tools will use this fund by default.
2. Default Acknowledgement
   The default acknowledgement is a great way to stay on top of your thank-you letters. This email is sent instantly when Donor Tools is notified of a new donation. You can use mail merge fields, just like you do in your letters and emails.

Donate Now HTML Buttons

You can put your “Donate Now” form on any web page. A little bit of HTML knowledge is helpful, but we’ve made it easy to get your Donate button’s HTML code. Here’s how:

1. Go to Settings, then Funds and Goals, and click the fund you want.
2. Click “Donate Buttons” in the left-hand sidebar.
3. Copy the HTML code.
4. Paste the HTML code into your web page.

IPN (Instant Payment Notification)

The beautiful thing about IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is that both Amazon Payments and PayPal have the ability to notify your Donor Tools account when a donation is received, even if the donation doesn’t originate on your Donor Tools page. This means that you can put your donation form on your own home page or any other website, and Donor Tools will be notified and record your donations.

In order for IPN to work, you’ll need to know your IPN URL. To get your IPN URL, go to Settings, then Online Donations, and click either PayPal or Amazon Simple Pay. At the bottom of the form, click “Your IPN URL” to reveal your URL. You can use this in any way that is supported by Amazon or PayPal.

For more information on IPN, see the following developer resources.

• PayPal IPN introduction
• Amazon Simple Pay Documentation

Fund Aliases

Fund aliases allow you to use other names for your funds. This is useful when you are setting up your own PayPal or Amazon donation forms.

For example, let’s say you have a fund called “General Fund”. Let’s say you use PayPal subscriptions, and you want to create PayPal buttons that people can use to give monthly. You’ve set up your PayPal buttons, and you’ve specified the “item name” (PayPal’s name for funds) of “Monthly $25 gift” for the $25 per month subscription and “Monthly $50 gift” for the $50 subscription. In order for all these donations to go into “General Fund”, you’ll need to define these additional “item names” as aliases for the fund:

1. Go to Settings, then Funds and Goals, and click on the fund you want to edit.
2. In the section labeled “Fund Alias”, type the names of each additional name that you will use for the fund. Separate multiple aliases with a comma. In this example, we’d type “Monthly $25 Gift, Monthly $50 Gift” (without the quotes).
3. Save the fund.

Additional resources:

• PayPal for Nonprofits
• Amazon Payments for Nonprofits
• PayPal IPN introduction
• Amazon Simple Pay Documentation