Setting up Donation Buttons for a Church

[longiron07]

I would like to be able to set up a donation button for our church website.  However, we have several different funds where one may make a donation.  For example...Flower Fund, Youth Group Fund, Wee Church Fund, Church Tithe.  My question is, what would be the best way to set this up so that when the donation is made, one can make sure that the donation goes in the correct fund. How could one make a determination as to the designated fund when they go into the paypal account to collect the funds.  I hope this is clear..  Thanks for the Help!

[TekGems]

Hello, good day to you!

What a great idea to set up a church donation button for a specific purpose. There are a few ways to set this up, but I was thinking of the following:

Create e-mails for the different funds in your Paypal. You are allowed up to 8 different e-mails per Paypal account. If you use a Gmail account, you can actually have just one e-mail but add the plus then fund type to differentiate each donation.

ourchurch+flower.fund @ gmail.com,

ourchurch+youth.group @ gmail.com,

ourchurch+wee.church.fund @ gmail.com,

ourchurch+church.tithe @ gmail.com

Now, make your donation buttons using this tutorial:

http://www.blogadr.com/tutorials/free-paypal-tutorial/paypal_donation.html

For each fund, have a separate donation button. When you receive payment, you can always filter transactions by e-mail address. This is why it is advantageous to have different e-mails for the different funds. As long as you keep under 8 e-mails, this method can work.

There's also a Facebook app called "Profile HTML" which you can use to create a Donation tab for your Church's Facebook Page.

Good luck setting up your button. If you need further help or want to bounce any ideas off me, feel free to reply to this post!

p.s. If you like my response, please click on the thumbs up button.

[longiron07]

Thanks for the great ideas, I really appreciate it!  I would appreciate any hekp I can get.  I fyou have anymore Iideas, I would appreciate your sharing.

[Jaxel]

I have several donation buttons on my account... each one has it's own "donation id". How do I get a summary based on this donation id? I want to know exactly how much has been donated; and how much I have left after paypal fees are subtracted.

[Rmomto3toomany]

Hi

So, I am a small seller, and recently also set up a donation site.

I need to be able to print a report of my payments, without the donations.

How do I seperate the two on a report or search? Thanks!!

[longiron07]

I was just wondering,  why set up the email accounts.  are they for identification only?  I was thinking that I could create a button for each fund, and that when the donation was made, I could be able to identify in my paypal account which fund was donated to so that I could make that entry into my accounting software. For examlpe... If I made a Flower Fund doantion button. and someone donated 10.00, then it would show up in my paypal account as a 10.00 donation to the flower fund.  Then I could simply make the entry into my accounting software.  Hope I'm making sense...is this possible this way, or is some other better/simpler.  Thanks again for the comments and assistance!

[longiron07]

I just had a thought after looking at how to create the donation buttons.  What if I just gave each button a "donation ID" which is shown as an option when creating a button.  I'm thinking that if I did this, when a donation was made, I can identify it by fund when it comes into my paypal account.  Does anyone know if I'm thinking correctly on this.  This big thing I need to have is a way to identify which fund was given a donation so that the bookkeeping can reflect the donation correctly.

[TekGems]

> each button a "donation ID"

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_donation_bu...

Yes, this is a good idea as well and keeps your process simple by sending donations to one e-mail address. The potential downside is that it may require more work to account donations for various funds. I've not received donations personally, so I am not sure if donation-id is a column you can see in History nor if you can group by donation-id.

Maybe someone from PayPal will know.

[longiron07]

Thanks for the resopnse.  Does anyone know how I could get in touch with Paypal to ask if the donation ID on a Donation Button, would actually identify the donation fund in my paypal account? Thanks

[PayPal_Olivia]

Hi longiron07, Jaxel and Rmomto3toomany! Welcome to the forums!

I merged a couple of posts over here since the questions are similar and can be answered with the same information.

If you go to History > Download History, you can download a file that shows all the transactions in a given period. If you check the box to "Include Shopping Cart details", it will also include the information you're looking for. The downloaded file can be searched and rearranged to suit your needs.

You can also ask around and see if anyone can suggest a third party solution for collecting this information in a more real-time manner. If you head over to the X.com forums, that's where the developers hang out. 🙂

I hope this helps!

Olivia