A donate button gives people a way to give from any page of your website, through whichever processor your parish uses.
First, connect a processor
Under Payments → Processors, connect the company that will take the money: Tithe.ly, Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.Net or Intuit QuickBooks. Orthodox Web Solutions has a long-standing relationship with Tithe.ly and it remains a good choice, but it is not required — the donation screens work the same way whoever takes your gifts.
See Payments: Setting Up a Processor for what each one can and cannot do. It is worth two minutes before you choose.
Adding the button
- Go to Media → Pages
- Edit the page you want it on
- Insert a new section and choose Donations - Button as the section type
- Click Create Section
- Choose the campaign it gives to, style the button, and save
If you would rather show a goal and a progress bar than a plain button, choose Donations - Campaign instead. See Donation Campaign Progress Meters.
How the gift is taken
That depends on the processor:
- Stripe, Square, Authorize.Net and Intuit QuickBooks put card fields on the page itself. The giver enters an amount, fills in the card, and presses Donate without going anywhere.
- PayPal opens its own payment window over your page, so the giver stays on your site.
- Tithe.ly takes the gift on its own giving page, which is why its campaigns and charts are managed in Tithe.ly rather than here.
Card details go straight from the giver's browser to the processor. They never pass through your parish's website and are never stored on it.
Every gift is recorded under Donations → Transactions — who gave, what the processor kept in fees, and what actually reached the parish — and a gift given to a campaign counts on that campaign's progress meter.
Letting people give regularly
A donate button offers one-time giving to begin with. If you would like people to be able to commit to giving every month, or on another schedule, edit the section and look for Repeating gifts.
Tick the schedules you want to offer: every week, every 2 weeks, every month, every 3 months, every year. Tick none and only one-time giving is offered, which is how every donate button starts. The giver then chooses between a single gift and a regular one on the button itself.
Repeating gifts need a processor that can take them. Authorize.Net, Stripe, Square and PayPal all can; Intuit QuickBooks cannot, and where it is the processor behind the section the schedules are simply not offered rather than being offered and then failing.
Somebody choosing a regular gift is asked for their name, because card processors require one on a repeating gift even where a single gift can be anonymous.
Once people start giving this way, the arrangements are listed under Payments → Subscriptions, where you can see what is committed, what has stopped collecting, and stop any of them. See Payments: Subscriptions.
If you already have an old PayPal button
Many parishes have had a Components - PayPal (one-time) or (recurring) section on their site for years. Those buttons worked, but they recorded nothing: the gift reached the parish and your website never knew it had happened, so it appeared in no total and on no progress bar.
That is fixable without rebuilding anything. Edit the section and link it to your PayPal processor. From then on its gifts are recorded like any other — who gave, what PayPal kept in fees, and what actually arrived — and they count toward a campaign.
A section you leave alone keeps working exactly as it does today. Nothing is forced on you.
Where the gifts show up
Under Donations → Transactions, and in the wider list under Payments → Transactions alongside form payments and store orders.
See Also: