Accept donations on your website

We are very happy to announce the availability of a new UGAL functionality that allows you to receive and manage donations on your website.

From campaigns management, to online payments and automatic PDF donation receipts, this new functionality fits the needs of associations and non profit organisations looking for an easy and affordable solution to accept online donations.

Adding donation pages on your website

Adding donation pages to your website works like adding any other page on your website: go to the "Pages" tab of your website, choose "Add Pages" and select the Donations page type. You will then have access to a new "Donations" tab from where you can complete the configuration of the pages. The donations you receive will show up there as well.

Configuring your donation pages

The "Settings" links brings you to a number of pages to configure how you want to receive donations:

• Donations Amounts: configure the minimum donation amount you'd like to accept, as well as preset amounts to make the choice easier for your donors.
• Emails and messages: choose if you want to send confirmation emails and receipt emails to your donors. The confirmation email is sent when the donation record is created, the receipt email is sent when the payment is received. You can modify and format the copy of the emails that are sent out to your donors.
• Donations receipts: UGAL can attach a PDF receipt to the receipt email if you choose to (2 PDF templates are available). With PDF receipts, your donations become entirely automated for you - no extra offline work to do!
• Payment methods: just like for e-commerce orders, three payment methods are available: Offline payments (donors mail you a check), Paypal payments (super easy to setup) and payments via Ogone (if you have an internet merchant account). You can choose more than one payment method, and your donors will be given the choice at the time they make their donation.

Finally, UGAL gives you the ability to manage campaigns towards which your donors can give. Showing where their donation will be allocated is a great incentive for your donors.

That is pretty much it for the setup of the donation pages.

Making donations

Now that the donations are setup with preset amounts, campaigns and payment methods, visitors of your website can easily make donations. The donation process is a 2 steps process:

1. The donor enters his contact information and the details on his donation (amount and campaign).
2. The donor is then taken to a "Review donation" page from where he can choose one of the payment methods you have setup:

The donor then receives the automated emails when the donation record is created and when the payment is received. The website administrators receives a separate email, with the details of the donation.

You can give it a try on our demo website at http://demo.ugal.com/donations.

More visibility with the campaigns widget

A new widget is available to make your fund raising effort more visible throughout your website. The widget displays a list of your active campaigns with their performance (progress bar) and can be embedded on any page of your website.

To embed the widget on a page, go the "Layout" tab of the page properties, and simply drag and drop the widget to where you want it displayed. It works just like any other UGAL widget.

Here we go with donations, we hope that you will find their functionalities well suited for your needs and are looking forward to your feedback, as always: support@ugal.com.

RSS feed Post a comment Other news