Running a website for a small local charity. We want to make it easy for people to pay money over to us. This is an occasional requirement, the circumstances being often that someone has decided to make a donation, or held a collection on our behalf and currently they have to email or telephone to get the bank details or even to post a cheque to the treasurer. We already have a page for signing up to annual paid membership via paypal.

So we could make a second paypal button for one off donations. We could just publish our bank account details and say 'go away and make the payment yourself through your bank.' Neither of them seem particularly ideal. We would like to have some contact details from donors as well, just to thank them and sometimes  offer them membership benefits. We could sign up to some kind of online donation service; we used to have a MyDonate account but they closed.

Obv we want to pay as little as possible in fees, especially no percentages (in case there is a large sum involved). We need to give all the right signals of security, professionalism and authenticity. It's all looking a bit complicated to me and I can't help thinking there should be a single simple solution for handling charity money online but what is it?

Ta.

The site in question I made many years ago and yes, I know it needs updating along with the whole corporate ID but that's a job for another day:  Friends of Quantock Website

[edit] Hmm, links have been banned? https://friendsofquantock.com/

Edited December 7, 20214 yr by TimW
add url

A charity I help with has a donate form. You enter your name and email address and you get an automated response with the bank details and a paypal donate button. They looked at getting an online direct debit form but the bank advised against (no idea why).

 

A Paypal donate or payment facility works well on charity sites I manage,

You could also look into Stripe for card payments - they now have "payment links" which takes the customer to a Stripe payment form. You have to set up links in your Stripe account and each link is a fixed amount, there's no reason why you can't create several links for different amounts. Payment links also allow you to set up subscriptions as well as donations or general payments.

4 hours ago, BlueDreamer said:

A Paypal donate or payment facility works well on charity sites I manage,

You could also look into Stripe for card payments - they now have "payment links" which takes the customer to a Stripe payment form. You have to set up links in your Stripe account and each link is a fixed amount, there's no reason why you can't create several links for different amounts. Payment links also allow you to set up subscriptions as well as donations or general payments.

I will look at Stripe, ta!