Managing Donations & Donors

When you are in the middle of a campaign, managing donations and donors can be front of mind. Here we’ll explore how you can confidently manage donations and support your donors throughout the life of the campaign. 

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Donations: the basics

Offline Giving, Refunds, Moving Donations, and Balances

Receipts & Communication

Managing Regular Giving

FAQ’s

Donations: the basics

Processing donations is a primary feature within Raisely, enabling you to raise funds for your organisation. Simply, donations are captured within the Donation Form on your site then processed by your Payment Gateway account setup in settings, commonly Stripe. Donation records are saved, including: donors email, name, other custom fields, donation amount, donation ref, donation date, payment method, and fee breakdown.

Donation records can be accessed in three ways: 

1. Within the campaign, from the Campaign sidebar select Donations
2. Within the Supporter Management Tool, from your dashboard sidebar select People > select individual,
3. Or within reports, from the sidebar navigate to Reports > Transaction Report

Note that when accessing Donations from the sidebar, you are seeing a filtered view of all your transactions. To see all transactions, rather than just donations, change the filter settings up top. 

For more information on setting up Donations, check out Donation Forms: the Basics

Offline Giving, Refunds, Moving Donations, and Balances 

When managing donations and donors throughout a campaign, there may be moments where you need to manually make changes. Raisely makes this easy with simple offline giving and refund processing.

Offline Giving

Adding offline donations within Raisely is a great way to record donor giving and make sure your fundraising totals are accurate on your site. At times, it may be requested by fundraisers within Peer to Peer campaigns. To add offline donations, simply:

1. Within your campaign, from the sidebar select Donations
2. Select New Donation from the top-right
3. Search for the Profile you wish to associate the donation with. Note, if your campaign is not Peer to Peer, then your Campaign name is your only profile.
4. Complete the remaining fields and select either Save + Add Another or Save Donation

If you are looking to batch/bulk upload offline donations, please contact our support for help. To see only Offline or Online donations, you can apply a filter with Donations. All Offline donations have a Donation Card icon attached.

Refunds

To process a refund, simply:

1. Pull up the Donation you wish to refund, either within Donations or Profiles
2. Select Refund from the bottom of the donation record
3. Select a Reason from the dropdown, and either Refund or Partial Refund

Partial refund will provide you with the option of entering a figure between the existing donation amount. 

Moving Donations

It's not uncommon for supporters to accidentally donate to the broader campaign instead of a specific profile on the campaign, or vice versa. To move a donation:

1. Within your campaign, select Donations from the sidebar
2. Find the donation referenced - the most recent donations are displayed first or you can search by name or email Expand the donation, and select  Move Donation, where you will see a popup appear. This allows you to re-assign the donation to a profile within a campaign or to a campaign itself.
   • Note: When moving to a campaign, select both the campaign and the campaign profile marked with parenthesis eg. raisely (Campaign)
3. When assigned, select Move Donation

Balances

Raisely stores a donor's balance in the data records for you to use within custom messages, segmentation, etc. You can find the giving balance within your People records.   

Another helpful tip is the ability to search donations by credit card number. If you know the final 4 digits of the donations credit card, simply enter them into the search bar on the Donations page to pull up all donations relevant to that card.

Receipts & Communication

Providing donors with a great experience often starts with great communication. The best starting point can be your receipts, though there is always more you can do. Note, check out Donation Summary Receipts article to learn how to send a collection of receipts, ideal for EOFY.

Receipts

Raisely provides you with the option of an email or PDF receipt. Email Receipt settings can be found within Messages. To configure email receipts, within your campaign simply:

1. Select Messages from the sidebar
2. Open either Donation Receipt or Regular Donation Receipt
3. Skip Step 1 & 2 as they are set to the correct defaults
4. Within Step 3, adjust your Sender Name, Sender Email, & Subject
5. Within Step 4, you can customise the receipt content.
   • To personalise your content, use merge fields through the # command. If you are looking to go further, consider learning how to use Advanced Merge Fields to take your content even further.
   • Note: When sending a test email, if you have not set up your PDF default receipt, make sure you disable the Attached PDF option.
6. Select Save then progress to the final step to enable automatic sending.

Raisely supports PDF receipts also, allowing you to customise, send, and attach to automated email receipt. To configure your PDF receipt, from within your campaign simply:

1. Select Settings > Payments & Receipts then under General Settings select Configure Receipt
2. Within the Popup, you can adjust General Settings like Header/Footer, Title, or Org details and Advanced Settings like field labels and more.
   • Note: To save your PDF receipt, ensure there is message content within the Tax Deductible field
3. Save your changes

If you wish to attach your PDF receipt to email receipts, enable the PDF attachment option in Messages.

If you have multiple Payment Gateway accounts, you also have the option to create custom donation receipts for each account. Your primary account will use the primary PDF receipt, though to create new receipts for other accounts simply:

1. Select Settings > Payments & Receipts then select your Payment account you wish to edit
2. Enable the Use Custom Donation Receipt and select Create
3. Follow the same steps as above

To edit your email receipts for multiple payment accounts, use the same conditional merge fields as you did for payment routing. For example, if you wish to separate the messaging for US donors you can use the following merge field:

  {{#eq user.country 'AUS'}}Insert your message{{else}}Insert your message{{/eq}}

Communication

Raisely allows you to explore a range of messaging options to help further support your donors. Default messages allow you to customise messages for donation thank you’s, failed donations, and welcomes. Through Raisely’s Message add-on, you can create unlimited custom messages for just the right moment in your campaign journey. Find more information here.

You can also send Donation Summary Receipts via Messages, making times like EOFY and Major Donor requests simple. Check out the  article here.

Managing Regular Giving

For all the information you need to support Regular Giving in your campaigns, head to our support guide Managing Regular Giving Donations & Donors here.

FAQ’s

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# The donor's account has payments in both Regular Donations and Individual Donations. Is that right?

Raisely classifies a regular donation as an individual donation, so both will appear as they are related. You cannot edit regular donation settings in Individual Donations. 

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# Can I search for donations via a credit card number?

Within your campaign, select Donations from the sidebar. By entering the final 4 digits of the donors credit card into the search option, you will pull up the donor and donation relevant to that card.

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# I need help reconciling my donations. How do I best understand the charges applied on transactions?

When a donation is processed, three things happen. Firstly, the donation amount is processed within your Payment Account, where the Payment Gateway/Provider will also deduct a processing fee from the total donation. Secondly, if the donor opts in to cover the Raisely admin charge, then that charge is sent & processed within Raisely's payment account, separating it from your transactions.

If you download a Bank Payout Report, you can see this, as the Total Payment is the donation + the Raisely Fee, whilst the Net figure is the donation - payment processing fee. When reconciling donations, refer to the Net figure.

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# What is the difference between a transaction and a donation?

A donation is a type of transaction. Other transactions include Tickets, used for registrations and other cases with campaigns.

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