Understanding the Payment Process

Having confidence that your donors are having the right experience when it comes to payments can provide that assurance you may need in your campaign. In this guide, let’s explore how you can experience exactly what your donor will. 

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The Payment Process

Just understanding the payment process can be reassuring before you launch your upcoming campaign. You want donors to have a seamless experience, so understanding the process can help you find ways to improve upon it. 
The process has the following stages:
  • The donor selects the donation amount and chooses to Opt-In/Out of Raisely Fee
  • Donor enters their details
    This will include name and email address, as their email address becomes the unique ID for their database record. Here you can add other custom fields to Donation Fields within your Donation Form settings
  • Donor enters credit card information (for Stripe) or selects PayPal to be redirected to payment processing
  • Payment is processed by Payment Account, taking into account the donation amount, Raisely Fee (if selected), payment processing fee (Stripe/PayPal), and tax.
  • Thank you message appears
  • Post-Payment Automations
    • The donor receives an email donation receipt with a PDF Receipt attachment (if setup)
    • People record is created for Donor, with Donation record is saved in record
    • The donor is associated with Profile (either Campaign Profile for Appeals or Individuals Profile for Peer to Peer campaigns)

Digital Wallets

All Raisely Forms support the use of Digital Wallets (i.e Apple Pay and Google Pay) at the payment step. This is enabled by default and will show up depending on the user's browser and device settings. On externally embedded donation forms, Apple Pay is not currently supported.

How Payments are handled

All payments made on your site are handled by your Payment Gateway Account. This integration provides the secure platform needed when handling sensitive payment details. Raisely does not store any credit card information on your site's database or anywhere within its platform. 
Stripe & PayPal are the two options for Payment Accounts, though Stripe is recommended for you to access broader options within Raisely, including reoccurring giving.
How the payment costs are calculated is simple:
Donation + Raisely Fee (optional) = Total to process
THEN
Payment Processing Fee (Stripe/PayPal) is deducted from the total
THEN
Raisely Fee is collected
THEN
Net amount is processed
If you run a Donation Report, you can see the breakdown of these payments, with Total (Donation + Raisely Fee) , Amount (Donation) , Gateway Fee (Stripe/PayPal) , and Net (Total - Gateway Fee - Raisely Fee (if applicable)).
Refunds are also handled by the Payment Account, though you can send refund requests within Raisely which are passed to the Payment Account. This is recommended as it will then adjust the Campaign Totals. Usually, refunds are processed within 10 business days by your Payment Account, but the time can vary depending on your country and payment processor.

Handling Regular Giving

Regular Giving is a staple for many successful campaigns, providing donors with an ongoing journey with your cause. Raisely makes this simple for you to manage, with the ability to develop reports on regular givers, change payment details such as withdrawal date, amount, frequency, and even move the regular donation to a different campaign.
You can also update the donor's credit card details manually. If donors credit card expires, Stripe handles this within their processing so that there is no stop in payments being processed. If the card is cancelled, regular donation payments will fail and be noted within Raisely and Stripe. For more information on Regular Giving, explore this guide: Payments: Managing Donations & Donors.

Suspicious or Fraud Donations

There may be rare occasions when suspicious or fraudulent donations come through in the database. This causes issues in understanding the genuine campaign totals and also account payment reconciliation. By default, Raisely activates Fraud Protection measures for each of your campaigns. Though there are steps you can take to limit your risk of these. Let’s take a look:
1
Within your campaign, from the sidebar select Settings > Fraud Protection
  • By default Raisely’s Fraud Protection is active, though you can disable it for 24hrs
  • Donation Form Captcha is another measure to weed out computer-generated fake donations, placing an invisible hurdle in the way.
  • If you are experiencing a lot of small donations that you feel are fraudulent, here you can apply a minimum donation limit to your Donation Forms. 
  • You can also run a donation report that specifically lists suspect or fraudulent donations. Simply select Reports > Create Report > & choose Suspect Donations from the Donations Report Template. This is a simple way to understand your records and use re-import in your Supporter Management Tool to update records.

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