NeatClubs.COM - Donation Events

Soliciting contributions is often done by not-for profit organizations as a part their on-going fund raising activities. NeatClubs.COM allows administrators to easily setup the sort of “Donate Now” buttons frequently seen on internet web-sites without the complexity of needing to do your own programming or modify HTML. Unlike simple “donate now” buttons that automatically take users to a secure screen where users can enter a credit card number to provide payment, when “donation” type events are employed, users will be brought to a screen that will tell them about the cause for which they are donating. From there they can proceed to create a new profile on the system (creating a record in the member database) and indicate the amount of money they wish to donate. After this point re-direction will occur to the secure PayPal web-site. Once a visitor to the web-site has made a payment, a thank you e-mail will be sent from NeatClubs to the donor. This thank you message can of course be customized to include your own specific text. Optionally, a message can also be sent to the site administrator or person coordinating fund-raising whenever a new on-line donation is received. PayPal will also send a receipt to the donor and will additionally send an e-mail to the holder of your organizations merchant PayPal account confirming that money has been deposit. Examples of where a donation event might be useful are included below:

•	You would like to attract sponsors to help found your organization, perhaps in return for placement of ads on the clubs web-site

•	You would like to provide material of value on the web-site and ask users to fund the development effort by contributing to the author

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You would like to raise money for a particular cause or political action and would like to ensure that the donation activity involves the contributor providing sufficient details to ease the process of generating tax receipts. (NeatClubs.COM stores all of the responses for event responses so that they are easily accessible in future)

When setting up Donation or Contribution event types, the important setup options are:

Event Description - this is where you would describe the charity or cause that you are asking people to donate to. Visitors will see the text described here before being asked to press “Continue” to continue with the event registration.

Registration Configuration – use the registration configuration to control details such as whether confirmations are sent to the organizer for each donation, whether a document from the document library should be sent automatically in response to each donation and whether there is a deadline after which the site will no longer accept donations.

On-line payment configuration – You can use this screen either to ask contributors to donate a fixed amount or allow them to enter an amount themselves. If the event is in support of a registered charity details such as the charity name and a tax identification number may also be provided on this screen. For donations, the setup should always reflect the fact that there will be a cost or payment associated with the activity.

You may optionally need to collect additional information from the donor. If this is the case, you may optionally setup your own data collection fields, however this is normally not necessary for simple donation activities since the donor will be asked to create a membership record in your database anyway when they provide their donation.