Ability to donate during membership application/renewal or event registration
Current features:
Visitors/members are not prompted to make donation while they are performing other payments (e.g. membership renewals, event registrations,etc)
Desired features:
Admins have the ability to enable donations to be made during event registrations, membership applications/renewals or other payments.
We're considering to take Donations during registrations/applications into development right now, but during analysis of the feature we ran into an issue where we would love to hear your feedback.
Essense of question: how would you like donations during applications or registration to be processed for offline payments (when your member/prospect decided to get an invoice and pay later)?
Some more details:
We can implement donations during event registrations/membership renewals for online payments - not a problem.
But when we're talking about offline payments, straighforward solution seems to be a bit expensive - we don't have invoices for donations or pledges yet.
So right now we're considering going on with straighforward online payments solution (donation will be added to payment transaction) and for offline payments - just include an invoice memo to buyer to add $XXX to his payment as donation for event/membership he has selected.
This way administrators would have to manually record donations if they receive extra payment and we could deliver this update soon.
What do you think on proposed solution?
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Dmitry Buterin commented
You are right that 2) is much more complex. So I think we will consider 1) first.
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rmillstein commented
I love the new ability to customize the donation form. However, I am wondering if it would be possible to integrate donation items with the membership and event registration forms -- so that when renewing membership or registering for an event, one can make the choice to make a donation as well. Here is the reason this would be desirable: We find that when people are already paying money, they are thinking about us and willing to throw in a small donation, too, in contrast to the standalone link to donations which is almost never used. We used the "radio buttons with extra cost" to solicit donations. However, there was no option for people to enter a custom amount for their donation. So, I guess what I am asking for is either 1) add the functionality to include a custom amount on the membership and registration forms or 2) add the functionality to include the donation form information on the membership and registration forms. The first is probably simpler to implement -- and would probably be fine for our purposes. The second is a bit "slicker" and might make tracking donations a bit easier.
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Alex Yaroslavsky commented
I would like my event registrants to be able to make donations at the time of registration (while their credit cards are out). This should be done in a single registration step and not require the person to go to a separate donation page.
I would also like the ability to re-categorize current (or past) payments as donations. The reason for this request is that, as a workaround, we have added an optional "donations" category where people have the ability to pay extra as a donation. The trouble is that now our donations report is not accurate.