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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@alex absolutely
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Alex Sirota commented
To confirm @oleg - for online payments for events reg/membership application/renewal the invoice with a donation will have
1) an invoice for the total event/membership component
2) a separate donation generated with the appropriate amount/receipt sent to customerSo there will be an invoice, an invoice payment with tender online payment and a separate donation receipt for the donation amount with the tender online payment set as well.
Is that right?
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Alex Sirota commented
@Oleg - right you would not want to put a donation line item on an invoice. So if you include a invoice memo to buyer to add $X to their payment you're basically counting that the buyer will do that using their preferred payment method. I see what you mean. The payment received can be split into settling the actual invoice and then applying the remaining payment towards the donation, generating a payment receipt. As long as this is documented I guess it could work.
If there was a way to generate a "draft" donation receipt for these offline membership+donations that would be a bit better. Then the draft receipt can be marked as paid in the donations module once the payment was received.
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Merideth Frey commented
That proposed solution makes a lot of sense to me! The vast majority of our membership payments are online, and offline payments are handled manually by our Treasurer, and the money (whether it is a donation or membership fee) will ultimately end up in the same bank account.
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@Alex Sirota: If we include donation into invoice - it will be taxed and in WA it will be considered as membership or events revenue. That's the main driver for this feature. There are numerous ways to include donations into invoices already - any extra charge field. But all of these workarounds would have exactly the same flaw - revenue will not be considered a donations.
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Alex Sirota commented
@oleg - still seems overly complex. What does received extra payment for an invoice mean? You mean someone has paid more than the invoice amount and somehow that signals to WA to create a donation? Shouldn't it be part of the invoice total if the donation is marked there? I don't see how this would not be confusing.
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@Alex Sirota: there's no need to adjust invoice amount - this way donation would be part of invoice, not a separate donation transaction. What we are suggesting to do is to add donation as separate financial document in WA once association has received any extra payment for an invoice.
All membership/event invoices will remain "clean" this way -
Alex Sirota commented
The approach for offline payments seems to be odd since the invoice will not include the donation and thus involve manual interventions to adjust the invoice to include the amount of the donation afterwards. If the invoice doesn't have the donation amount someone can't pay for the donation afterwards anyways.
Why not just restrict a donation as part of the membership process only to online payments? That way a proper donation receipt can be registered and the invoice will just have the membership part of the transaction keeping records clean.
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James Ranieri commented
The proposed solution would work fine from my perspective. The vast majority (in my experience) of registrants/memberships that pay by invoice are large companies that would rarely if ever include a donation. The donations during a membership renewal or event registration would almost always come from individuals who generally pay by credit card.
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COGS Geoscience commented
Requiring a member to go back to the home page and make a second transaction to give a donation when they pay their membership dues is costing us significant $'s....perhaps as much as we spend on Wild Apricot (before the price increase). With 350 votes, and on the list for so long, am wondering if you are listening>
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Barbara Stroud commented
Commented in 2021, just adding a comment here in 2022 - really want/need this feature - we are a not for profit and collect donations for geology students.
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Alex Sirota commented
@alan there is a vibrant user group on Facebook. It’s called the grove. Have you heard of it?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/WildApricotGrove/?ref=share
We plan to implement this in our next WordPress plugin. See https://newpathconsulting.com/wap for more. The partner community is doing a lot here. Join us to help.
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Alan commented
@Oleg,
Firstly, its good to hear that WA product development reads these forums.
Secondly, without spending too much of my life trawling thru this forum, it seems to me that this request has been open for at least six years, possibly much more. And when you have administrators posting that donations are important for their revenue stream and that they are losing revenue because a "Donation" feature at the point of renewal is not available, you got to wonder what prioritises WA product development life. If Clubs are missing out on revenue because of a lack of functionality then they may start thinking about moving on from Wild Apricot.
And finally, why no WA User Group? How does WA product development know what is really needed by the Users and what is really annoying them about the product? Its a bad path for a software developer, whether that be in-house or provider such as WA, to "know" what users want and what are the burning issues. If this path is taken, invariably the developer picks the wrong functionality to implement and not surprisingly paying users can wait years (and lose revenue) while the wrong functionality is implemented
Given that I am sure WA wants to do the best by its paying User base, how can we get a User Group going to help guide functionality development? Who do I need to talk to?
thanks
Alan
PS anyone reading this who would like to contact me about getting a WA User Group going, please contact me at alan.baldry@students.mq.edu.au. Please share this offer with other WA users. If I get enough interest I'll start the ball rolling. -
@Alan,
1. We read these forums and they contain a whole bunch of useful information
2. We don't have fixed WA user group that rules WA roadmap,When working on roadmap we have to consider a whole bunch of different sources, including, but not limited to support requests, business plans, compliance and security updates, etc.
As of current issue, we are well aware of its priority, and we plan to work on it soon. But I cannot make any promises, we're still developing our next year roadmap.
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Alan commented
This is just one of many features that WA users have requested that have been outstanding for years. This, and the others, pose the questions:
1. Does WA product development read the requests in these forums?
2. If they do, why don't they respond and provide future development guidance?
3. Is there a WA User Group that works with WA product development to set feature development priority?
4. If there isn't a User Group, why isn't there one?
Look forward to a response that indicates that WA does read these forums and considers there current customers requests.
thanks
Alan
PS By the way this feature is also an urgent requirement for my club -
Frances Harper commented
This has been suggested for ages and still not done? It is the most serious shortcoming of the system
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Dr Tim commented
This would be tremendously helpful. I would also suggest adding the ability to purchase from your shop on a membership form.
If nothing else, this would tie up all of the ways for us to generate revenue into one source for one-stop shopping.
More important to me, it would allow for much better reporting, so I could see what donations are being made at membership, what additional perks they're purchasing through their membership.
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AAWE commented
Please enable an option to accept donations from members when they are renewing!
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ADonna Lynn Mosiurchak Linton commented
Can you please add a feature where members can donate when they renew their membership?
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HSANZ commented
We are a charity, as well as a membership organisation and it would help fundraising immensly to have this option. We have been asking for this for nearly two years now, since I realised it was not available and I see it has been on the requested list for over ten years. What is the hold-up? This will enhance your offering a lot. Valerie Orton HSANZ