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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Flute Master commented
Great news. Been waiting for 3 years. We have a single large event each year. Having the ability to membership application during event registration would make lots less work for me.
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Evgeny Zaritovskiy commented
As Dmitri said, we are going to make some change in the very next release 4.3 (about Oct 2011) where there will be ability to make membership application during event registration and pay for both in the same transaction.
Making donations while registering to event or applying for membership is still a weak point. We will be thinking of that as soon as we process current development queue.
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Dmitry Buterin commented
@dseger - thanks, that's a good summary and this is the exact direction we are working in. Will probably ignore the approval thing for starters.
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Dennis commented
We have a similar organization as alexyaronyc. We gain most of our members by offering discounts to our conference and training events. It would be quite an advantage of our event attendees could join and register with a single payment.
That said, we would need the following:
* Simple. A shopping cart could work if the workflow is obvious for non-tech users. WA does a great job on user flow and that would be key for this as well.
* Separate accounting. The user should be able to make a single payment (single invoice), but internally, there still needs to be two invoice line items that each map to membership & event records.
* Event pricing based on cart contents. If the user includes a membership in the cart, then they can qualify for the lower priced member price for the event.
* Hum - not sure how how you would handle the above bullet if the membership requires approval but the event registration doesn't. You smart guys will figure it out ;-)Thanks - dseger -
Dmitry Buterin commented
It's not a question of priority, it's a matter of this feature requiring a big redesign of some internal processes in our system - which might not be obvious at the first glance.
We are working on a design and best case it will be addressed in 4.3, which I would guesstimate for release in September-October. Even then, 4.3 would not provide the full ideal solution to what is being requested but just a first good step to improve this process.
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Wes Nugent commented
It's disappointing to see this issue hasn't received higher priority on the product development wishlist/roadmap. One would think the ability to offer a combined registration form (with different subevents and registration capacities) would be a fairly common need.
It seemed like this feature could be released in early 2011, but is now delayed. A related post (http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825548-online-store-5506 ) indicates a feature like this would be included as part of a future version. If version 4.2 is scheduled for May, what's the anticipated roll-out date for v4.3 when can organizations expect this feature? I'm hopeful v4.3 is released prior to August.
Following our initial foray with registration via WA last summer, this feature was identified by our organization's Web committee as a critical need to improving and streamlining the registration process. Not only will it make registration more straightforward for the end user, it should save organizations money on payment-processing transaction fees.
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rlandel commented
We are having the same issue. I hope that you'll be able to implement a simple solution, as well. The key for us is to allow people to very simply add a donation, while they're already in the mode of sending us money to join our organization. The shopping cart would be fine, as long as the potential donor doesn't have to reenter any of their information. We want to avoid annoying people from whom were asking money!
Thanks.
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mspreitz commented
Yes, 1) is what I want too.
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Kimiko Yamada Heng commented
I hope that you continue to work towards this goal. As it stands, we are possibly losing out on a lot of donations because of the lack of synchronicity. If we can make it simpler for our membership to donate as they renew their membership or as they get new membership, it would be very beneficial.
We would appreciate any attention you can give to this problem.
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mspreitz commented
My organization has a similar wish. We currently do everything by paper. We do not have event registrations, but our paper forms for joining and renewing have blanks where donation amounts can be written in (one for each of three purposes). I know we can do a hack in Wild Apricot of including member fields that Wild Apricot treats as extra fees --- not donations, unfortunately --- but we have to fix the amounts, which does not really work well for donations.
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Dmitry Buterin commented
We are working toward this but several other pieces has to be put in place first to allow this.
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Kimiko Yamada Heng commented
I think an easier way to help our membership make donations is needed. Separate pages create a barrier for us to get donations.
Has this problem been addressed?
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Greig Holder commented
Current Behaviour
During the self-service membership renewal process, a member is not presented with an option to donate. The same is the case with membership applications. Desired Behaviour
Include the ability to automatically present the donation form during membership renewals and applications. Why
Improve the number of donations. If presented with the option to donate at application or renewal time, more will choose to do so. If they have to go to a separate page on the website to donate, they won’t do it as often.
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Dmitry Buterin commented
We are currently thinking about implementing a shopping cart - which would allow people to buy several different things in one go. They would still have to go through individual form wizards - I do not think this can be avoided simply because wizard workflows are different for each form.
Would this address your need to a significant degree?
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rmillstein commented
That's great!
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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.