How to Accept Donations with Shopify April 13, 2016 19:00
If you are a non-profit charity, or are fundraising towards a Kickstarter-style goal, you can use Shopify as your platform for accepting and managing donations. Non-profit organizations can use Shopify to create their website with embedded fundraising functionality without having to redirect donors to third-party platforms. This can give organizations more flexibility and control over their online fundraising by accepting donations with Shopify.
In this post, we will see how you can set up a fundraising product, use analytics to track donations, and customize your donation areas using the Recurring Donations app by Bold Commerce.
Accept donations with Shopify: Create a donation product
You can set up as many donations as you like by setting up donation products using the app. First, create a regular Shopify product for the donation and add the title, description, and image(s) for the product page. Then, navigate to the app and click on the Edit button for that product.
Here, you will be able to:
- Select the product to be enabled as a donation product.
- Create default payment option list including the amount and description. You can use this to highlight different tiers of donations, or what each amount accomplishes through your fundraiser.
- Choose whether you want to add “Other” as a payment option where users can specify their own amount.
- You can also choose whether users are able to create recurring donations, and provide different interval options.
- Display and customize a progress bar for a goal for that donation product.
Set up the donation page and create custom emails (Source)
The app gives you the ability to set up different donation products with different setups. You can also create and manage donation product emails from the app. The emails contain merge fields so you can send out personlized emails in bulk.
The final page will include all the options you’ve selected for the fundraising area, and import the image, title, and description from your product settings.
Donations product on a Shopify store
Click here to see the live demo store created by Bold Commerce showing the user experience for the app.
In addition to the donation product page, you can embed the donation area or the goal bar for any of the donation products anywhere on the website. For each donation product, the app provides you Liquid or HTML snippets. This way, you can embed your donation area or goal bar within the template files to display on all pages, or on individual pages or posts.
Accept donations with Shopify: Analytics and tracking
The app also has built in capability for analytics. You are able to track all donations, or individual donations over time. You can look at different campaigns and compare fundraising versus the goals.
Analytics for past donations and track upcoming transactions (Source)
Under the Recurring Donors tab, you can also track customers who have opted for recurring donations for a campaign. You can track:
- total payments coming due over the next week, month, and year.
- individual payment details like next donation date, total donated so far, and frequency of donations.
This can help you plan ahead as you have a better overview of your cash flow. You can manage and edit details for individuals if needed, giving you the option to adjust individual donations.
The app also allows you to export donation transactions as a CSV. You can use this to complete tax receipts, or other tax forms.
Accept donations with Shopify: Customizations
Under the Settings tab, you can customize four aspects of the app:
- Payment Settings: change the payment gateway information.
- Display Settings: change fonts, colors, layout, and more for most areas managed by the app, including the goal bar. You can also input custom CSS, and create a custom thank you page message that displays instead of the standard Shopify order confirmation page.
- Language Settings: Adjust all default content areas for donations, including the payment window fields.
- Email Settings: This is where you can customize all the template emails that are sent to donors, with built in merge fields.
Customize language and look of donation areas (Source)
The app is highly customizable and gives you control over the donation area without having to use any code. However, to install the app on to your store, you will have to make additions to your theme’s Liquid template files. Once you download the app, there is a tutorial that walks you through this process.
Accept donations with Shopify: Summary
The Recurring Donations app for Shopify simplifies fundraising using your store. For $9.99 per month plus a 1% transaction fee on donations, the app allows you to set up a fundraising bar, donation options, and the ability to track and manage donations. You can give donors the option to contribute once, or on a recurring basis.
Instead of using the regular Shopify checkout, the app uses Stripe as a payment gateway to streamline the checkout. It also creates a distinction in experience when checking out a regular product on your store, or when creating a donation.
Want more details? Learn about the app in this video.
In what way can you use the app for your store? Are there other ways to accept donations with Shopify? Please share in the comments below.
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