RaiseDonors has the capacity to support multiple gateways at once for your organization, allowing your organization to have backup gateways ready to go if a gateway is offline for any reason, support multiple currencies, by configuring a single gateway per currency type, have flexibility in gateway fees. RaiseDonors currently supports the following gateways:
- Virtuous Payments (powered by Stripe)
- PayPal (including Venmo)
Virtuous Payments
First, navigate to your Settings and open the Payment Providers menu. In the top right corner you'll see a + New Provider button to get started setting up a gateway.
A new Payment Provider page will open to begin setting up a Virtuous Payments account. This is the first step of an application to create a new Virtuous Payments account. After completing this page, there will be additional information regarding your organization that you will need to provide for your application to be approved. The full application for Virtuous Payments takes about 20 minutes to complete.
If you have already submitted your Virtuous Payments application, the page will look like this instead. Click Continue Setup to finish or change any of the information on your Virtuous Payments application.
Once your application for Virtuous Payments has been approved, you will be able to adjust a few settings on this new payment provider and begin setting it as your default gateway on new Giving Forms and Fundraising Pages. In addition, there is an option to verify your website domain to all donors to donate via Apple Pay and Google Pay.
PayPal
To set up PayPal (including Venmo) as a gateway, a slightly different process is involved. Click + New Provider in the top right corner like before. When the page appears to set up a new Virtuous Payments account, scroll to the bottom and look for the option "link my PayPal account to RaiseDonors."
Selecting this option will redirect you to a PayPal hosted page to either log in to your existing PayPal (including Venmo) or to set up a new PayPal account.
After completing the setup process in PayPal, you will be redirected back to RaiseDonors with your PayPal (or Venmo) account set up as a new gateway in RaiseDonors. This payment provider is now ready to be used as the gateway on your Giving Forms and Fundraising Pages as well.
Information about Recurring Donations
Recurring donations are made from two components. These components may have different names across individual gateways, but the concepts will remain the same.
- Schedule - How often should the donor's payment method be charged? i.e., once a week, every month, biannually, etc.
- Payment Profile - What payment device should be charged when the schedule is fired? Credit cards are common, but ACH, E-Check, Apple Pay, and many others exist.
RaiseDonors always strives for maximum security and has decided to not manage or host any of the payment profiles. Those will live at the gateway. This means the gateway is responsible for completing the "charge" across the schedule and payment profile. RaiseDonors will be notified from the gateway whenever a schedule has been charged (success or failure) and take the appropriate action steps.
For this reason, RaiseDonors is also not responsible for doing the actual "charge" when a schedule iteration hits. Each gateway operates differently and have many different kinds of error codes. RaiseDonors will always record the error reason and code - and also the successful transaction information.
To ensure RaiseDonors can listen for schedule related charges from the gateway, various settings need to be configured inside the gateway.