Church Donations

Hi Jim,

I have used the Donation - http://drupal.org/project/donation and Donations Thermometer - http://drupal.org/project/donations_thermometer modules in the past. They are both extremely straight forward to set up with Donation using PayPal to process payments.

If you need some help setting them up let me know.

Ian

We might give better advice if you could tell us more about the congregation— size, anticipated volume of transactions, any denominational bodies to which you belong. The best solution for an independent rural stake of 100 will probably not be the same as an urban Catholic parish of 10,000.

Fees for credit card providers depend on volume; smaller outfits will do better with accepting payments via PayPal or Google Checkout, but if you are growing to megachurch status and will be handling thousands in transactions each month, having a merchant account tied to your bank will be cheaper and give you more options.

At the simplest level, you can create a PayPal business account, create a payment button under merchant services, and paste the resulting HTML code into a block or node on your Drupal site. No external modules or coding are required, and all your financial management and reporting would be done through PayPal's tools.

You can extend this system using the http://drupal.org/project/lm_paypal family of modules, which are a little better maintained than donation, but since you are planning to have an online store, you might want to get familiar with Ubercart.

Another option is CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org/ ), which gives you much more sophisticated options for parishioner management, donor activity tracking, event handling, pledges, reporting, and so on, but which is something of a bear to configure and probably overkill unless you have contacts numbering at least in the thousands.

Sometimes, a mix of approaches is necessary as well. St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington uses Faith Direct for its weekly giving program, but also accepts one-time gifts via PayPal.

Thanks everyone fro your comments. I will do a gang reply here.

First, Ian, I had read a little bit about the Donation module and intended to check it out. It sounds like the simpliest approach for what I Want to do initially at least, giving the church the ability to receive online donations. The only part I wonder about is could it be used for the online store later, or am I better of having a dual approach there? My main concern is making it simple for the members.

Second, Maryann, the group sounds intruiging. What time does the meeting start? I am out of town the 3 & 4 week of June but maybe it work for me in July.

Third, Choster, your take is well put. We are a congregation of about 100 people, about half of whom my guess have no access to a computer. We are part of AFCM which is a Word of Faith church. AFCM is in over 100 countries and our litle congrgation is growing quickly this past year. Our church recently did some DVD recordings that AFCM intends to push out through their Bible School to all the countries that they are in. Obviously that will give us some exposure. Also, in 2012 we are going to Israael and will be filming there as well for another DVD series. These are some of the unique types of things that will be in the online store as we get it launched. My hope here is that I can launch something and then build on it rather than having to redo everything as the store comes along or we get bigger.

Finally mipaca, we are currently running Drupal 6. At some point we will want to go to Drupal 7 but not for a bit yet anyway. At this point I ahve not looked into payment gateways, that is perhaps the biggest thing I was looking to folks with experience for. Also, the church uses ChurchPro 2010.

Thanks all, I am pretty tied up for the balance of the week but I will start looking into your suggestions with more detail next week.

I have worked with 2 payment gateways when building Drupal sites, PayPal Standard and Authorize.net. There are pros and cons with both of these as your payment gateway. I will try to list the ones that I have and maybe others have some additional ones to add.

Authorize.net Pros
- widely integrated in Drupal modules whether you use Ubercart, Drupal Commerce (Drupal 7) or Pay+Donate module (http://drupal.org/project/pay)
- relatively easy to configure inside of modules

Authorize.net Cons
- Fees are a bit higher than other gateways
- Setup process through your bank can take time (week or more in my experience)

PayPal Standard Pros
- Easy to sign-up for
- Fees are typically lower than most gateways
- No monthly fee for PayPal Standard

PayPal Standard Cons
- Users typically leave your site to complete transactions on the PayPal site.
- PayPal has policies in place where they can hold a percentage of the money you take in for 60 days. Not sure if non-profits are able to bypass this for donations.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head.