Gathering online donations can be one of the most important steps for an organization doing advocacy on the web, and Salsa gives you the ability to create and edit donation pages quickly and easily.
NOTE: 501(c)3 and fiscally sponsored organizations may use DemocracyInAction's merchant and gateway accounts. All other organizations (such as C4s and political campaigns) using the donation tool must set up their own merchant and gateway accounts first in order to process donations.
The donation page creation process has three steps: editing content, choosing options, and establishing thank-you and follow-up paths for your supporters who've donated.
1. Go to the Donation Management tab, select Donation Pages, and click on "Create a Donation Page".
2. Create a Reference Name. This is the name this donation page will have inside your Salsa HQ--supporters will not see it, and it does not appear anywhere inside the donation page that is created. This name will appear in lists of donation pages within Salsa.
3. Select a Template
By clicking on one of your template thumbnails, you can select a web template to use with this donation page.
4. Fill out the Header field. This content will appear at the top of your donation page, inside the editable area of your template.
5. Select fields as Request/Required for supporters to fill out. Please note that the basic set of fields is already in place, and is required, since that information is required to process a credit card transaction.
6. Pre Donation Text. This content will appear just before the form that takes donation information.
7. Determine the donation amounts by completed the* Comma Delimited Amounts* section. If you would like to set specific donation amounts, you can enter them here as comma separate values, like "5,10,20,50,100", and they will be added to your donation form as radio buttons.
8. Confirm Box Text. Text entered here will display before a required checkbox, which allows you to enter, for instance "I certify that I am qualified to give money to a political organization inside the United States."
9. Insert content in the PreSubmit Footer. This content will appear after the form, but before the form submission button.
10. Insert content in the Footer. This content appears after the form submission button.
The following options are available:
1. Select the Number of Columns. You can choose the number of columns you would like your donation page content to appear in, according to how you want your page to display within your template.
2. Select to Include Recurring Payments (only if this is enabled with your gateway account). This option adds recurring payment options to your page. With these, your supporters can set up donations that will charge them monthly, quarterly, semi-yearly, or yearly. Please note that this option should only be enabled if your merchant account gateway allows recurring donations! Check with your merchant account provider for details of their services.
3. Option to Include In Honor Of. This option will allow your supporters to enter In Honor Of information into their donations, so that you have an address and name to publish, or to send followup communications to (thank you letter, etc.)
4. Allow Anonymous Donations. This option allows anonymous donations--the supporter's information is passed to the merchant account gateway, but their personal information is not retained in the supporter database.
5. Determine your Tax Status. You can choose your organization's tax status here.
6. Select an Event Key. If this donation page is associated with a particular event, you can choose the event from the Event Key menu.
7. Determine the Email Trigger Keys. If you have custom email autoresponses that you would like to replace the standard thank you email with, you can choose them from the list of autoresponses in the Email Trigger Keys field.
8. To add a support to a gropu select the Groups Keys. This will automatically add them to the group once they donate.
9. Select the merchant account/gateway for the page by selecting the Merchant Account Key. To use your own merchant account, or to choose between them, select the merchant account you wish to use from the Merchant Account Key drop down list. For clients with 501-C3 status, by default this will select the DemocracyInAction merchant account gateway, so make sure to select otherwise if you do NOT want to use our account.
Step three lets you set landing pages for your supporters, so that when they've donated, they're taken to a thank you page, or another
followup action:
1. Thank You Page Text. The content you enter into this field will appear inside the thank you page that your supporter is redirected to, if you don't specify a redirect path for this donation page.
2. Redirect Path. You can enter a URL here, where your supporters will be taken after donating. This could be your homepage, or another action page, or any location you choose. However, it's good to give supporters visual and immediate feedback that they've made a donation, so consider redirecting to a page capable of displaying a success message on donation.
Copyright 2009 Salsa Labs, Inc.
