Donation Page Settings¶

Minimum Amount (Donation)¶

Users will not be able to make a donation in an amount less than your minimum. Often this is set to an amount that just covers the transaction fee charged by your vendor.

Payment Accounts (Donation)¶

To accept donations in ActionKit you must have a payment account with a vendor we integrate with. You can accept credit cards through ActionKit donation pages with a traditional merchant vendor account with Braintree, Authorize.net, PayFlow Pro or PayPal. You can also accept PayPal payments where the user logs into their own PayPal account and pays with their preferred method with a standard PayPal account.

ActionKit records each donation and generates a request to the vendor, asking them to process the donation and deposit the funds in your bank account. We also provide an interface for prompting changes (like refunds), so these are captured in your ActionKit database as well.

PayPal (Donation)¶

ActionKit's PayPal implementation offers support for both traditional CC processing (like that provided by Braintree, Auth.net and PayFlow Pro) as well as paying via PayPal accounts.  Users set up their PayPal accounts to use whatever payment method they prefer (e.g. credit card, bank account). When users pay via PayPal accounts they are redirected to the PayPal site and then back to ActionKit after they approve the payment.

Read more about our PayPal integration.

Suggested Ask Formula (Donation)¶

You can customize the suggested donation amounts shown to a previous donor based on that user's giving history.

Recognized users will see a suggested donation and any larger amounts you enter on the Edit content screen. You define the formula used to set the suggested amount, basing it on the donor's highest previous gift, 2nd highest gift, average gift,most recent gift or total over a particular time period. Imported donations are included.

You can also insert the same ask amount in a mailing using the suggested ask Snippet in the mailer.

To read more about defining the formula used to set this amount, read Suggested Ask Rules.

Allow International Addresses (Donation)¶

If you wish to accept credit card donations from users with international addresses, you must:

1 Select the Allow international addresses checkbox.

2 Turn off AVS with your merchant vendor.

3 Modify your donation page template to include country.

International addresses will not be accepted unless you've completed all three steps.

Donations must still be in U.S. dollars unless you are set up to receive donations in other currencies as outlined below.

ActionKit still requires state and zip if the user selects the United States as their billing country. Neither postal nor region are required if the user selects any other country.

Users with JavaScript will see the correct fields when they switch countries. Users without JavaScript will see all four fields (region, state, zip and postal) all the time but if they fill out extra fields they will be ignored.

Accept ACH Payments (Donation)¶

If you use Braintree as your merchant vendor, you can accept transfers from U.S. bank accounts using ACH Direct Debit. Before you can process these payments, you will need to do some setup as described here.

Accept Foreign Currencies (Donation)¶

To accept donations in other currencies you need to use Braintree as your merchant vendor. You'll need to do some additional set up with Braintree for each currency you wish to accept. Then you can create Donation Pages, send mailings, generate reports, etc. using the currency. The set up is similar to using other languages; donation campaigns will generally need distinct Pages and mailings per currency. Details, including how to get started are at currencies.html.

Products (Donation)¶

ActionKit provides basic support for product sales and give aways. Products can be premiums, merchandise for sale, or something less tangible (for example, 'adopting' an endangered tiger).

Products are used with donation pages. If you have set up any products, you'll be able to select them in the More options section on the Action Basics screen when you create your page.

The default layout offers users options to select a product and to make an additional donation. You can change the layout, offer products with no option for an additional donation, or allow users to donate without selecting a product on a page with products by editing the donate.html template.

Our product system is not designed to function as a storefront. If you need shipping and tax calculations and fulfillment tracking, we recommend using an external storefront and integrating the data using our API.

Candidate Donations (Donation)¶

Use this option to create bundling pages for candidates. You need to add Candidates first before they'll be available for inclusion on a Donation page.

The end user fills in the amount they'd like to give to each candidate and there's an option to make a regular donation to your organization.

In the Original Templateset, employer and occupation are automatically required for Pages with candidates. PACs can easily copy the code to require these fields everywhere or you can use it to adapt your Templatesets for bundling for non-federal races with different rules.

Fraud Filters (Donation)¶

Fraudsters will sometimes use Donation Pages to test whether stolen credit cards are functional or not. These carding attempts can incur transaction and chargeback fees for your organization.

Clients who use PayFlow Pro, Authorize.net or Braintree as their payment gateway can set global- and per-page fraud limits.

The fraud scores are generated using the MaxMind minFraud service. We incur a small charge for each fraud score calculated, but do not pass that charge along to you.

MaxMind looks at a lot of factors: whether the user's IP address is that of a known fraudster, whether the country of the card issuer matches the user's current location, HTTP request headers that can help tell automated scripts from real users, and more.

The filters can reject some real donations although the benefit of avoiding fraud may outweigh any donations lost, especially if you're having a problem with fraud.

The filtering process logs details to the core_donationattemptlog table, where you can review exactly how many attempts were rejected and the details of the rejections.

By default, ActionKit blocks donations from IPs in 5 high risk countries: Brazil, Estonia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Vietnam. If any of those are high value for your organization, we can remove those countries on a per-client basis. Note that this comes with an increased risk of carding attempts, which can incur transaction and chargeback fees.

Read more if you want to enable fraud filters for your instance.

Donation User Form (Donation)¶

Unlike other page types, donation pages do not use the user form template. Instead the form is part of the donate template.

Donation pages always require the user to enter all of their contact information. By default they do not require the credit card CVV, if you use Authorize.net or Braintree, and you've changed your settings so this isn't required by your merchant vendor. It is required by default by both vendors, so if you remove it from your ActionKit form without changing your settings, donations will fail.

Amount Options (Donation)¶

You can select an amount as the default, which means it will be pre-selected on your page.

If your page also uses a Suggested Ask formula, here's how these amounts and the Suggested Ask amount interact:

• For users who aren't recognized by ActionKit, the donation amounts entered here will be displayed. Read about which users will be recognized.
• For recognized users who have never given, the Suggested Ask amount is used in place of the lowest amount on your list. The amount under Make ask amount in the Suggested Ask Conditions section for the top row is used.
• For recognized users who have previously given, the Make ask amount column shows the lowest suggested donation that will be shown to all users with a total less than the amount in the first column for whichever criteria you select (e.g. Highest Donation); all larger donation amounts entered here will show as well.

For example, if your formula is based on the donor's Highest Previous Contribution (HPC) and the user has an HPC of $150 and the suggested ask is $175, the amounts shown on the page will be $175 and any donation amounts that are larger.

• There is an exception to this rule. If the donor would only see one or two donation amounts on the page because the Suggested Ask is higher than all but one donation amount, ActionKit will display all of your donation amounts (just as if the user wasn't recognized).

For example, if a user has an HPC of $1000, the Suggested ask amount is $500 in the default formula. If the largest donation amounts entered in this section are $500 and $1000, the user would only see two suggested amounts. Instead they will see all the amounts you enter in this section.

Recurring Donations (Donation)¶

A Recurring Donation is a commitment your user makes to give a donation automatically on a regular basis, like monthly. Through ActionKit you can accept recurring donations by credit card, US bank transfer (ACH Direct Debit), or from the user's PayPal account. You must sign up for recurring billing with your payment processor. Most payment processors consider recurring billing a distinct product from one-time payments. ACH Direct Debit recurring payments are handled directly by ActionKit, but you must sign up for the ACH beta program with Braintree.

By default, users are charged on the same day of the month each month by the merchant vendor. ActionKit will show the payments immediately or the next day, depending on which merchant vendor you use.

By editing your Donate template and depending on your merchant vendor, you may be able to adjust the billing date (e.g. to the 1st of each month) or change the frequency (e.g. to weekly or yearly). You can also edit your template to create a recurring only page.