How To Set Up Donations Via Paypal

Thinking about using PayPal?

Whether you depend on PayPal or merely want to offer your donors an alternative, agreement the all-time ways to make PayPal piece of work for you is smart. If you lot want to know how to create a great PayPal donate link, you're in luck. This calendar week, Eric Bryant of Gnosis Media Grouping brings you some technical advice for making the nigh of your PayPal connection.

Every bit a nonprofit, there are many reasons to cull PayPal every bit a payment processor over competitors. PayPal is probably the most well-recognized make for nonprofits, so it's widely trusted. More people accept a PayPal business relationship than any other mobile wallet. This means that prospective donors can but log in to their PayPal account to donate without having to enter a debit or credit menu more so than with whatsoever other payment processor. It besides ways it requires fewer steps to donate with PayPal, increasing your conversion rates.

PayPal also offers 1 of the cheapest ways to take donations, charging charities a lower charge per unit than most other competitors. This means nonprofits keep more of the donations they receive. Another benefit is that PayPal doesn't crave donors to create an account to donate to your clemency.

Creating a PayPal Donate Link

A PayPal donate link is a URL that, when clicked, takes prospective donors directly to your PayPal checkout page. This URL doesn't require the donor to visit a website or click a donate button. Additionally, PayPal donate links are versatile, as they can be shared on social media channels, in emails, also as on websites.

There are a few different means to create a PayPal donate link, then let's explore each.

Creating a Branded PayPal.me Link

The first mode is to create a PayPal.me link. These are personalized links that allow you to put your proper noun in them to brand it easy to retrieve (e.g., PayPal.me/RedCross). Best of all, they're piece of cake to ready. Just follow these steps to get your own PayPal.me link:

Visit this webpage on PayPal'due south site.
Enter your nonprofit's proper noun or a discussion or a phrase that your organization identifies with, this volition follow the "PayPal.me/" part of the URL. For instance, if you choose "GnosisMediaGroup," your URL volition be "PayPal.me/GnosisMediaGroup".
Log in or create a PayPal account.
Customize the spider web folio for your PayPal.me account for customers or donors to see when they click your link. For instance, you lot can add your logo to the header of your PayPal.me page.
Share your link wherever you lot'd like. When people click on your link, it takes them directly to your organization's PayPal donate checkout folio.

Creating a PayPal Donate Button

A second way is to take donations with PayPal is to create a donate button. These come in the form of HTML code that you identify onto your website's coding. Creating an embeddable button is also pretty like shooting fish in a barrel. You lot simply:

Log in to PayPal
Click on "Merchant Services"
Click "Donations"
Follow the site's prompts to become your personalized HTML code
In one case you go the HTML code, yous paste it into your site where you want the push button to display.
You can too elect to simply become the link instead of embedding the HTML lawmaking

Embedded buttons offer visual appeal, but they also have some drawbacks. Embedding the button requires a little more than technical know-how to implement. You must be familiar with how to embed HTML code using your website's content management organisation. Y'all tin can't send a button via text message or electronic mail, and it can't be placed on social media. All potential donors must exist showtime referred to your website and and then must click the "Donate" button from there.

Creating a PayPal Subscription Link

PayPal also offers subscription opportunities in both button and link form, allowing donors to make recurring, monthly gifts to your organisation.

Since nosotros already addressed the increased versatility of the link, we're going to focus more on how to create that. But y'all can also create a subscription push to place on your website visitors so that they'll see a big button and click in that location to donate. To get a PayPal subscription link, follow these steps:

Log in to your PayPal account.
Visit "My Selling Tools" from your profile pane.
Visit the "Selling Online" section.
Click "Update Link" on the row that has your PayPal button.
Click "Create New Button".
Specify "subscriptions" for the button type and fill out the residual of the fields.
Click "Create Button".
On the adjacent page, y'all'll run across the button lawmaking. Withal, if you click the email tab adjacent to it, you lot'll become just a link.
Copy and paste that link and utilise information technology wherever you lot'd like people to be able to subscribe for recurring donations from.

Subscriptions vs. Recurring Donations

I limitation with PayPal is that subscription links are not actually the same equally recurring donations. Even though a nonprofit tin technically use a subscription link, these links are actually for products and services for for-profit entities. In fact, 1 of the biggest complaints from nonprofits is that PayPal does not have a mobile-friendly, recurring donation option.

Creating a PayPal Donation Link (The Quick and Dirty Way)

Creating donation links and buttons every bit outlined above requires more steps. You have to log into PayPal, navigate to the button creator section, fill out all the fields and prices, so get the link or HTML lawmaking.

Just at that place is a faster, easier way to create a PayPal donate link that doesn't even require you to log into PayPal.

Edifice the URL

Take a wait at this link:

Create a PayPal donate link to fundraise better

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=fashionfoundationforourfuture@gmail.com&lc=Us&item_name=Donation+to+Fashion+Foundation+For+Our+Time to come+(idg4973)&no_note=0&cn=&currency_code=USD&bn=PP-DonationsBF:btn_donateCC_LG.gif:NonHosted

This link is a donate link for one of our recent customers, Fashion Foundation for Our Hereafter. To customize this link for your nonprofit, all you accept to do is change the "&business=" and "&item_name=" parameters to your nonprofit's details.

For example, if your nonprofit'south PayPal e-mail is "info@gmg.cm," you would but modify the business organization and item_name parameters to

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=info@gmg.cm&lc=US&item_name=Donation+to+YOUR+NONPROFIT+Proper name&no_note=0&cn=&currency_code=USD&bn=PP-DonationsBF:btn_donateCC_LG.gif:NonHosted

Exist sure you include the "+" signs in the "item_name" value. Plus signs are encoded spaces and if y'all don't include them sometimes the link volition not work properly. You can customize the "item_name=" value to any you like.

That's it; that's all you have to do. That link works merely like a Donate push button or a PayPal.me link! Now, when a donor visits this link, they volition run into your nonprofit's PayPal checkout experience:

To conserve grapheme length, you lot tin shrink the link using a URL shortener tool similar chip.ly or Tiny.url.

This method works for whatever PayPal account, as long equally you use the email address that is registered to your nonprofit'south PayPal account (ordinarily this is the same email yous use to log in).

At present, when a prospective donor clicks "Donate with Paypal" or "Donate with Card," she enters your checkout and funds go directly into your PayPal business relationship, merely equally if she clicked a donate push. This method doesn't require whatsoever special scripts. You don't fifty-fifty need to log into PayPal to set a website button.

UPDATE: PayPal is now offering a mobile recurring donations option.

Eric Bryant is a social entrepreneur who has been building telephony and SMS applications since 2008. He started Gnosis Media Grouping (GMG) in 2008, a communications consultancy whose first successful product was a text-to-donate application for nonprofits. In 2022, GMG was awarded the stardom of "Tech Visitor to Watch" past the Connecticut Engineering science Council. The following year, GMG was accepted into the award-winning ReSET Social Touch on Accelerator, a nonprofit business concern incubator, and later received meaning funding from Backstage Uppercase, a Los Angeles venture upper-case letter fund. When he's non coding, Eric enjoys power naps, reading philosophy, playing chess, and bowling.