Donation Types
Each donation on your platform is categorised. This article explains what it all means.
When reporting on donations received on your platform, you’ll notice that each donation has a Donation Type, such as online, personal, or recurring.
Depending on how the donation was made, we categorise it to assist with your reporting and analysis. Let’s explain how this works:
Firstly, to find out the type of donation, you can see this within the donation record under the Personal Details section.
To report on this information, you need to use the field Donation Type within your Donation report or Transaction report.
What does each type mean?
Online
An online donation is a donation made to a fundraiser/team page, donation page, or crowdfunding page by a member of the public. This could be a friend sponsoring a friend, or a supporter of the charity making a donation to an appeal.
Personal
A personal donation is one that a fundraiser makes to themselves. This is either during the registration flow by self donating to their page. Or, when logged in, making a donation on their fundraising page.
Recurring
When a donor commits to a recurring donation, e.g. $10 once a month, the first donation and all subsequent associated donations will be set as the type recurring.
SMS
You can set up your platform to receive donations via SMS. More information on how to set this up can be found here.
Registration
Within your event > Entries & Fees, you can set the registration fee to be treated as a donation. If this setting is selected, when someone registers and pays to enter, their entry fee will be converted into a donation and appears against their fundraising total.
Product
If using the Shop module, you can treat shop purchases as a donation which will create a donation record for when that particular product is purchased.
Matched Giving
If enabled on an event or appeal page, Matched Giving will create a donation record to match the original donation in a specified multiplier. E.g. x2. This record is essentially an offline donation as no transaction takes place.
This is a donation that was received on a Facebook fundraising page.
Contribution
If an entrant registers and pays an entry fee and makes a contribution towards platform fees, then this is treated as a donation and categorised as a contribution.
Import
If you have created a PURL for an appeal and the donor follows that PURL and donates, this is categorised as an import donation.
Offline
An offline donation can be one of two things. When an entrant is logged in, within their dashboard they have the option to pay in money that has been donated to them offline. Donations paid for in this way are considered offline.
An offline donation can also be one that the charity has manually added to the platform. For example, a donor may have transferred $1000 directly to the charity but they want this reflected on their fundraising page, so the charity manually adds it to the platform.
Top Tip: When manually adding an offline donation via the admin, the charity will mark it as paid and do not need to process a transaction. Therefore, these manually added offline donations will not appear in a transaction report for reconciliation.
Pro Tip: You can easily identify these types of donations in a donation report by including a column for the Payment reference. If a donation was manually added by an admin, and no transaction took place, then the reference will be a string of 32 numbers and lower case letters. Actual transactions will either have a Stripe reference, ch_123…. Or a Paypal reference of 17 numbers and upper case characters.
That’s donation types explained. To set up your donation reports, check out our article on creating custom donation reports.
If you’d like further help, please pop in a support ticket from your admin, and our team will assist you.
