The donation collection guide

A donor in Dar es Salaam wants mobile money. A donor in London wants a card or PayPal. Showing everyone every option is how you lose both: the local donor scrolls past card fields they cannot fill, and the international donor wonders what M-Pesa is.

One page, methods surfaced by where the donor is. The donor should never have to know which rail carried their gift.

Three suggested amounts with a plain description of what each does will out-raise an empty box every time. Make the middle one the amount you actually want.

Keep the open field for the donor who wants to give something else. Just do not make it the only option.

Recurring gifts are worth several times a single one, and the thing that kills them is a donor who cannot stop without emailing someone. Every recurring plan gets a page where the donor can view, pause or cancel by themselves.

This feels like it costs you money. It does the opposite: donors give monthly far more readily when leaving is visibly easy.

Per gift: the amount, the currency the donor gave in, the rate it converted at, the fee, the net you received, the method and the date. Anything less and the reconciliation becomes an argument about exchange rates.

Export at the end of each period rather than at the end of the grant. Reconstructing a year of giving in the week a report is due is where mistakes come from.