[thelist] contribution database

F Dariano fdariano at woh.rr.com
Fri Jan 14 10:16:47 CST 2011


On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:12 PM, F Dariano <fdariano at woh.rr.com> wrote:

> For the annual NAMI Walk fundraiser, the the Executive Director would like
> a donation page added which would keep track of which walker or team
> gets credit for the donation & have an entry for the Team name or Walker
> name.

> I thought a database would have to be created & looked into this but it
> seems beyond what I understand.

> Would another format work for this?

On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 at 2:25 pm. Hassan Schroeder wrote:

> Not clear what you mean by "another format".

> If you want the site to accept, process, and display information about
> donations, yeah, you typically want a DB to store the data processed
> by your application. (The data has to be stored somewhere; writing it
> to the file system directly is clunky and slow.)

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 at 2:10 pm. Frank Dariano wrote:

> By another format, I meant something other than a database. Thanks for 
> your > answer; I'll either have to learn how to do the database or turn it 
> over to
> someone else.

> I also heard from another subscriber, Martin Burns, to use a tool that 
> will do
> this & to check out http://civicrm.org/. Checked it out but I think it's
> somewhat more than what's needed for the fund raiser. Thanks for your
> answer though.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 Martin Burns wrote:<martin at easyweb.co.uk>

> Yes, but installing this and limiting the functionality will be a *lot* 
> less work
> than creating the limited functionality from scratch.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 trevor <trevor at intospace.ca> wrote:

> You may be interested to look into widgets or helper sites for this, such
> as:
> http://pledgie.com    or
> http://chipin.com  or things along those lines.
> I think pledgie.com  might be the best bet in the case you describe

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 Greg Holmes wrote:

> I've built exactly this for a different non-profit. It got pretty 
> complicated -
> possibly more than yours will - there were all sorts of permutations of
> teams, walkers, donations, t-shirts, etc.

> But yes, it certainly needed a database. I suppose you could gather all
> the information and just email it to somebody, but that just pushes the
> task of storing and organizing the data onto them, whoever they are.

> So your choices would seem to be either figure out how to do it, pay (or
> recruit) someone else to do it, or find some company that would have a
> hosted solution for this.

Thank you so much for all of your answers. I checked them out.

I should have said in my post that the org wanted to collect the donation 
through a PayPal account. I didn't realize what all PayPal offered.

After some off list advice & questions from Hassan Schroeder, I checked 
deeper into the PayPal service.

I learned that PayPal Donate buttons are pasted on a Website. Clicking the 
button takes the donor to the PayPal secure site where the donor fills out 
his/her data.

After the donation is completed, this information is emailed to the PayPal 
account holder in a list format; name, donation amount, date, etc. This 
seems pretty easy to me & may be the way we go.



More information about the thelist mailing list