TOPIC: Pre-Sales questions for a political donations sit

Hello,
I\'m putting together a site for a political organization and my client wishes to provide functionality for members to make donations on-line. We have several requirements that I\'d like to discuss with you to make sure your product meets our needs.

The requirements are:
1. Accept donations via PayPal or Credit/Debit card, but not through Authorize.net, for which they don\'t have an account. Will I be able to disable the Authorize.net portion so that the user won\'t see it? (I think you have this from reading other posts, but need to make sure)

2. Support a variety of donation levels (Student=$10, Normal=$35, Gold Level... etc.) at a yearly non-recurring, yearly recurring and monthly recurring level.

3. Support one-off event tickets. For instance, buying 1 to many tickets for a $25 a seat fund raiser.

4. Support for a shopping cart. This is a future need, and I don\'t want to lock them out of the opportunity to sell shirts or whatever through the site.

5. Track donation aggregation. Political contributions resemble a pyramid scheme. For example, I might make be a donor, and then I ask you and others to donate. If you decide to do so, you might link your donations to me as a referral, which would then show the party masters (I say that tongue-in-cheek) that I\'ve brought in $x to the organization. It seems silly to a non-politico like me, but it seems to be rather important.

6. How does the data entry form work? Do I need a separate form tool to collect information and then pass it to your extension somehow? If not, can I configure yours? I ask this because there are specific reporting requirements set by the FEC that need to be met. I think it\'s basically the name, address and employer of the donor, but the laws can change and I\'ll need to be flexible enough to keep up. I\'m pretty sure that PayPal won\'t give me most of this information, so I\'ll need to track it on my site somehow.

7. How well documented is your product? Can I see the manuals prior to buying?

8. What would be involved in supporting multiple organizations on one site. In this case, the site is a coalition of local political clubs, each of which would accept memberships, donations and ticket sales. Currently, they would be going to a single PayPal account, so it probably wouldn\'t be a problem, but eventually, I can forsee the need for each club to set up their own PayPal merchant accounts. Will I be able to direct donations to different accounts?

Well, I think that\'s it for the requirements known at this time. I look forward to your response, and thank you for your time.

1. Yes, you can configure to use only PayPal.

2. You can create preset donation amounts like your example, BUT you can not get that detailed on recurring / non-recurring. The user will choose if the donation is onetime or recurring. The recurring list will include weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. This part is not customizable at this time.

3. You can make one of your preset amounts for a ticket, but this should be separate from other donations. You could use our DT Register for the event registration need.

4. There is no shopping cart function.

5. Not at this time.

6. You can create custom form fields to collect whatever data you need prior to sending the donor to PayPal.

7. We do not have a full manual, but a basic tutorial. You can find it in the support area of this site.

8. Currently you can only direct donations to one paypal account.

Best of luck to you.

Thanx for the response. A couple of quick follow-ups, if you don\'t mind.


2. You can create preset donation amounts like your example, BUT you can not get that detailed on recurring / non-recurring. The user will choose if the donation is onetime or recurring. The recurring list will include weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. This part is not customizable at this time.

Does this mean that the user selects repeatable/non-repeatable after they go through to the PayPal site? I had kinda thought that this would be configured into the button. In other words, I\'d put one button for each option in my example, as well as one for each subscription model.

6. You can create custom form fields to collect whatever data you need prior to sending the donor to PayPal.

Does the contents of these forms end up in a datastore on my site\'s end? Or is it all passed through to PayPal? I\'m relatively new to Joomla, and am still struggling with how to put a form on the page, so this just might be a newbie question.

Thanx a lot!

I also am considering using DT Donate for contributions to the Clark County (Nevada) Democratic Party. We have an authorize.net account, and I have used their simple checkout feature to handle online sales of tickets to our major fundraiser and for payment of annual dues. Now that the election crunch is over, we can start getting things done that we\'ve not had time for before. One is to get a more flexible donation mechanism set up, and your software looks like a very good possible solution. Our website is hosted by Bluehost, and we\'re using Joomla (don\'t recall offhand which version, because I am not the webmaster).

One concern I have is that, from a quick scan of your software description, confidential information would be stored on our Bluehost server, and we would need an SSL certificate. The authorize.net simplified checkout, and other integration methods they offer, keeps all such information on the authorize.net server. From a security standpoint, this seems highly desirable, especially since we rely heavily on volunteers to function.

I would appreciate any feedback you can give.