[Noisebridge-board] Differentiating affiliate and member donations on Paypal

mfburdett at gmail.com mfburdett at gmail.com
Mon Dec 27 01:18:03 UTC 2010


Hi, I do web dev for non-profit orgs for a living, including
installing and customizing CiviCRM (luckily I get to do a lot more
interesting things besides that :p) so let me know if you have any
questions about it.

The site I made isn't using CiviCRM as that would have been overkill
for just capturing and listing incoming donations.  But it could make
sense if you want a database and UI for managing memberships, and want
something that is both off-the-shelf and open-source.

--mark

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Kelly <hurtstotouchfire at gmail.com> wrote:
> Replies inline.
>
> On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 17:10, Rachel McConnell <rachel at xtreme.com> wrote:
>> I think that a system for managing memberships and donations ought to
>> have the following features:
>>
>> 1. a way to list the current members
> (+categories of membership)
>> 2. member identifier that doesn't HAVE to be associated with other
>> identifying info (such as name or email) but that is associated with
>> their membership status.  This one is hard b/c there has to be SOME way
>> of doing the association with an anonymous member to the actual person,
>> and if it's not written down somewhere, it has to be in someone's head.
>
> This isn't really necessary. I'll just use a pseudonym in the system
> if we have a genuinely anonymous member. Right now there's no one.
> Most people's electronic payment methods de-anonymize them anyway.
>
>> 3. automatic reminder emails (to those whose email address is associated)
>> 4. automatic tracking of received payments
>> 5. way to list members with late payments who need to be followed up with
>> 6. reasonable* security around member info
>>
>> What other features do we Need?  It's hard to evaluate systems without
>> knowing our requirements.
>
> Our requirements should be tailored to taxes and non-profit
> requirements. That means we need to track donations separately from
> income sources and track each income source separately. I would also
> say that as much automatic feeding as possible (i.e. from paypal, WF
> and Square) is a requirement for the treasurer's sanity.
>
> I would describe 3-5 differently. Most accounting systems are
> invoice-based, and this is reasonable. In that model, dues
> expectations are tracked via invoices, so we want the ability to make
> invoice templates, repeating into the past and future. We want to be
> able to view pending invoices for a given person, as well as in total.
> We need a way to reconcile incoming payments to invoices. We want an
> easy method for retrieving invoices that could be associated with a
> given line item of income (right now I just search by name every time
> and it's ok but it wouldn't be hard to do better). We also need to be
> able to have income that's not associated with invoices. So far
> there's no use case for 3, but it's a pretty reasonable feature to
> have.
>
>>
>> I reviewed the Hackerdojo code that they use to manage memberships (and
>> other things).  It is mostly a wrapper around Spreedly, which is a
>> wrapper around various payment gateways (such as Paypal).  The
>> hackerdojo system fails on 2 and 6, although these could be added
>> easily.  It uses, as noted, Spreedly for handling 3, 4, and I think 5.
>> It requires that all payments go through Spreedly, which I think is a
>> nonstarter for us.
>>
>> Kelly do you have a list anywhere of systems people have evaluated?  I
>> can start up a spreadsheet otherwise.
>
> No list, and no prior evaluations as far as I know. There were a few
> suggested options that sounded promising in that past thread I posted
> asking for suggestions.
>>
>> Rachel
>>
>> * 'reasonable' is gonna be hard too, I think.  e.g. I would not want our
>> member info to be associated with our Google accounts, but I also don't
>> really want it to be in an encrypted database on someone's server that
>> they have sole control over.
>>
>> Jeff Tchang wrote:
>>> I have not personally used it but I took at look at the functioning demo.
>>>
>>> Here is a list of things that made me want to use it:
>>>
>>> - You can add contacts and track their donations
>>> - It can generate a donor report
>>> - It is multiuser and seems to have a good deal of functionality above
>>> and beyond what we need
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org
>>> <mailto:adi at hexapodia.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 01:22:07PM -0800, Jeff Tchang wrote:
>>>     > I wanted to setup http://civicrm.org/ to help manage this. What do
>>>     you guys
>>>     > think?
>>>
>>>     I have a horrible allergy to the acronym "CRM". :)
>>>
>>>     Is the software good?  What features does it have that would be useful?
>>>     What problems does it solve?
>>>
>>>     -andy
>>>
>>>
>>>
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