An Overview of the “Donor to Cover Fee” Fundraising Tool
Within CharityEngine, our webform layout feature allows you to offer an additional fundraising tool to increase gift sizes. This feature can be leveraged to assist you in covering your general costs associated with fundraising. The “Donor to Cover Fee” fundraising tool is designed so your donors can assist in covering the fees and processing your organization incurs by increasing gift sizes as a percentage to the donor’s total donation amount. In addition, CharityEngine’s feature allows you to set the percentage that is most meaningful to your organization’s needs and your donors.
While this is designed as a fundraising tool, it is important to note that this option does not automatically calculate the donor’s total fees as payment processors will assess fees based upon payment tender type and gross donation amount.
Your organization can customize the processing fee rates based upon your organizational needs while also allowing you to ensure coverage across processing fee types. As you determine your processing fee percentage, you may want to consider costs associated with transaction fees, monthly fee rates, or other fees as set with your payment processor agreement.
With the flexibility to expose this option to your donors, you can determine if you’d like to offer this fee coverage calculation on one or many of your webforms. You will also have the flexibility to adjust your organizational processing fee rate at any time.
Table of Contents
How will the donation be presented to your donors and within your CharityEngine account?
Let’s assume your organization has determined that the ideal processing rate for your donors is 5%. Your donor makes a $25.00 donation and decides to opt in to cover processing fees. The donor’s transaction will be processed at a total donation value of $26.25. The donor will be charged and receipted for a total donation of $26.25. The transaction will be recorded for a total of $26.25 within CharityEngine.
As this is a fundraising tool to increase gift sizes, the $1.25 will always be presented within the total transaction amount and is not designated specifically as a ‘fee’. The total value of $26.25 will always be presented throughout CharityEngine including transaction level reporting, Accounting reports, and queries.
How the donation will be presented within the CharityEngine Transaction App (the User Experience):
When presenting the transaction within CharityEngine, in the Transaction app, the following example demonstrates how the value is presented to the CharityEngine user.
- Note, all transaction values will be presented as the full donation value
- CharityEngine does not capture the donor’s action of selecting “I’d like to cover the processing fee"
- Payment Processor Presentment:
- When transactions are processed by your payment gateway, all transactions will post with the full transaction value (gross value + fee), or continuing the example of $26.25.
- It’s important to note that your payment process will continue to assess monthly fees, transactions fees, etc. based upon the total donation value (i.e. $26.25).
How do I set my organization’s “Cover Fee Rate”?
You also have the flexibility to set the percentage that is right for your organization and your donors – allowing your donors to support your fundraising efforts and support the coverage of operational fees.
To configure your organization’s global “Cover Fee Rate”, navigate to:
Configuration > General > Account Settings > Online tab > “Cover Transaction Costs” box > Insert Organization Rate > Save
Note: You can also update the language on the label associated with this function.
The configuration of the “Cover Fee Rate” fundraising tool is a global configuration and will be applied to all webforms in which “Enable Cover Processing Costs” has been set to “yes”.
The field represents a percentage value and will be applied to the gross donation amount when the donors opt in to this feature.
In this example, if your donor makes a gift of $25.00 and opts into covering fees, the 5% will be applied to the gross donation amount of $25.00 and process a total transaction value of $26.25.
How to expose the “Donor to Cover Fee” fundraising tool within your web form
This fundraising feature can be exposed on an individual web form, allowing you greater flexibility to expose to your donors as you determine. To configure the “Donor to cover fee” fundraising option, navigate to your Web Form by going to Online > Web Forms > Search & Manage and click Manage. Go to the Advanced tab > Payments > General and toggle "Enable Cover Processing Costs" to Yes. This will enable this feature on the Web Form.
Note, the Sync Amount To Button on the Content > Landing screen should default to Yes. However, if the web form is not updating the dollar value when selecting 'Cover processing fee', ensure that this toggle is set to Yes.
This is an example of the view presented to your donor when this feature is enabled:
In this example, the organization’s “Cover Fee Rate” has been set at 5%. When a donor selects their donation amount ($200 in this example), they will see the processing fees below. Clicking edit will allow donors to opt out of covering these fees.
When you create a donation form, one of the most important configurations is deciding if your donors will cover the processing fees when they donate. This tool should be treated as a fundraising tool to get donors to increase their gifts, your organization will still pay processing fees, but the gift will be larger. Use this appropriate rate for your organization to support your team's fundraising activities with this feature.
FAQs & Further Reading
Q. Can I set this as a default to have the check box set to, yes?
A. In the out of box feature, the option is not available to configure for default of the checkbox.
