Donations, pledges, and fundraising pages

Donations: money received

The Donations grid is the ledger of received gifts. Each donation belongs to a person, so a donor’s full giving history is always one click away on their profile’s Donations tab. The list works like the other grids — search finds donors by name or email, columns filter and sort, and long ledgers page instead of loading every gift at once — but rows are read-only: donation amounts and receipts have legal weight, so open a gift to change anything about it. See Working in grids.

Four tabs sit at the top. All is the whole ledger, led by the total you have raised to date — every gift, including the monthly installments (they carry a Monthly chip). One-time narrows it to single gifts, so the month-over-month numbers are not moved by recurring money. Monthly pledges is the recurring commitments themselves, and Receipts & statements is where receipts and year-end documents live.

Most gifts arrive on their own through a fundraising page. For cash, a check, or a bank transfer collected offline, click Record donation at the top of the Donations page: pick the donor, enter the amount and their mailing address (no gift is recorded without one — receipts must print it), and choose a method (Card, Check, Cash, or Bank transfer). Official receipts are covered in Donation receipts and giving statements: configure the regime in Workspace settings → Donations, then issue receipts by hand or turn on auto-issue.

If a card gift is later refunded or charged back through Stripe, the donation updates itself. It shows as refunded or disputed and stops counting toward the donor’s giving totals and contribution limits, so your reports stay honest without any manual cleanup. Any receipt covering the gift is cancelled at the same moment — a reversed gift never keeps a live receipt. A chargeback you later win flips the gift back to succeeded automatically; its receipt stays cancelled until you reissue it (receipt numbers are never silently reused).

Choose your payment processor

Online gifts are processed by Stripe, set up under Workspace → Donations. Stripe handles both one-time and monthly (recurring) gifts, and processes and stores donor payment data in the United States.

Setting up Stripe means connecting your own Stripe account — click Connect with Stripe, pick your campaign’s country, and Stripe walks you through verifying the campaign before returning you to pplCRM. There are no API keys or webhook URLs to copy. Donations are charged directly to your Stripe account, so your campaign stays the merchant of record for compliance and receipting, and you manage payouts, refunds, and disputes from your own Stripe dashboard (the Open Stripe dashboard button). pplCRM deducts a 1% platform fee from each card donation; Stripe’s own processing fees also apply and are billed to your account by Stripe. If a gift is fully refunded, the platform fee is refunded too.

Why your own account? Campaign finance rules generally require contributions to be received by the campaign itself, so donations settle directly into your campaign’s bank account and never pass through pplCRM. It also puts the money in the safest possible hands: Stripe is certified to PCI DSS Level 1, the industry’s highest payment-security standard, and card details never touch pplCRM’s servers. And the account stays yours; your processing history remains with you even if you stop using pplCRM.

If you do restrict where donors may live, the provinces or states you pick apply only to donors from the country they belong to. Allowing Canada and Ontario alongside the United Kingdom accepts every UK donor, because no UK regions were named — it does not refuse them for living outside Ontario. Contribution-limit windows and the Stripe connection itself are administrator or owner settings; editors can record and view gifts but cannot change them.

When you record an offline gift by hand, the Gift date field is the day the money arrived, not the day you typed it in. A cheque dropped off on December 31st and entered in January is still a December gift, so it lands in the right tax year on the receipt. Future dates are refused. The gift also joins the campaign you are currently working in, so keep an eye on the campaign switcher before recording one.

Pledges: money promised

Pledges live in their own view beside donations. Keeping promised and received money separate keeps reports honest, and gives you a follow-up queue of pledges yet to convert.

The giving portal: donors help themselves

Every donor can be given a personal giving page. On it they see their own giving history and nothing else: their gifts, their receipt PDFs, the monthly pledge behind their card, their mailing address, and their newsletter preferences. From that one page a donor can download any receipt, update the card behind a monthly gift, change its amount, cancel it, fix their mailing address, unsubscribe or resubscribe, raise a hand to volunteer, or ask for a yard sign.

The link travels three ways. Every receipt and acknowledgement email now carries it automatically. You can send one by hand from the Giving band on the person’s record under People — the band appears for anyone with recorded giving and also shows their totals at a glance; for a person with no giving yet, the same panel sits on their Donations tab instead. The panel also offers Copy link, which is the way in when the donor has no email on file or your workspace still holds demo data (demo workspaces never email real contacts). And donors themselves can request one: the public request page asks only for an email address and answers the same way whether or not it matches anyone, so nobody can use it to learn who has donated.

Links expire on their own after a year, and sending a new one never breaks the old one — the link in last month’s receipt email keeps working. Revoke link on the same panel stops every live link for that donor at once. When a donor cancels their monthly pledge from the portal, administrators are told by bell and email; the toggle for that notice lives in personal settings under “Donor cancelled a monthly pledge”.

Fundraising pages: money online

1. 1Open Forms, click New form, then Create a fundraising formBuild the giving page: your appeal, your branding.
2. 2Share the linkThe page stands on its own for email, social, or QR codes.
3. 3Watch gifts arriveDonations made through the page land in the CRM attached to the right people. No retyping.