Giving Online
How donations are taken on the site, and how much of that experience can be ours
Donations run through Blackbaud's hosted donor form, embedded on the Donate page. Blackbaud is MOWP's fundraising software, and its main product, Raiser's Edge NXT, is where staff keep every donor and every gift. The website's job is to take a gift and get it into Raiser's Edge correctly attributed, which is the constraint every option below has to meet.
The current setup
It's the form itself rendered inside the page, not a link to Blackbaud. A donor paying by card or bank transfer completes the gift without the page ever navigating, with mowp.org in the address bar throughout. Choosing PayPal inside that form is the exception, and opens a popup.
The page around the form and the thank-you page after it are already ours. How the form looks isn't: its typography, spacing and buttons are Blackbaud's, and that's what reads as leaving the site.
The options
| Option | Possible | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Keep donors on the page through payment | Yes, and already done | Card and bank donors never navigate away. Choosing PayPal inside the form opens a popup |
| Send donors to our own thank-you page | Yes | The form can redirect to a page we build |
| Brand the Blackbaud form | Yes, within limits | A fixed set of color and font choices, no custom CSS. Some of the available controls aren't switched on |
| Our own fields, their payment step | Yes, at a cost | We'd own recurring billing, two systems and the gap between them, and rebuilt tribute gifts and donor self-service, after a separate approval from Blackbaud. Detailed below |
| Take card details ourselves | No, and not wanted | Card fields come from Stripe inside Blackbaud's layer under every option |
| Embed the county meal payments | No | PayPal allows its payment pages in an iframe only for PayPal Payments Pro and Pro Hosted Solution. MOWP's county pages are PayPal payment links, which are built to redirect |
The legacy site still loads a script for Fundraise Up, a second donation platform. It appears dead: the account behind it no longer resolves, so nothing renders.
Card handling
Card numbers reach neither the site nor its servers under any of these options. Blackbaud's checkout opens as a Blackbaud-hosted layer, and the card number, expiry and security code fields inside it are served by Stripe, the processor Blackbaud uses underneath. Stripe belongs on any list of who handles donor data.
Building our own
Blackbaud's API writes gifts into Raiser's Edge against a donor record that has to exist already. It doesn't take payment. Payment is a separate Blackbaud product, and its card fields come from Stripe the same way they do today.
- No recurring scheduling. Blackbaud's payments service has no scheduling engine, in their own documentation. Every monthly gift would be ours to schedule, charge, retry and chase.
- Two custom builds where there's currently a drop-in. The hosted form handles the hard parts of taking money, security requirements included. Replacing it means owning the payment step, the record-keeping step, and the failure between them.
- Tribute gifts, employer matching and donor self-service rebuilt. Donors currently pause, skip and change their own recurring gifts in Blackbaud's portal.
- It can't start with us. Payment access is a separate subscription: a Blackbaud Merchant Services account, a request they process and approve, and someone inside their environment granting our application access.
All of that buys a styled form up to the moment of payment.
Keep the embedded form and spend the effort on how it looks. We control the page around it and the thank-you page after it, and the form designer has branding controls nobody has switched on.
What branding is already set up in Blackbaud's form designer, and which form type each page should use. Donate and the capital campaign are on different types, and the two allow different amounts of styling.
Meal contributions
Meal recipients contributing toward the cost of their meals go through three PayPal payment pages, one per county, which open on paypal.com rather than on the site.
PayPal allows its payment pages in an iframe only for PayPal Payments Pro and Pro Hosted Solution. MOWP's county pages are PayPal payment links, a different product built to redirect, so there's nothing to configure. Rebuilding them on PayPal's checkout button would keep the payment on the page, but these are three low-volume pages that work today.
Reporting limits
Because Blackbaud's form is an iframe, gifts commonly land in Google Analytics as direct traffic rather than credited to the campaign, email or search result that brought the donor. Blackbaud reports three custom events and doesn't offer the ecommerce reporting most analytics setups expect.
For the other services the site depends on, see Third-Party Services.