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Fundraising (Non-Profit) Marketing

Fundraising Module Overview and Setup Instructions

Overview

The Fundraising module is a specialized stored value application that helps businesses connect with local non-profit organizations to grow sales and profits with 100% accounting transparency. The module works when using the Virtual, VeriFone or POS integrated terminal to record sales or invoice payments from your customers by recording a small donation from every sale recorded. The only time donations accrue is AFTER non-profit members spend money at your business. Unlike traditional fundraisers that might be limited to a one day or one week campaign, you can setup this type of fundraiser to run every day of the week all year round at your choosing.

Typically, the fundraisers added to the back office are local community organizations seeking to raise funds for their local chapter or cause. This could include a local girl scout troop, youth baseball team, rotary club or local foundation chapter.

Operators are 100% responsible for adding their own approved list of fundraisers and paying donations direct to said fundraisers based on reporting available from the system.  Operators can add any fundraising organization they wish to the approved list. We do not require your organizations to have official 501c3 non-profit status. The decisions and policies on which local organizations get added to your list is entirely up to the operator.

How do Donations Impact Rewards?

The short answer is they don’t.  The most common misconception about Fundraising is its impact on rewards issuance. Many operators incorrectly assume that tracking donations on sales activity somehow reduces the rewards earned from those sales by the % allocated for donations. On the contrary, donations and rewards are NOT pooled together or intertwined in any way. For example, if your business issues 10% cash back rewards to customers and then adds the Fundraising module to track 5% donations on those same sales tickets, customers will continue receiving the same 10% rewards (as configured in SETTINGS > Rewards Parameters).
Let’s dive into the math with a hypothetical example. If your account is configured to give 10% rewards to customers with 5% going to the patron’s charity as a donation, then two calculations are being performed on the same transaction as follows:    

The Reward Calculation Explained
The $20.00  Sales Ticket x 10% Rewards = $2.00 reward issued to the patron under this example. This $2.00 reward represents a future liability and NOT an expense. And when the expense comes through as a redemption it’s applied against the actual cost of a new sale (30% to 50%) while also factoring in breakage (% of rewards that are never redeemed). Historical breakage on rewards issued is about 38%.   This all means your actual economic cost on the $2.00 reward issued is MUCH less then $2.00.  It’s likely as low as $0.30 to $0.50 in real economic terms.

The Donation Calculation Explained

The same $20.00 Sales Ticket x 5% Donation = $1.00 donation accrued for the patron’s affiliated fundraiser.  This donation will be later grossed up with other donation transactions and paid out as a charitable tax deductible expense.   Donations represent real money paid out $ for $ back to the fundraising organization at an interval subject to the operator’s discretion.  In short, the $2.00 donation equals a $2.00 expense in real economic terms.  

When fundraising is enabled, donations are recorded separately, above and beyond rewards issuance.  This separate handling makes economic sense since rewards are “monopoly money” or a “house money” liability that are saved up and redeemed on future visits whereas donations represent real dollars paid back to non-profit organizations as an actual expense. Furthermore, patrons are not penalized with fewer rewards, rather patrons are rewarded with feeling their sale at your business not only  benefited them personally but also benefited a local community cause for which they feel passionate.  That’s a nice 1-2 punch for emotional retailing and instilling brand loyalty.  

NOTE: There is a work-around to above configuration using Membership Classes where patron accounts can be configured to yield 0% rewards and exclusively accrue donations. Please contact Technical Support for direct assistance setting this up as it involves performing an extra step inside the Virtual Terminal that affiliates a patron with a Membership Class yielding 0% rewards.

Fundraiser Setup Instructions

Requirements

Fundraising (Non-Profit) Marketing is an advanced stored value application which requires using a certified terminal to process sales transactions from customers.  You will need the Fundraising module enabled inside the back office denoted by a green checkmark on your Feature Dashboard. If this module is not enabled, tap the icon and submit a request to enable this feature.

Step 1: Open the Fundraisers Page

From your back office dashboard Home screen, click or tap Fundraisers from the MARKETING navigation menu. This page will display all fundraising organizations officially added to your account by a user with Administrator or Marketing security clearance. Fundraisers can only be added by authorized users on your account and you start out with none.

Step 2:   Add a New Fundraiser to Official List

Click the Add Fundraiser button to add a new fundraiser to your official non-profit list and start completing the online form mousing over the help text for field explanations. Let’s review the most important fields on this page in more detail.  

Patron Select:  Set to Yes to give both patrons and clerks the ability to (1) choose the affiliated fundraisers during registration (signup) and (2) ability to edit the patron’s profile anytime via a drop down dialog box added to the patron profile edit screen. We recommend toggling this field to Yes in most instances.  

Select No to prevent patrons and clerks from affiliating this specific fundraiser on their account during signup and editing. You would select No on this field if issuing plastic cards that are hard coded to a specific fundraising organization. Selecting No prevents patrons from selecting this specific fundraiser during signup or later editing their profile with changes. You might also select No if the fundraiser becomes INACTIVE and you don’t want this organization listed publicly anymore for affiliation.

Donation Rate:  Enter value as an integer representing a percentage of sales to accrue as a donation. For example, if you want to accrue 5% of sales from all members of this fundraiser as a donation, enter “5” in this field to represent 5%. This means a sales ticket of $10.00 will record 10.00 x 5% = $0.50 donation for this specific fundraising organization.    

Patrons can choose to affiliate their account with multiple fundraisers (if available) by tapping more than 1 option during signup or holding down the CONTL key if editing their profile from a desktop PC.  If a patron profile is affiliated with multiple fundraisers from the official Fundraisers list, the system calculates pro-rata donations among the affiliated fundraiser donation rates.  For example, if a patron is affiliated with 3 different fundraisers on their profile, each tracking a 6% donation, the system will allocate a pro-rata 2% donation on each sales ticket allocated among the 3 fundraisers, which together equal the full 6% approved for donation accrual. The pro-rata calculations ensure the operator is not over-paying donations to local non profit organizations above the entered donation rate.    
Complete all other fields to the best of your ability, including details about the fundraising administrator, if known.  A long as you have a fundraiser name, donation rate and patron select toggled on correctly, your donation calculations will work as intended.  

Fundraising Card Ranges Explained  
In the early days of the Platform the Fundraising module was exclusively reliant on assigning a sequential batch of card IDs to a specific non-profit organization. Some operators prefer to allocate a batch of cards to charitable organizations in this manner. The key attribute to using a card range is the card ID is “hardcoded” to the local fundraiser and patrons cannot change this affiliation on their own.  When the card ID is registered it automatically affiliates with the applicable fundraiser.  If interested in allocating plastic card ranges to fundraisers, please contact Technical Support for assistance ordering or reallocating an existing card range for fundraising use.

In the new modern era of using the Fundraisers module, card ranges are not assigned to local non-profit organizations. Patrons (or clerks) can affiliate a patron profile with any fundraiser in the approved Fundraisers list at any time during signup as long as the MARKETING> Fundraisers>Edit> Patron Select box is checked (Yes).

Fundraising affiliations can also be changed and edited anytime, on demand, via Patron Edit screen or when patrons log into their account online and click or tap the Profile tab. This ability to change affiliations is practical as over time, patrons may no longer be part of an original organization in the past and desire to support a different organization going forward. The Patron Select field controls this ability to change fundraising affiliation at the patron’s discretion.  

Step 3:  Update Registration Settings to Allow Fundraiser Selection

Click or tap SETTINGS> Registration Settings and scroll down to the field entitled, “Allow Patron Fundraiser Selection”. Assuming operators want to allow patrons the option to select a fundraiser from your approved Fundraisers list during signup (recommended), toggle this field to Yes. This setting will add the drop down dialog of box fundraisers to your customized registration (signup) form. The list of fundraisers patrons will be able to select during signup is restricted to only those fundraisers marked with Patron Select = Yes inside the Fundraisers page as described in Step 2 above.

At this point in the steps, you have the knowledge to create and edit fundraisers on your own so patrons can be affiliated to organizations and donations start recording on sales activity processed through your terminal. Donations will display as footer messages on online/printed receipts and will also display on the REPORTING> Reconciliation Report.  In addition, the automated Thank You Note toggled on from MARKETING> Automated Promotions> Thank You Note will automatically display a sentence calculating how much money the organization’s members have helped raise for their organization by invoking the {frtotal} tag.  

Manually Editing Patron Fundraiser Affiliation

As long as Allow Patron Fundraising Selection = Yes inside SETTINGS> Registration Settings, both clerks and patrons can edit their fundraising affiliation anytime on demand via the following ways:

First, clerks can pull up the patron’s profile inside Virtual Terminal or Patrons>Patron Search>Edit and manually select the fundraiser(s) for which the patron wishes to affiliate their account for donation tracking. This dialog box can be edited anytime on demand.  

Secondly, if your business has implemented the Website Tools Guide, patrons can login to their account over your website, tap the Profile tab and edit their fundraising affiliations on their own, on demand.

Paying a Fundraiser

Merchant operators are solely responsible for paying their list of non-profit fundraising organizations their accrued donations from all participating members on an agreed upon internal (monthly, quarterly, etc.) The donation receivables that accrue populate the REPORTING> Fundraising Dashboard. The Fundraising Dashboard keeps a running tally of all open donation receivables owed to fundraisers. In order to apply a payment to reduce the outstanding liability for that fundraiser, look for the Not Paid icon and click it. You will then have the opportunity to record a check or other payment method that will reduce the cumulative donation liability owed to that specific fundraising organization.

Giving Fundraisers a Login ID to Audit Donation Receivables

Merchant operators, at their discretion, can provide fundraising organization administrators with a login ID to access their fundraising account on our platform to review donation receivables and sales activity from non-profit members.  In order to generate a login ID you first must record the Administrator’s name and email address inside MARKETING> Fundraisers> Fundraiser EDIT and scroll to the Administrator field. Be sure to enter a valid email address for your fundraising administrator, which is necessary for auto generating a login ID.  There is a help text box under the Administrator field that contains instructions for how to generate the login ID credentials.  You will need to copy and paste a link and enter the fundraising administrator’s email address in that page, which will send that individual their fundraising login ID.  Your administrator will then have the ability to log directly into the Platform and review sales and donation activity from their members in real-time and historically. This login ID is part of our commitment to delivering 100% accounting transparency inside the Fundraising module so donations can be audited to the penny.

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Fundraising Module Overview and Setup Instructions

This article covers how to properly setup fundraisers inside your account for tracking donations from sales activity processed through your Virtual, VeriFone or POS integrated terminal. It is typically used by operators running a cash back or milestone rewards program.

Overview

The Fundraising module is a specialized stored value application that helps businesses connect with local non-profit organizations to grow sales and profits with 100% accounting transparency. The module works when using the Virtual, VeriFone or POS integrated terminal to record sales or invoice payments from your customers by recording a small donation from every sale recorded. The only time donations accrue is AFTER non-profit members spend money at your business. Unlike traditional fundraisers that might be limited to a one day or one week campaign, you can setup this type of fundraiser to run every day of the week all year round at your choosing.

Typically, the fundraisers added to the back office are local community organizations seeking to raise funds for their local chapter or cause. This could include a local girl scout troop, youth baseball team, rotary club or local foundation chapter.

Operators are 100% responsible for adding their own approved list of fundraisers and paying donations direct to said fundraisers based on reporting available from the system.  Operators can add any fundraising organization they wish to the approved list. We do not require your organizations to have official 501c3 non-profit status. The decisions and policies on which local organizations get added to your list is entirely up to the operator.

How do Donations Impact Rewards?

The short answer is they don’t.  The most common misconception about Fundraising is its impact on rewards issuance. Many operators incorrectly assume that tracking donations on sales activity somehow reduces the rewards earned from those sales by the % allocated for donations. On the contrary, donations and rewards are NOT pooled together or intertwined in any way. For example, if your business issues 10% cash back rewards to customers and then adds the Fundraising module to track 5% donations on those same sales tickets, customers will continue receiving the same 10% rewards (as configured in SETTINGS > Rewards Parameters).
Let’s dive into the math with a hypothetical example. If your account is configured to give 10% rewards to customers with 5% going to the patron’s charity as a donation, then two calculations are being performed on the same transaction as follows:    

The Reward Calculation Explained
The $20.00  Sales Ticket x 10% Rewards = $2.00 reward issued to the patron under this example. This $2.00 reward represents a future liability and NOT an expense. And when the expense comes through as a redemption it’s applied against the actual cost of a new sale (30% to 50%) while also factoring in breakage (% of rewards that are never redeemed). Historical breakage on rewards issued is about 38%.   This all means your actual economic cost on the $2.00 reward issued is MUCH less then $2.00.  It’s likely as low as $0.30 to $0.50 in real economic terms.

The Donation Calculation Explained

The same $20.00 Sales Ticket x 5% Donation = $1.00 donation accrued for the patron’s affiliated fundraiser.  This donation will be later grossed up with other donation transactions and paid out as a charitable tax deductible expense.   Donations represent real money paid out $ for $ back to the fundraising organization at an interval subject to the operator’s discretion.  In short, the $2.00 donation equals a $2.00 expense in real economic terms.  

When fundraising is enabled, donations are recorded separately, above and beyond rewards issuance.  This separate handling makes economic sense since rewards are “monopoly money” or a “house money” liability that are saved up and redeemed on future visits whereas donations represent real dollars paid back to non-profit organizations as an actual expense. Furthermore, patrons are not penalized with fewer rewards, rather patrons are rewarded with feeling their sale at your business not only  benefited them personally but also benefited a local community cause for which they feel passionate.  That’s a nice 1-2 punch for emotional retailing and instilling brand loyalty.  

NOTE: There is a work-around to above configuration using Membership Classes where patron accounts can be configured to yield 0% rewards and exclusively accrue donations. Please contact Technical Support for direct assistance setting this up as it involves performing an extra step inside the Virtual Terminal that affiliates a patron with a Membership Class yielding 0% rewards.

Fundraiser Setup Instructions

Requirements

Fundraising (Non-Profit) Marketing is an advanced stored value application which requires using a certified terminal to process sales transactions from customers.  You will need the Fundraising module enabled inside the back office denoted by a green checkmark on your Feature Dashboard. If this module is not enabled, tap the icon and submit a request to enable this feature.

Step 1: Open the Fundraisers Page

From your back office dashboard Home screen, click or tap Fundraisers from the MARKETING navigation menu. This page will display all fundraising organizations officially added to your account by a user with Administrator or Marketing security clearance. Fundraisers can only be added by authorized users on your account and you start out with none.

Step 2:   Add a New Fundraiser to Official List

Click the Add Fundraiser button to add a new fundraiser to your official non-profit list and start completing the online form mousing over the help text for field explanations. Let’s review the most important fields on this page in more detail.  

Patron Select:  Set to Yes to give both patrons and clerks the ability to (1) choose the affiliated fundraisers during registration (signup) and (2) ability to edit the patron’s profile anytime via a drop down dialog box added to the patron profile edit screen. We recommend toggling this field to Yes in most instances.  

Select No to prevent patrons and clerks from affiliating this specific fundraiser on their account during signup and editing. You would select No on this field if issuing plastic cards that are hard coded to a specific fundraising organization. Selecting No prevents patrons from selecting this specific fundraiser during signup or later editing their profile with changes. You might also select No if the fundraiser becomes INACTIVE and you don’t want this organization listed publicly anymore for affiliation.

Donation Rate:  Enter value as an integer representing a percentage of sales to accrue as a donation. For example, if you want to accrue 5% of sales from all members of this fundraiser as a donation, enter “5” in this field to represent 5%. This means a sales ticket of $10.00 will record 10.00 x 5% = $0.50 donation for this specific fundraising organization.    

Patrons can choose to affiliate their account with multiple fundraisers (if available) by tapping more than 1 option during signup or holding down the CONTL key if editing their profile from a desktop PC.  If a patron profile is affiliated with multiple fundraisers from the official Fundraisers list, the system calculates pro-rata donations among the affiliated fundraiser donation rates.  For example, if a patron is affiliated with 3 different fundraisers on their profile, each tracking a 6% donation, the system will allocate a pro-rata 2% donation on each sales ticket allocated among the 3 fundraisers, which together equal the full 6% approved for donation accrual. The pro-rata calculations ensure the operator is not over-paying donations to local non profit organizations above the entered donation rate.    
Complete all other fields to the best of your ability, including details about the fundraising administrator, if known.  A long as you have a fundraiser name, donation rate and patron select toggled on correctly, your donation calculations will work as intended.  

Fundraising Card Ranges Explained  
In the early days of the Platform the Fundraising module was exclusively reliant on assigning a sequential batch of card IDs to a specific non-profit organization. Some operators prefer to allocate a batch of cards to charitable organizations in this manner. The key attribute to using a card range is the card ID is “hardcoded” to the local fundraiser and patrons cannot change this affiliation on their own.  When the card ID is registered it automatically affiliates with the applicable fundraiser.  If interested in allocating plastic card ranges to fundraisers, please contact Technical Support for assistance ordering or reallocating an existing card range for fundraising use.

In the new modern era of using the Fundraisers module, card ranges are not assigned to local non-profit organizations. Patrons (or clerks) can affiliate a patron profile with any fundraiser in the approved Fundraisers list at any time during signup as long as the MARKETING> Fundraisers>Edit> Patron Select box is checked (Yes).

Fundraising affiliations can also be changed and edited anytime, on demand, via Patron Edit screen or when patrons log into their account online and click or tap the Profile tab. This ability to change affiliations is practical as over time, patrons may no longer be part of an original organization in the past and desire to support a different organization going forward. The Patron Select field controls this ability to change fundraising affiliation at the patron’s discretion.  

Step 3:  Update Registration Settings to Allow Fundraiser Selection

Click or tap SETTINGS> Registration Settings and scroll down to the field entitled, “Allow Patron Fundraiser Selection”. Assuming operators want to allow patrons the option to select a fundraiser from your approved Fundraisers list during signup (recommended), toggle this field to Yes. This setting will add the drop down dialog of box fundraisers to your customized registration (signup) form. The list of fundraisers patrons will be able to select during signup is restricted to only those fundraisers marked with Patron Select = Yes inside the Fundraisers page as described in Step 2 above.

At this point in the steps, you have the knowledge to create and edit fundraisers on your own so patrons can be affiliated to organizations and donations start recording on sales activity processed through your terminal. Donations will display as footer messages on online/printed receipts and will also display on the REPORTING> Reconciliation Report.  In addition, the automated Thank You Note toggled on from MARKETING> Automated Promotions> Thank You Note will automatically display a sentence calculating how much money the organization’s members have helped raise for their organization by invoking the {frtotal} tag.  

Manually Editing Patron Fundraiser Affiliation

As long as Allow Patron Fundraising Selection = Yes inside SETTINGS> Registration Settings, both clerks and patrons can edit their fundraising affiliation anytime on demand via the following ways:

First, clerks can pull up the patron’s profile inside Virtual Terminal or Patrons>Patron Search>Edit and manually select the fundraiser(s) for which the patron wishes to affiliate their account for donation tracking. This dialog box can be edited anytime on demand.  

Secondly, if your business has implemented the Website Tools Guide, patrons can login to their account over your website, tap the Profile tab and edit their fundraising affiliations on their own, on demand.

Paying a Fundraiser

Merchant operators are solely responsible for paying their list of non-profit fundraising organizations their accrued donations from all participating members on an agreed upon internal (monthly, quarterly, etc.) The donation receivables that accrue populate the REPORTING> Fundraising Dashboard. The Fundraising Dashboard keeps a running tally of all open donation receivables owed to fundraisers. In order to apply a payment to reduce the outstanding liability for that fundraiser, look for the Not Paid icon and click it. You will then have the opportunity to record a check or other payment method that will reduce the cumulative donation liability owed to that specific fundraising organization.

Giving Fundraisers a Login ID to Audit Donation Receivables

Merchant operators, at their discretion, can provide fundraising organization administrators with a login ID to access their fundraising account on our platform to review donation receivables and sales activity from non-profit members.  In order to generate a login ID you first must record the Administrator’s name and email address inside MARKETING> Fundraisers> Fundraiser EDIT and scroll to the Administrator field. Be sure to enter a valid email address for your fundraising administrator, which is necessary for auto generating a login ID.  There is a help text box under the Administrator field that contains instructions for how to generate the login ID credentials.  You will need to copy and paste a link and enter the fundraising administrator’s email address in that page, which will send that individual their fundraising login ID.  Your administrator will then have the ability to log directly into the Platform and review sales and donation activity from their members in real-time and historically. This login ID is part of our commitment to delivering 100% accounting transparency inside the Fundraising module so donations can be audited to the penny.

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