We've just set up one page giving and we have thought of another use for the page. The intention of this procedure is to discontinue verbal collection of credit card details by phone.
I'd like to run this up the flagpole to see if anyone sees any pitfalls. I'd be grateful for your thoughts on this proposal:
Set up a separate "On Account" type for ticketing funds.
Set up a contrib type that would utilize OPG to accept payments to the new On Account.
Style the One-Page Giving form and confirmation for this contrib to refer to "Payments" rather than donations.
After creating a customer record if needed and verifying the primary login, our staff could then verbally direct customers to the new OPG page.
Guest fills out first, last and email using the primary login. (our logins are email addresses) Guest inputs the amount to pay, as instructed by our staff, and proceeds to Windcave hosted payment page.
Upon completion of the payment, our staff can then see the money On Account. They can then use the On Account funds to complete a reservation and send PAH tickets and confirmation as usual.
much thanks,
Kate
We also talked about doing this earlier this summer! We opted not to, primarily because we don't have a ton of installment billing patrons so it wasn't really worth the work to set it up, but I'd be very interested to hear how it works out for you!
To help the patrons input the right amount -- the url for donate pages can have amounts embedded in them, so if you are sending email reminders to your patrons to make payments, the link can have the amount embedded. If patrons owe different amounts (such as installment billing) you could potentially export the amount due in your mail merge prep and use that amount as a merge field at the end of the url (with no spaces) so the URL in the email would end with donate/q/[slug]?amount=[mergefield]
Although that's with the disclaimer that I've had trouble getting those fields to export cleanly - I had to write some SQL to do so.
Hi Anna-
It sounds like you did a lot of great work with SQL and mail merging, really great to hear about. One point of clarification is that while you can set the suggested amount for a One-Page Giving page in your configuration of LTR_TNEW_CONTRIB_TYPE, the ?amount parameter is not supported, however you can use ?promo to populate a source number.
Oh thank you for catching that Paul! Our original work on that was before one-page came out so glad to know we'd still have to use the standard contribution page if the embedded amount is an important step for us.