Giving Impact Help & Support

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How do I get started?

Getting started with Giving Impact involves three essentials including setting up your payment settings, creating your first campaign, and adding that campaign to your website. You can also customize your donation experience by adding your organizational logo for the donation screens and configuring your widget to match to look and feel of your website.

Payment Settings

Giving Impact utilizes PayPal for all donation payment processing. You can choose to use either PayPal Express or PayPal Pro. Paypal Express offers a quick setup process and no monthly cost but requires that all donors use or create a PayPal account as part of the donation process. PayPal Pro allows donors to pay simply with their credit card and allows us to offer a more streamlined and brand-integrated donation experience where Express will require donors to go directly to PayPal for payment processing.

You are responsible for setting up and managing your PayPal merchant account. Once you have setup your PayPal account, you can refer to the following knowledge base article to help you access the information that you need to provide Giving Impact in order to link to your PayPal account.

Creating Your First Campaign

Creating a new campaign is simple process.

  1. Click the “Create New Campaign” button from the Dashboard.
    Create a campaign image
  2. Complete the new campaign form. Each campaign has a name, target amount (USD), description, and status.
    New campaign form screen
  3. Click save and your campaign is created.

Campaign Publishing

Once you have setup your payment settings and have created your first campaign you are ready to publish your campaign so you can start promoting it. At its simplest publishing your campaign involves copying a snippet of code for your donation widget that in turn needs to be added to appropriate pages on your website. The process is similar to adding a YouTube video or Flickr slideshow to a page. If you choose to, you can customize the look and feel of the widget so it shares a desired look and feel.

  1. From the dashboard click on the name of the campaign you want to publish to get to the “Activity Overview” tab of that campaign. Next click the “Publishing Settings” tab.
    Publishing settings screen
  2. In the “Embed Code” section you can preview your widget or select the code to copy and paste to use on your website. In the “Customize Widget” section you can tweak various settings to vary the look and feel of the widget content.

If you have any questions regarding how to add the widget code to your website you should consult with a technical resource to help. We have created a technical document that you can use/refer to for more information about the technical details of the widget code and our implementation approach.

Last updated on Aug, 08 2010