2010-04-29 Introductory call with Development Director re Donations on Web

Committee: 
Web Design
Meeting
Date: 
Thu, 04/29/2010 - 00:00
Location: 
Agenda: 

See minutes below

Groups audience: 
Attendees: 

Kevin Melchionne, Walt, Ann

Minutes: 

Following are Ann's notes from the call:

4/29/2010 Call with Kevin / Walt

Web site -- deep and rich. Amazing tool.

eBase remarkably robust for what it is.

Facebook page -- people using to make notes on trails, etc.

Prefacing donation with logon. All credit card activity is implicitly a registration. But does donor have to know they are registering? Kevin observes current state of the art is to not have explicit logon/pw.

Could implement more anonymous process but pw would be unknown to them. Use their email address as userid.

Trivial to implement "donate anonymously via Paypal" as a payment option. Adds another revenue stream to back office processing. Kevin to check with Josh and Hedy if this would be acceptable to add.

We use Payflow (bought by PayPal but originally owned by Verisign). Service charges significantly less.

Do changes on Drupal 6.

Technology committee : plan for migrating CRM to Web.
Membership experience not heavily transactional.
Rather, entry level philanthropic.
Make donor experience as smooth as possible.

Using email as userid -- becomes username for signing forums.

Look at Middlebury page as example.

Kevin concerned that donors are being turned off.

Walt about to sit with Josh, Gary and Hedy to go over Drupal 6 -- what changes should and should not go in? Currently have vanilla out of the box Ubercart.

Also need to schedule discussion re CRM. Add Kevin to Technology steering committee.

May 14th: Kevin at Teatown with Jane.

 

Comment: Please be relevant, civil, non-commercial.

Ann Gruhn's picture

It was a delight to talk with you this afternoon about the donation and membership transactions on the website. Josh and Hedy like your idea for a short term fix using PayPal. It's an added point for processing but it is worth the step to remove this barrier as quickly as possible.

 

For the short-term fix, the link that would change is the "donate now" button. "Join/renew now" would have to remain as is, I think. There is also the beautiful map ("Find and support your favorite trails") , which has its own links. I would defer to your judgment as to the feasibility (from both a technical and labor point of view) of redirecting these links to this new non-login point-of-sale, too.

 

As for the longer term adjustment for the migration to Drupal 6, we can talk more about how we want to arrange things but I think that Ann is on the right track with the middlebury.edu site. And, there is certainly information we will want to add, ie planned giving, instructions for non-cash gifts, contact info, special projects, etc.