Step One: The Donor Arrives

The donor clicks on your donation link. This can be a button, a graphic or a text link. That link takes the donor to a complete reproduction of your website hosted on Qgiv's Secure Servers. This page contains your Qgiv donation form but looks and feels exactly like your website, complete with your own images, styles and navigation in place. More information about this can be found in the Features section of Donation University as you move through the courses.

The donor completes the donation form by entering personal information, selecting the option to donate one-time and choosing $100 as the amount. The donor then selects a method of payment and clicks a submit button to complete the transaction.

What follows takes place over the span of about one second.

Verification and Approval

Personal information and billing information is transmitted by Qgiv to the merchant provider for authentication and authorization.

Transmission of this sensitive data is protected by compliance with PCI DSS Standards. You can read more about how the standard protects your donor's data later in Donation University.

The merchant provider identifies the type of card being used and contacts that credit card company to see if the card is valid and if there is enough of a balance to cover the transaction. If the card comes back valid and with enough of a balance, the credit card company transmits an approval code back to the merchant provider and schedules funds to be moved to your organization's merchant account for settlement.

If the transaction is declined for any reason, Qgiv displays the reason for the decline to the donor and asks them to verify the data entered and re-submit the transaction with corrected information. Donor-correctable decline reasons include Address Verification Mismatch, Card Validation Code Errors, or other mistyped information. Donors can easily correct this information and re-submit the transaction.

Receipts and Notification

Once validated, the merchant provider transmits the approval code to Qgiv. When the approval arrives, Qgiv then displays a receipt and confirmation page to the donor. Qgiv will also send the donor an automatic email receipt with content customized by your organization. This is the end of involvement for the donor and the end of the one second time span.

The reporting suite has also been instantly updated with this transaction. All reports are real-time and contain the most up-to-date information as your donors give to your organization.

Settlement and Funds Transfer

At the end of the day, the credit card company deposits the $100 into your organization's merchant account for settlement. About twenty-four hours later your merchant provider will then transfer the $100 electronically into your organization's bank account. That's the entire $100 up front in about forty-eight hours, no fees are taken at this time.

This provides your organization with a constant stream of funding. You get the funds the donor has specified as fast as possible. At no time are the funds ever in the possession of another company or placed in any other bank account. Your organization retains complete control over your funds throughout the entire donation process.

This ends the donation process. One-second approvals and forty-eight hours to funds arriving in your organization's bank account. This is the advantage of using a Gateway to provide your online donations.

The Big Picture and Safety

In the next few sections of Donation University you will be introduced to the details of Safety in the online donation process. Safety includes both Security and Compliance. To give you an overview of what role security and compliance takes in the online donation process, we have illustrated the different areas of coverage for each term.

Security is the protection of data entered by your donors and transmitted across the internet. As you will learn later in Donation University, easily identified marks of a safe site include a lock icon and valid SSL Security Certificate. Security not only keeps donor information safe, it provides valuable piece of mind to your donors.

PCI Compliance ensures that an online donation company complies with the standards set forth by the credit card industry to protect sensitive data from theft. It governs how an online donation provider transmits and handles sensitive data like credit card numbers and banking information. It is the responsibility of the donation provider to be compliant, not the organization.

The Big Picture

Here is the complete view of the way online donations are processed, start to finish and including the different responsibilities of security and compliance: