PayPal Giving Fund Data Entry

Erin BillingsleyDadd

I was just wondering how other organisations handle entering donations received via PayPal Giving Fund or other similar platforms, such as My Cause Giving Fund.

Having read into the details, donors are technically donating to these funds, rather than us. The receipts they get say PayPal Giving Fund and the like, and then the Funds disburse the money to the non-profits/ charities. Would you enter the donations on a record for PayPal Giving Fund and the like and then soft credit the donors, or would you credit the donors (mark as Do Not Receipt of course) and treat PayPal Giving Fund and the like more as payment facilitators?

It seems that most third party platforms, at least the ones I have seen, act as facilitators, so we can rightfully credit the donors, but there are a few like PayPal Giving Fund whereby donors are technically donating to them and nominating our charity to receive the money from the Fund, so these people have technically not donated to us.

Am I over-thinking this? What do other people do for these types of transactions?

Patti Hommes

We credit the donor and treat the giving platforms as facilitators. We acknowledge the donor, leaving out any tax language.

Erin BillingsleyDadd

That's what I had been planning to do and do for most typical platforms, but I suppose PayPal Giving Fund is a bit different having had a read of their Charity User Agreement, where they outline that they are the ones making the donations to the charities.I agree that we should acknowledge the donors but in terms of who to credit, I would imagine we would need to credit PayPal Giving Fund as they make the donations. My thought process was to soft credit the donors and pull acknowledgements based on that. To be honest, nearly all donations we receive via PayPal Giving Fund are anonymous anyway, so they would be going on an anonymous record (which we probably wouldn't soft credit). However, there are a few which are not. Here is the link where I pulled the below snippet from: https://www.paypal.com/au/webapps/mpp/givingfund/policies/user-agreement.

Mallory Wiswell

We process the donation under PayPayl Giving fund as the legal donor and then add recognition credit for each of the individual donors using the activity report from PPGF. This is the same way we handle Donor Advised Funds. We do not send out true “receipts”, but rather an acknowledgement letter if we have name & contact info for the individuals.