Authorization for Back-Office Volunteers

Kevin Li
Kevin Li
Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1 2024 Season of Giving
in SKY Developer General Discussions

Hello,

I am currently in the process of creating a back-office donation page for volunteers. They will be taking payment information from donors over the phone, inputting the information into the page, and donating on the donor's behalf.

I am using Blackbaud Checkout for the donation form, but I am having trouble understanding how to complete the transaction using the Checkout Transaction endpoint from the Payments API.

This endpoint requires an OAuth 2.0 access token and I have followed all the steps of creating an application and redirecting upon authorization. However, if I am to use this page for volunteers, they will not have a Blackbaud account to login to and grant authorization.

I was thinking of using server-to-server API requests to get an auth token, but I do not know how I'm supposed to authorize the user as it currently needs user interaction to login/authorize the app.

Is there a solution to this problem?

Thanks,
Kevin

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Kevin Li
    Any reason why you have to build a donation form? for the purpose you mentioned, you can just use an existing donation form platform your org use for external donation and simply have the volunteer submit the donation on the donor behalf.

  • Kevin Li
    Kevin Li
    Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1 2024 Season of Giving

    @Alex Wong
    The current donation form being used is a Raiser's Edge NXT embed donation form, but we want to create our own so that we can have full control over the design, inputs, validation, verification, etc.

  • Kevin Li
    Kevin Li
    Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1 2024 Season of Giving

    @Alex Wong
    Sorry to bother you, but do you have any clues as to how I should approach this?

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 4 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Kevin Li
    I have not created a custom donation form and use Blackbaud Payment API for processing transaction. Our internal need to process on behalf of donor were handled with a donation page customized on Luminate Online, which is quite customizable to begin with.

    So I was hoping that someone else on the forum can point you to the right direction.

    However, I think I have seen a discussion on this before, relating using of authorization token to make call or is there a way to do it without authorization (as “external” volunteer will not be able to login to get authnorization token). Someone had mentioned that Blackbaud Checkout API went through how to do it without authorization token, so you may want to see if you can search for the community post.

    Without knowing anything else, I would have went with the authorization token route and have a “preserved” authorization token for an internally used form.

    Not much help, but again, hoping for someone who might have done it to speak up.

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