How to setup a donations page for a charity website?

Question

I need to help a human rights organisation to setup a donation page at their website. They have tried PayPal and GlobalGiving and they found some glitches with these services like ceiling, transaction fees, etc. They want to setup their own mechanism. So what are the possible options and how much programming is needed? Is there any free-open source e-commerce or charity modules available?

Answer 1

Sounds like you are looking for something very customizable here, what I would recommend you is to do some custom coding or leverage solution like wufoo. You can build as simple as a form that whole bunch of fields and sends all these result to paypal or other payment gateways. Leveraging pre-built solution like wufoo is often recommended for non-technical people and/or simple, quick tasks like this.

(Alternatively) Most well-known applications like drupal, Joomal, wordpress (you name the rest) have fairly good support/module on this area, however, most of them require some degree of customizations and often become an overkill solution (mainly because of the learning curve).

Answer 2

You might look into Google Checkout. It's not free, but they do have an option tailored to non-profits (link).

The main benefit of going with them is that you won't need to set up a direct relationship with a CC merchant gateway, which can be a good sized hassle, especially for a smaller nonprofit. To me, the other benefit is that it keeps you far away from Raiser's Edge / Blackbaud, purveyors of some of the most awful donation pages I've ever had the misfortune to see or use.