Campaign Kickstart

You need a way for supporters to contribute to the campaign.

There are a variety of choices for contributions which all come with their own set of pros and cons. They are:

• Paypal • Actblue • Authorize.net or Verisign • NGP or similar campaign service

But there are several things which you’ll want to consider when setting up a contribution service. Most importantly, you need to collect employer and occupation information for contributions of $200 or more. Actblue does this automatically.

Another thing to consider is that you want to collect as much contributor information as possible, such as an email address (you DO want to thank them for the donation, right?), and you can still collect this info by hosting a form on your website before sending the contributor off to the payment service. The beauty of this setup is your form will pass that info off to the payment processor with hidden fields. Paypal works well with this setup.

The “official” way to process payments is with Authorize.net or Verisign. Again, you can send them off directly to the payment processor, or you can host a secure webpage to collect that information and pass it along to the processor. Since authorize.net doesn’t accept employer and occupation information (one would think they’d have an easy solution for campaigns, but no) you’ll want to store that information locally, and you can use the hidden form fields trick for this.

NGP and other services will take care of all this legwork for you, even letting you embed their form in a frame on your non-secure website. But don’t get the impression that this is ideal—the data gets stored on their server, and you’ll have to manually retrieve it if you’re maintaining your own email list of contributors and supporters. Also, these guys will take a heavy cut in commissions.