Allow Donors to Cover the Processing Fees

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When building donation or interaction with payment forms in the Responsive Forms tool, you have the ability to ask donors to cover the processing fees of the transaction. To enable this option do the following:

  1. Go to the Form Builder tab of your form
  2. Add the “(Donation) Processing Fee %” field to your form.
  3. Click the gear icon on the left of this field and set your desired % and whether it should be selected by default or not.
  4. Save the changes in both the settings window and the Form Builder tab

The text on the actual form is dynamically generated using the percentage that you set. For a 3% selection, the form text will show “Add 3% to cover payment processing fees.” This text is not editable.

When a donor checks the box, the Amount field will still display the original amount. It will not add the processing fee % until the form is submitted. The confirmation web page and email will both display the final amount including the extra percentage.

Processing Fees are Also Tax Deductible

For tax deductible donations that receive no goods or services in return, 100% of the amount a donor gives is tax deductible. This includes any extra amount they give to “cover the processing fees.” For example, a $100 tax deductible donation plus 3% ($3.00) means that a $103 charitable contribution was made. This is the amount that will show in the Amount field of your donation record and on all confirmation emails and acknowledgement letters. Do not subtract the additional amount from the total amount field in the donation record that is created in DonorSnap. Your accountant handles recording expenses for processing fees on the accounting side, not in your donor management system.

Best Practices

Do not default the Processing Fee % field to Yes. We have found that donors prefer to be given the choice to add an extra percentage, and many happily choose to add this extra amount. Therefore you should not default the Processing Fee % field to Yes. It should be defaulted to No so the the donor does not have to uncheck the box if they prefer not to add to their donation. When donors have to uncheck the box, it could deter them from making a donation altogether.

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