Before your first real donation
Run through this before you share your donation page with the public — each check is something that’s easy to leave on a default and expensive to notice later.
Before you start
Section titled “Before you start”Work through Setup Health first — everything below assumes the essentials it checks are already green.
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Confirm your payment gateway is on Production, not Sandbox. A gateway connected in Sandbox mode processes donations that never touch real money. Open your gateway’s settings and check which environment tab your live credentials are saved under. See Connect your payment gateway.
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Set your own receipt numbering. Until you do, receipts go out under DonorCARE’s generic prefix instead of a series that’s clearly yours. See Set your receipt numbering.
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Verify your sender domain. Receipt and donation emails sent from an unverified domain are more likely to land in spam, and some donors’ mail providers reject them outright. See Set up your sender domain.
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Set tax-deductibility correctly, if it applies to you. A campaign only issues tax-deductible receipts when both your organisation’s tax exemption status is approved and the individual campaign has opted in — missing either one means donors who expected a tax-deductible receipt won’t get one. See Make a campaign tax-deductible.
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Clear your sample data. Sample campaigns and their donations count in your dashboard totals and finance exports until you remove them — a real donation sitting alongside sample figures makes both look wrong. See Your sample campaign.
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Check who holds which role. Confirm the people who should be able to void a donation, publish a campaign, or run an export actually hold a role that lets them — and that nobody who shouldn’t still has Admin from setup. See Roles and permissions.
If something goes wrong
Section titled “If something goes wrong”| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A donation appears to succeed but never shows up in your bank account | The gateway is still in Sandbox mode. | Switch to your Production credentials and re-test with a small real donation. |
| A donor says their receipt email never arrived | Your sender domain isn’t verified, or the email landed in spam. | Verify your domain, then ask the donor to check spam before assuming the email never sent. |
Related
Section titled “Related”Screenshots use sample data. Every screen on this page is captured against a demo organisation seeded with generated donors, amounts, receipt numbers and campaigns. Any resemblance to a real person or organisation is coincidental.