One click PayPal donations with CiviCRM

Creative Commons has been using CiviCRM for several years. A number of months ago we decided that for our annual fundraising campaign we wanted to streamline the donation process, possibly reducing it to a single click on the CC site.. About a month ago we launched our annual campaign along with a one-click donation process. The process required a bit of custom coding, but fortunately very few changes to core CiviCRM code. Some of the main benefits of this method are:

• The contributor (potentially) makes only a single click to donate on your site. The less clicks/keystrokes the better chance someone will complete a contribution.
• You are no longer limited to designing your contribution pages within the confines/scope of Drupal and CiviCRM. You can create pages the way you want, wherever you want. This is especially nice for widgets, or anyone else wanting to help your campaign. Potentially, people can create their own donate links on their own sites ... it doesn't matter. And if you run multiple sites, you can place Donate links wherever you want on any of those sites, and it makes no difference whether it's run by Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, or even made with static HTML.
• Tired of Pending (Incomplete Transaction) contribution statuses and bogus contacts for people who never completed a transaction? This method eliminates those 100% because no contact or contribution will ever end up in the database until a contribution has been completed at PayPal.

I have documented the process on the CC Wiki in case this might be of interest to anyone else. Thanks to Lobo for the script bin/ContributionProcessor.php, on which this new process is largely based. You can see it in action on the CC donation page by clicking on any of the "Donate Now" links. It's actually more than one click on the CC site because we had too many things we wanted to include, but it could be one click.

Comments

Nathan, has this been tested compatible with 4.x on wordpress? Thanks!

Nathan,

This looks a good workflow.  I notice the code files listed at https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Single_click_donations_with_CiviCRM are dead links.  It could be nice to see those if they're still available.

Thanks,

Steve