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Foundation donations and donors

Once your foundation starts accepting money, two pages become the centerpieces of your daily work: Donations and Donors. They look at the same data from two angles — Donations is row-per-transaction, Donors is row-per-person — and they share filter and export tooling. This page walks through both and explains the dedup behavior that quietly stitches your donor list together over time.

Donations page​

Reach this page at Foundation → Donations. It is the canonical ledger of every donation attempt — successful, pending, failed, or refunded — across every campaign in your foundation.

Foundation Donations page with status filter tabs and donor search. Foundation Donations page with status filter tabs and donor search.

Status filter tabs​

Across the top of the table are five tabs: All, Completed, Pending, Failed, Refunded. Click any tab to filter the list view. Note — see the "Export to CSV" section below for the export's known behavior, which doesn't follow the tab filter.

What each status means:

  • Completed — the charge succeeded and Stripe confirmed it via webhook. Counts toward fund and campaign totals. Receipt has been triggered.
  • Pending — the payment intent was created but Stripe has not yet confirmed the charge. Most donations sit here for less than a second; if you see Pending lasting more than a few minutes, the donor likely abandoned the payment form or there is a webhook delivery problem.
  • Failed — Stripe rejected the charge (declined card, fraud filter, expired card, etc.). The donor saw an error on the public page.
  • Refunded — a Foundation Admin issued a refund via Stripe. Donor totals, fund totals, and campaign totals were decremented when the refund cleared.

Donation rows​

Each row shows the donation date, the donor's display name (or "Anonymous" if the donor checked the anonymous box on the public page), the amount, the fund, the campaign (if attributed to one), and the status. Click any row to open the detail dialog.

Donation detail dialog​

The detail dialog surfaces everything attached to a single donation:

  • Donor name and email
  • Amount, fee, and net amount (net = amount - fee unless the donor opted to cover the fee, in which case net = amount)
  • Currency
  • Fund and campaign
  • Status
  • Date
  • Whether the donor covered fees
  • Refund timestamp and reason, if refunded
  • Notes — either donor-provided ("In memory of …") or admin-added internal notes

Two action buttons sit at the bottom of the dialog:

  • Resend Receipt — appears whenever a receipt has been generated for the donation. Re-queues the receipt email task; the donor receives a fresh copy with the same receipt number.
  • Refund — appears only on Completed donations. Opens a confirmation dialog before issuing the refund. Refunds go through Stripe; once Stripe acknowledges the refund, the donation flips to Refunded and the donor, fund, and campaign totals are decremented.

Search and sort​

Above the table, a search box filters by donor name. Column headers are sortable. Pagination is fixed at 25 rows per page; use the search and status filters to narrow the list before browsing.

Export CSV​

Click Export CSV in the header to download the currently-filtered Completed donations as a CSV. Columns:

Date, Donor Email, Donor Name, Amount ($), Fund, Campaign, Fee ($), Net ($), Receipt #

Note that only Completed donations are included in the CSV regardless of the status tab — the export is intended as a finance-team artifact, not a debug dump. If you need every status, fetch via the API.

The export does not include refunded donations, so reconciling refunds requires a separate query.

Donors page​

Reach this page at Foundation → Donors. It is the people view: every unique email that has ever donated to your foundation gets a row here, regardless of how many donations they have made.

Foundation Donors page with search box and Member column Foundation Donors page with search box and Member column

What is a donor​

A donor is uniquely identified by the combination of foundation and email address. Donors are created automatically — there is no "add donor" button on the donors page, because every donor record comes into being either when someone donates through the public page or when an admin creates a donation on their behalf. (See "Manual donor entry" below.)

The donors page is a read-only directory plus search.

Member vs guest​

The Member column shows a green check or a dash. A green check means this donor's email matches an active member of your organization (or any of their verified secondary emails). The system links the donor record to the underlying user account automatically the first time a match is found, including retroactively after the fact if the email becomes verified later.

What counts as "active member" for linking: anyone with a membership in the foundation's organization whose status is one of undergrad, associate, alumni, active_alumni, lifetime_alumni, or inactive. Members in prospect, interested, or other pre-affiliation statuses are not auto-linked.

Donor detail dialog​

Click a row to open the detail dialog. You see:

  • Contact: name, email, phone, address
  • Whether they are a member or a guest
  • Lifetime stats: total donated, donation count, first donation date, last donation date
  • Recent donations (up to ten)
  • Active recurring pledges (if any)

Donors marked as anonymous on individual donations still appear here under their real name; the anonymous flag is per-donation and only affects what shows on the public donation page (not what admins see).

The search box filters by name and email substring. There is no tag system today, no notes field, and no custom-fields support for donors — donors are an emergent record, not a managed one.

Guest-donor dedup​

This is the silent feature that makes the Donors page useful over time. When a donation comes in through the public page, the platform looks up whether a donor record already exists for the foundation + email combination:

  • If yes, the existing donor is reused. The donation attaches to that donor, and the donor's lifetime stats update. Empty contact fields on the donor record are backfilled from the donation form if the new donation provides them (e.g., if the donor record had no phone but the new form filled in a phone, it sticks).
  • If no, a new donor is created with the form data and the donation attaches to it.

Email matching is case-insensitive — Jane@Example.com and jane@example.com collapse into one donor.

What dedup does NOT do​

  • It does not merge donors across email addresses. If Jane donates once as jane@example.com and once as jane.smith@example.com, you get two donor records. There is no merge tool in the UI today.
  • It does not cross foundations. Each foundation has its own donor namespace; even on the same platform, the same email can be two different donor records under two different foundations.
  • It does not retroactively reconcile when a name changes. The donor's name on the record reflects what was submitted on the most-recent donation only when fields were previously empty; existing name fields are not overwritten by subsequent donations.

Member linking​

In parallel with dedup, every donation also tries to link the donor to a user account. The link is one-way: a donor record carries an optional user reference. The link is established by email lookup against the User table and the verified-email table, scoped to memberships in the foundation's organization.

The link matters because:

  • The Members module shows a "Donations" tab on the member detail page when the donor is linked, surfacing the member's giving history in their member profile.
  • The donor portal — accessible to authenticated users at /foundation/my-donations — pulls history via the user link, not the donor email, so unlinked donors cannot see their history even if they create an account later.
  • Reporting and analytics roll up giving by member when the link exists.

If a guest donor matches a member later (e.g., they were not a member when they donated but joined later), the link is established on their next donation through find_or_create_donor — but historical donations made before joining are not automatically re-linked.

Manual donor entry​

There is no "add donor" form on the donors page today. To record an off-platform gift (check, cash, grant), you have two practical options:

  1. Use the public donation page yourself — go to your campaign's public URL, fill in the donor's name and email, enter the amount, and complete the test/live charge. This is the official path for new donor records. If your processor is in test mode you can simulate the gift; if in live mode the donor's card or your foundation's card will actually be charged.
  2. Use the API directly — for bulk imports of historical gifts, your platform admin can run a one-off script using the create_donation service. This is not exposed in the UI.

Adding a manual donor entry form is on the roadmap; track the issue in your platform's project tracker.

Refunds​

To refund a donation:

  1. Open Foundation → Donations.
  2. Click the donation row to open the detail dialog.
  3. Click Refund, then Confirm Refund in the confirmation dialog.

The platform calls Stripe to issue a full refund — partial refunds are not supported through the UI. Stripe processes the refund (usually instant for cards, 5-10 business days to land on the donor's statement), fires the charge.refunded webhook back to the platform, and the donation flips to Refunded.

When the refund completes:

  • The donor's lifetime total is decremented by the donation amount and donation count is decremented by one.
  • The fund's total raised is decremented.
  • The campaign's total raised is decremented (if the donation was attributed to a campaign).
  • The donation's refunded_at timestamp is set and the optional reason you typed is stored.

A refunded donation row remains in the Donations table under the Refunded filter — refunds preserve the audit trail.

Tips​

  • Use the email search. It is faster than scrolling, and donor records are keyed by email so you will always find the right row.
  • Export Completed donations monthly. The CSV is the easiest way to hand finance the running totals without giving them platform access.
  • Treat anonymous donations carefully. Donors who tick "anonymous" expect their name not to appear in donor lists or thank-you bulletins. Use the per-donation is_anonymous flag to decide what to publish.
  • Reconcile refunds separately. The Completed-only CSV does not include refunds, so if you are reconciling against Stripe's monthly statement, pull the Refunded filter too.

Last verified against v0.62.1 (2026-05-10).