The Virtual Terminal is a feature built in to the Fundraise Up Dashboard that enables you to process donations directly from your account. The Virtual Terminal is useful for processing in-person and over-the-phone donations. It is scalable for use in front office environments and large call centers.

Basics

Before using the Virtual Terminal, get to know its basics by reviewing the documentation below.

Enabling the Virtual Terminal

By default, Virtual Terminal is not enabled for your Fundraise Up account. To enable Virtual Terminal, view its settings page in the Dashboard and select Enable Virtual Terminal.

Donations processed through Virtual Terminal incur your organization's established platform fee.

PCI compliance

By enabling Virtual Terminal, you extend the scope of your PCI compliance to include your organization’s networks and computer systems. We recommend reviewing your device management plan to ensure that necessary security and privacy measures are in place.

Donation source

There are four possible donation sources in Fundraise Up: Website, Virtual Terminal, P2P fundraiser, and Recurring migration. The source for any donation processed using Virtual Terminal is Virtual Terminal. This helps identify Virtual Terminal records in the Dashboard, Exports templates, and integrations.

Access to Virtual Terminal

All but one user role in Fundraise Up can access Virtual Terminal and use it to process donations. Review the user roles below.

We recommend auditing the users added to your Fundraise Up account and reducing permission levels where possible. This helps you reduce the number of devices that are in the scope of your organization’s PCI compliance.

Configuration

This section describes the six sections in Virtual Terminal that provide access donation-related fields and properties during checkout.

Campaign

The Campaign section in Virtual Terminal includes a property for selecting the Fundraise Up Campaign that the donation should be associated with. Based on the Checkout configuration of the selected campaign, some fields and properties will be shown or hidden.

If designations are enabled for the selected campaign, a designation property is displayed that enables a user to select a designation for the donation.

Donation

In the Donation section, you can configure the donation as a one-time or recurring donation. When the Recurring option is selected, you can set the installment amount, frequency, and start date for the recurring plan that will be created.

The recurring plan frequencies available in Virtual Terminal are: Daily, Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly, Bimonthly, Quarterly, Semiannual, and Annual.

You can also set limitations on each recurring plan you create in the Virtual Terminal. You can set a cut-off limit for any new recurring donation plan by:

• Max plan amount: the total maximum donation amount for the recurring plan
• Max plan installments: the maximum number of installments that will be made
• End date: the date on which the recurring plan will be cancelled

When you add a limit, a full installment plan will appear. If multiple limits are set for a recurring plan, the plan will be cancelled as soon as any one cut-off condition is met.

The Donation section also includes the option to cover transaction costs for the donation. By default, the fee coverage amount is automatically calculated, but the amount can be edited by the user processing the donation.

As a best practice, we recommend verbally confirming the fee coverage option with a donor when processing an in-person or over-the-phone donation.

Supporter

The Supporter section includes fields for the supporter related to the donation. Using the supporter search function, you can autofill information for existing donors. This functionality is on by default when you enable Virtual Terminal, but it can be disabled if required by your organization’s security policies. Similarly, you can configure the autofill functionality to be available to all user groups or you can exclude users with the Virtual Terminal Specialist role. Learn more →

Depending on the Checkout configuration for the selected campaign, a few other fields may be shown, including On behalf of, which is used for attributing a donation to an organization, and the fields for comments and tribute giving.

Unique to Virtual Terminal, an email address is not required to process a donation. This functionality is useful for accepting donations from donors that do not have email addresses.

Payment method

You can process a Virtual Terminal donation using three types of payment methods:

• Credit card
• ACH Direct Debit
• Saved payment methods

For card-based payment methods, you can opt to process the donation without the card’s CVC/CVV security code. This option is configured from the settings page for the Virtual Terminal in the Dashboard.

For donations scheduled for a later date, ACH Direct Debit cannot be used as a payment method. If a later date is chosen for the donation, ACH will not appear as a payment method option.

To learn more about using saved payment methods, read the section in this guide titled: “Saved payment methods.”

Custom fields

If custom fields exist for the campaign selected in Virtual Terminal, they are displayed in the Custom Fields section, and a Virtual Terminal user can input values.

Donation receipt email

By default, supporters receive emails for donations processed using Virtual Terminal. For one-time donations, the One-time receipt email is sent. For recurring donations, the Plan receipt email is sent if the recurring plan is immediately initiated. Alternatively, the Plan scheduled email is sent if the recurring plan is scheduled to begin on a later date.

There are two conditions under which emails are not sent to supporters:

• If no email address is entered in Virtual Terminal
• If the “Don’t send email” option is selected

Additional notes

If the Show additional notes during Virtual Terminal checkout option is enabled and text is included in the note editor, a notes area is displayed in Virtual Terminal. This feature is useful for displaying instructions or call scripts to Virtual Terminal users.

Saved payment methods

When a donation is processed using Fundraise Up, the payment details are tokenized and securely stored in Stripe. These payment details can later be reused to process new donations using Virtual Terminal.

Compatible payment methods include:

• Cards
• Wallets: Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Click to Pay
• Bank debits: Instant Direct Debit

When a saved payment method is selected in Virtual Terminal, a warning will be displayed: “Confirm method with supporter before using.” This warning is designed to remind Virtual Terminal users to verify the card details or payment account information with a supporter before processing the donation. Taking this step helps reduce the possibility of charging the wrong payment method and having to issue a refund.

High volume events

Virtual Terminal is designed to help users process donations quickly and at high volume. This functionality is useful for call center environments, events, and other live fundraising activities.

We strongly recommend notifying us in advance of any high volume events where Virtual Terminal will be used to process donations. This enables us to whitelist the IP addresses you will use for your event so that Fundraise Up’s anti-fraud tools do not flag your network and block traffic to the platform.

To notify Fundraise Up of an upcoming high-volume event, email support@fundraiseup.com.

Settings

Some options for Virtual Terminal are configured from the settings area of the Fundraise Up Dashboard.