Virtual Terminal

Accept donations from your computer with Virtual Terminal.

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

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

Once the Virtual Terminal has been enabled, you can tap the T key on your keyboard to launch the Virtual Terminal from anywhere in the Dashboard.

PCI compliance

By enabling the 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 five possible donation sources in Fundraise Up: Checkout modal, Campaign Page, 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 the Virtual Terminal

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

User Role Virtual Terminal access
Organization Administrator ✅ Yes
Campaign Administrator ✅ Yes
Campaign Manager ✅ Yes
Support Specialist ✅ Yes
Virtual Terminal Specialist ✅ Yes
View only ⛔ No

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 the Virtual Terminal that provide access donation-related fields and properties during checkout.

Campaign

The Campaign section at the top of the Virtual Terminal includes a property for selecting the Fundraise Up campaign that this donation should be associated with. Based on the choice of campaign, some fields and properties further along may be shown or hidden.

Standardize donation processing by configuring a default campaign to use with Virtual Terminal. Learn more →

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 a start date for the recurring plan — the day on which the first installment will be charged. If One-time is selected, you can choose the date on which that donation will be charged.

The recurring plan frequencies available in the Virtual Terminal are: Daily, Weekly, Biweekly, Every 4 weeks, Monthly, Bimonthly, Quarterly, Semiannual, and Annual.

Recurring plan limits

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 cumulative 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 canceled

When you add a limit, the full Installment plan will appear on the right-hand side. 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 Virtual Terminal user processing the donation.

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

Supporter

The Supporter section includes fields for the supporter related to the donation. Using the search function, you can autofill information for your existing supporters. This functionality is enabled 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 settings you have in place 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, as well as fields for comments and tribute giving.

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

If you process multiple supporters using one single email address, these supporters will all be merged into one Supporter record under the name of the first supporter whose donation was processed using that email address. This data cannot later be separated into different Supporter records. For this reason, we strongly recommend processing donations with separate emails for each supporter.

Payment method

You can process a Virtual Terminal donation using any of the following types of 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.

You will only see a saved payment method if the supporter already has an existing recurring donation that’s being processed through Fundraise Up. Scroll down to learn more about saved payment methods in the Virtual Terminal.

Custom fields

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

Donation receipt email

By default, supporters receive emails for donations processed using the 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 set to process its first installment immediately. 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 for the supporter is entered in the Virtual Terminal
  • If the Don’t send email option is selected at the bottom of the Virtual Terminal

Additional notes

If you wish to display instructions, call scripts or other notes for your users alongside the Virtual Terminal, enable the Show additional notes during Virtual Terminal checkout option in the Dashboard settings for the Virtual Terminal and add your text.

Saved payment methods

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

Compatible payment methods include:

How it works

  • Recurring Donations: After processing a recurring donation through Fundraise Up, the payment details are tokenized and securely stored in Stripe. These stored details can be reused for future donations of any type, whether they are one-time or recurring, using the Virtual Terminal. This means that supporters won't need to input their payment details again for each donation through the Virtual Terminal.
  • One-Time Donations:

    After processing a first one-time donation, the saved payment method details can be reused through VT with the following restrictions:

    • If another one-time donation is made using the saved payment details after the initial one, then after this second one-time donation, the payment details will no longer be available in VT for further reuse. They will not be stored for future donations.
    • If a recurring donation is made after the initial one-time donation, the payment details will be retained and can be reused for any donation types in the future.

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

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

We strongly recommend notifying us in advance of any high-volume events where the 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 us at support@fundraiseup.com.

By default, Fundraise Up can process 200 real-time transactions per second, which is 25 times the processing demand of even the busiest days of the year. As needed, this processing capacity can be scaled to 1,000 transactions per second.

Settings

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

 

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