Accept online donations via PayPal
If you accept online donations through PayPal, you can now set up your LGL account to receive notifications about those donations, and automatically add them to your database. Notifications are sent from PayPal via their Instant Payment Notifications feature (IPN), and there are a couple steps involved with getting this set up.
- Activate your IPN Handler URL in LGL
- Configure PayPal to use this IPN URL
Once you have the integration set up on both sides, all of your PayPal donations will be automatically saved into your Integration Queue in LGL. From there, you can review them, make small updates (override constituent matching, for example) and then save them to the database.
Activate your IPN Handler URL in LGL
The first step is very simple. Log in to your LGL account, and go to your Integration Settings page, and click on the PayPal Integration menu.
Click on the Activate IPN Handler, and then copy the URL to your clipboard.
Globally set your IPN in PayPal
To have all PayPal payments sent to your LGL account, you can enable IPN notifications, and set the URL to be your LGL IPN Handler URL. Here are the basic steps to setting that up:
- Make sure that you have enabled PayPal IPN within LGL (see above)
- Log in to your PayPal account, and go to the "Profile" section, and click on the "Instant Payment Notification preferences" link:
- If you do not have IPN enabled at all, you will see a screen like this:
- Click the "Choose IPN Settings" button, and then paste your LGL IPN Handler URL into the "Notification URL" field, click the "Receive IPN Messages" radio button, and then click "Save"
If you want to have LGL receive all donation requests to your account, that is all that you need to do! The next donation you receive will then flow through to your Integration Queue, where you can review it prior to saving it into your LGL database.