Welcome to Donately

Getting started with Donately

Donately gives you donation forms you share as a link or embed on your website. Every gift goes straight into your own Stripe or Paystack account — Donately takes no cut. Follow these steps to collect your first donation.

1. Connect a payment provider

1. Open Settings → Payment Providers.
2. For cards worldwide, set up Stripe:
3. Paste your Publishable key and Secret key (the Get your Stripe keys link is right there).
4. Copy the Webhook URL shown and add it as an endpoint in your Stripe dashboard, then paste the Webhook signing secret back into Donately.
5. Tick Enable Stripe on donation forms and tap Save Stripe.
6. For African cards and bank transfer, set up Paystack:
7. Paste your Public key and Secret key.
8. Copy the Webhook URL into your Paystack dashboard.
9. Tick Enable Paystack on donation forms and tap Save Paystack.
10. Tap Test connection on each provider to confirm your keys work.

You can enable one or both. The webhook is what confirms payments and renews monthly gifts — don't skip it.

2. Set your receipt branding

1. In Settings, open Receipt branding.
2. Enter your Organization name and Tax ID — they appear on donor receipts.
3. Tap Save branding.

3. Create your first form

1. Open Forms and tap New form.
2. In Basics, name the form (e.g. Spring Appeal 2026). The URL ending fills itself from the name.
3. In Design, pick one of the four designs:

• Quiet — minimal, calm, sage-green.
• Editorial — magazine-style serif.
• Native — iPhone-app feel with glass.
• Progress — big campaign goal bar.

1. In Amounts, set the Suggested amounts buttons and the currency to charge in.
2. In Giving options, tick One-time and/or Monthly, and tick the payment method(s) you enabled in step 1.
3. Tap Create form.

4. Share the link

1. Open the form and expand the Links box.
2. Tap Copy next to Share link — anyone with the link can donate, no account needed.
3. Tap Preview the form → to see exactly what donors see.

Paste the link into WhatsApp, email, social media, or print it on a poster. The Sharing tutorial covers embedding and custom domains.

What Donately costs

Donately is included with your Pancho plan (Plus and up). There are no per-donation fees — Donately never takes a cut and never holds your money. On the free trial you can build and preview forms; saving Stripe or Paystack keys needs a paid plan.

Running Donately day to day

The daily loop: watch donations come in, know your donors, keep recurring gifts healthy.

1. Check the dashboard

Open Home. You get four numbers at a glance — Total raised, This month, Active recurring, and Forms live — plus your most recent donations and top forms.

2. Work the donations list

1. Open Donations.
2. Filter by form, status (Completed / Pending / Failed / Refunded), frequency (One-time / Monthly), or switch Active / Archived.
3. Tap CSV to download the list.

From a form's own page, View donations jumps straight to that form's donations, with a banner and a Clear filter link.

3. Open a donation

Tap any donation to see the amount, form, donor, provider transaction details, and any custom answers.

• Refunds happen in your Stripe or Paystack dashboard, not in Donately. When the refund clears there, this page updates automatically via webhook.
• Archive this donation hides it from the main list without losing the record — good for test gifts. Restore from archive brings it back.
• Delete removes the record permanently. The actual payment in Stripe/Paystack is untouched.

4. Know your donors

1. Open Donors and search by name, email, or phone.
2. Tap a donor to see Total given, every donation, their subscriptions, and private Notes only you can see.

Repeat donors are matched by email automatically — one person, one record, no duplicates.

5. Manage recurring gifts

Monthly gifts renew by themselves via webhook. To stop one, open the donor's profile and tap Cancel on the subscription.

6. Read your reports

1. Open Reports from the Home quick actions.
2. Pick a date range and tap Apply.

You get daily revenue, recurring vs one-time, top forms, top donors, and recurring health (active subscribers, past-due, monthly recurring revenue).

7. Get a push when a donation lands

1. Open Settings → Notifications.
2. Install the free ntfy app on your phone and subscribe to the topic shown there.
3. Tick Notify me when a donation comes in and tap Save notifications.

Keep things tidy

• Hide a form (on the Forms list) turns its link off without deleting anything; Restore brings it back.
• Delete on a form or donor removes it forever. The confirmation tells you exactly how many donations go with it — and warns you to also cancel any active subscription in your Stripe/Paystack dashboard so donors don't keep being charged.
• The Activity Log (Home quick actions) keeps a record of what's happened in your account.

Sharing your donation forms

Every form is a public link. Donors never need an account — they open the link, pick an amount, and give.

1. Copy the share link

1. Open Forms and tap the form.
2. Expand the Links box and tap Copy next to Share link.
3. Paste it into WhatsApp, email, social bios, or print it on a poster.

2. Preview what donors see

Tap Preview the form → at the top of the Links box. Donors can switch between light and dark mode on the form themselves; you pick which mode it starts in when editing the form (Design → Start the form in dark mode).

3. Embed the form on your website

1. On the form's page, expand Links.
2. Under Embed on your website, tap Copy embed code.
3. Paste the HTML snippet into your website.

The embedded form blends in: in light mode its background is transparent so your page shows through, and it reports its height so it can auto-fit its container (Pancho SiteBuilder sites handle this automatically). Put the snippet in a container at least 480px wide for the best look.

4. Use your own domain

1. Open Account → Domains on the platform sidebar and add a domain you own (e.g. donate.yourbrand.org).
2. Add the DNS records shown and wait for verification and SSL.
3. Point the domain at Donately and use the picker to choose which donation form it should open.

Now donate.yourbrand.org opens that form directly. Your fallback Donately URL is always shown under Settings → Custom domain.

One link per campaign

Create a separate form for each appeal — Forms → New form, or tap Duplicate on an existing form. Each form gets its own link, its own design, and its own totals.

Customizing Donately

Everything a donor sees is yours to change — the design, the amounts, and every word on the form.

1. Pick a default design

1. Open Settings → Default form design.
2. Tap Quiet, Editorial, Native, or Progress.

New forms start with this design. Each form can override it in its own editor.

2. Set donation defaults

1. Open Settings → Donation defaults.
2. Set the default suggested amounts, the default currency, and whether cover-fees starts ON.
3. Tap Save defaults.

3. Brand the receipt

1. Open Settings → Receipt branding.
2. Enter your Organization name, Tax ID, and a default thank-you message.
3. Tap Save branding.

4. Rewrite any text on the form

1. Open Settings → Form labels & text.
2. Change any field — the form title, the donate buttons, the cover-fees sentence, the footers, even the Progress design's raised / of / donors / days-left labels. Leave a field blank to keep the default shown in grey.
3. Tap Save labels. Reset all to defaults wipes every override.

This is also how you run the form in another language — every donor-facing string is here.

5. Customize one form

Open Forms, tap the form, then Edit this form:

• Design — switch between the four designs, or untick Start the form in dark mode.
• Amounts — preset buttons, currency (USD, NGN, GBP, EUR, GHS, KES, ZAR), let donors type their own amount, optional min/max limits.
• Giving options — one-time and/or monthly, which payment methods show, cover-fees default, anonymous giving.
• Fundraising goal — set a number to show a live progress bar; leave empty to hide it.
• Ask donors for extra info — tap + Add a question for a short answer or dropdown, optional or required. T-shirt size, dedication name, anything.
• After the donation — the thank-you message, the action button's text and URL, and an optional auto-redirect to your own thank-you page.

6. Match your brand with Custom CSS

1. In the form editor, expand Advanced.
2. Paste CSS into the Custom CSS box.
3. Don't know CSS? Tap Copy AI prompt, paste it into ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini with your brand colour, and paste the CSS it returns back into the box.

Careful with these

• Each form charges in its own currency. Changing it later doesn't touch past donations — only new gifts.
• Changing a form's URL ending changes its share link — links you've already printed or posted stop working.