During my trip in Bulgaria starting in a couple of weeks we will take part in a fund-raising mountain hiking for the Karin Dom foundation. As besides our participation we would like to help them financially as well we decided to put together a small website where friends and colleagues might sponsor us, so we can transfer their donations to Karin Dom.

To accomplish this task, I wrote a small django application, django-donation. This application let’s you easily receive donations on your website, and tries to show some relevant information about your sponsors, like to total amount collected. Moreover, depending on the sponsors’ wishes you might show their name and donation as well.

During this work I have learned several things:

Circumventing PayPal’s security checks is a breeze (but still annoying to have to) For the donation I thought I will need a Business type account. Probably I was wrong as a Premium account would suffice, but when I realised this my account was already changed into a Business account, and PayPal was asking for all kind of weird papers. For some reason, they were not very eager to change back my account type, thus I went on and asked all kind of recommendations from Karin Dom, and explained to PayPal that actually I am not affiliated to them, we are just collecting funds for them. Finally they allowed my account, and now I can collect the donations. The twist in this story is that Karin Dom struggles getting the Business status, thus despite the PayPal button on their site, you can donate to them only via direct transfers.

Use the identifier if you can Unfortunately django-donation still has some flaws. The main problem is that I am not saving the unique identifiers of every transaction, and several of our donors were registered twice or even more times. I will fix this once I have some more time (might be tonight?), or feel free to do it, if you have some free time. :)

Finally, you can check out our Karin Dom sponsorship site here.