Stripe is one of the most popular integrations for credit card processing because it accepts all currencies internationally and can be tax-deductible in most countries (as long as you have a charity number and a bank account in the country of collecting the currency). 

To get started I'm going to share my screen and show you what I've done so far to let you know how easy it is to integrate with CauseMatch. 

First, you’re going to go to the CauseMatch-Stripe Dashboard and put in the email that you've used to create your pre-existing Stripe account or that you will want to associate with your new account. Hit continue and put in your password and login. I can now see the account and select “connect”. 

After selecting “connect”, one of two things will happen: Either 1. Stripe will redirect you to the CauseMatch platform (which means you're good to go!) or 2. Stripe will ask you to tell them more about your business. If it's a new Stripe account and/or you haven't completely filled out the verification information for Stripe yet, you will need to completely fill out the organization information to continue.  

After filling out all the required information, the last page will say “agree” and will then create your Stripe account and redirect you to the CauseMatch Dashboard. 

Connecting a pre-established account should take about five minutes. And as long as you have all the organization information, it should not take more than 10 minutes to create a new account.  

A word of caution: the email address that you use in order to create your stripe account should be something that your organization will be able to access in the future even if you leave the organization!

{{Demonstration}}

This is a brand new stripe account I've hardly set up. It will start asking questions in order to activate transactions– this means being able to accept payments and then to pay out to the bank account. 

Note: To be tax-deductible you need to accept the money to a country-specific Stripe account and be paid out to a bank account in that country. For example, for a US tax-receipt, you need to have a US Stripe account that pays out in US Dollars to a USA bank account. Alternatively, you need to have a Canadian Stripe account that pays out to a Canadian bank in CAD to be tax-deductible there. You can create and connect more than one Stripe account to our dashboard and you can apply for the non-profit discount for all of them. 

“Tell us more about your business”, let's put in some information to show you what information they're going to ask. 

First it's going to ask you to verify your business; where it's located and what it is. If you're a non-profit, put a non-profit. If you're a for-profit-school school, put it in ‘educational institution’. 

Then you hit continue. Now here is where you add the business details. The legal business name, the EIN/charity number of the organization if it's a registered nonprofit, ‘doing business as’ if your organization has another name that's more commonly known, the registered business address, and last but not least, it asks for your business website. 

Many nonprofits have a beautiful website, which you can put here so they use this to verify you are a legitimate organization. With that being said, sometimes small schools or organizations just starting out don't have a fully functional website. In that case, put your CauseMatch campaign URL. 

Now the next important thing is the business representative details. This person should be your admin of Finance or the CEO. But this is the person that is most likely going to be answering any questions or dealing with the payments. If something comes up you also want to make sure that this person has a high position in the organization, so they can answer questions authoritatively.  It also asks for my address, phone number, and social security number (again this is a U.S account so there may not be a social security field for other countries) and then hit continue.

The Fulfillment Details are how you fulfill orders, so if you're a charity there are no goods and services, it is simply a donation. However, the reason they ask you this is because Stripe wants to understand what the likelihood of refund requests will be. In this field, you only have a couple options so I would select ‘within one day’ so Stripe understands there is a low risk of refunds after a few days. 

Now, here you have your Public Details: a statement descriptor (what shows up on donors’ credit card), a customer support number (someone that the client can contact if they see a charge they don't know who it is it should go to your organization), and the legal address in the USA.

Hit continue and add your bank. Once you connect your bank, you are able to set up payouts (how the donations are transferred from Stripe to your bank account).There are lots of options that you will be able to set up in scheduling the payout (one-time, every two days, etc). But you can also edit this later. 

The next step is securing your account with two-step authentication. This is very important. 

Then it asks if you want to add tax calculation, but because you're nonprofit you just select non-taxable and then hit continue. Next is Climate Contributions, which is something that Stripe is trying to push. Just skip it if it's not of interest to you. Hit “no thanks”, now select review and finish.

Once you agree and submit, your Stripe account should be up and running. Now that being said, as a CauseMatch employee, I have seen that Stripe has been taking a little bit longer to activate payments and it's no longer right away. Sometimes they'll email you to ask for verification to make sure it's a legitimate organization. Stripe might ask for a picture of an ID or they may want to see a bill to make sure that the address is right. They can also ask for proof that it's non-profit. 

Your integration is complete, but some other good-to-know facts are that Stripe accepts Google Pay and Apple Pay. 

What your campaign manager and the CauseMatch dashboard will need from you once you're done integrating your Stripe account is your account number. To find it, go to profile and right here is the account number.

The last thing you're going to want to do if you're a non-profit, is sign up for a non-profit discount. Here is their support board, this is their knowledge base and it shows you how to do it. It's very simple but they apply the discounted rates manually so it sometimes takes a few days. I believe the price for non-profits is 2.2 % plus 30 cents and 3.5% for AMEX. To apply, remember to email them from the email address associated with the account. And probably the most confusing thing for most people, is you need to confirm with them that more than 80% of the transactions coming into the Stripe account are tax-deductible (things that are not considered tax deductible are membership fees, tuition payments, ticket sales, registration fees, auction payments, etc).