Donations

by Mark Noble on Dec 9, 2021

It’s the time of year when our thoughts turn towards giving. Whether to family, friends, the community, or organizations we support and believe in. At ByWater Solutions we just participated in Giving Tuesday with Koha-US and we’re planting approximately 600 trees as a show of our appreciation for our partners.

With the 21.15 release of Aspen DIscovery we wanted to give libraries a new way for patrons to easily support your library. For libraries that have setup eCommerce integration with Aspen Discovery using PayPal, Comprise, or any other provider, you can now easily enable donations!

The donations functionality is designed to be used both by patrons when they are logged in and anonymously by patrons and like everything in Aspen it’s configurable to match your local donation policies.

To set up the donations, you will need to login as a user with Administer Donations permission. Then navigate to the eCommerce section of the Aspen Administration page.

Select Add New to create a new donation form. Donations can be configured differently for each library within Aspen so each member of a consortium can do things in a manner that best suits their patrons.

When you create the donation form, there are a few key things you will want to decide on:

Should users be able to choose a branch to send their donation to?

For a single branch library this isn’t really needed or if you split donations between all branches you can disable this as well.

Should users be able to earmark their donation?

This allows you to define a list of places where the donation will be spent. For example, you could suggest patrons contribute to a building campaign, new materials, children’s services, a bookmobile, or other areas.

Should users be able to dedicate their donation?

With this option you can give options for patrons to submit their donation “In honor of” or “In memory of” another person. The dedications can be defined by the library so you can provide the dedications that are most relevant to you.

What default values should be presented to the patron?

You can choose several default values to give patrons suggested amounts to donate to make the donation process easier.

The final two options allow you to define text to show above the donation form to give the patron context as well as the body of an email to thank the patron for their donation.

Once you have configured the donation form the way you want it, you will just need to provide a link to the donation form to your patron. This can easily be done using the Menu Links within Aspen Discovery or you can link to the page from your library website, from donation emails, and much more. Simply send the user user to https://youraspensite/Donations/NewDonation (replace "youraspensite" with the url to your Aspen Discovery Site).

When the patron selects the link, they will see a form similar to the following (click to enlarge):

The patron will then fill out the form with their desired donation amount and make their payment. The process is really easy for the patrons to use and the interface is familiar for anyone who has made a payment online!

Once the payment has been completed, Aspen will let them know that the payment is completed successfully and the patron will be sent a receipt via email with the text you included on the configuration page.

Now that patrons are making donations to your library, you can get a list of all payments using the eCommerce report which is available in the eCommerce section of the Aspen Administration page.

This report will show all payments that have been started with the status and any transaction information from the payment processor.

You can also use the Donations report to see a list of all donations that have been started with information about what the user wanted to donate to in the donations report.

This report will show all payments that have been started with the status and any transaction information from the payment processor.

You can also use the Donations report to see a list of all donations that have been started with information about what the user wanted to donate to in the donations report.

We hope this new donations functionality will make it easier for libraries to raise funds for all the essential resources and services they provide. With a direct donation URL, we envision libraries being able to convert these to QR codes and/or embed these URLs to their marketing materials (emails, newsletters, handouts, etc.) in order to promote this capability.