Short version: as far as we know, Altru does not take PayPal at checkout. Online card payments in Altru go through Blackbaud’s own payment processing, and PayPal is not one of the options its web forms or point of sale present. Blackbaud’s payment features change over time, so if PayPal is important to your board or your donors, ask Blackbaud support directly whether anything is on their roadmap before you plan around it.
That still leaves you with a real decision. Here are the ways organizations handle a PayPal request, what each one costs you in staff time and data quality, and when it makes sense to just say no.
Why people ask for PayPal in the first place
Before picking a workaround, figure out which problem you’re solving. In our experience the request usually comes from one of three places:
- Speed on a phone. The buyer doesn’t want to type a 16-digit card number on a small screen. PayPal is just the wallet they happen to know.
- Trust. Some people won’t enter a card number on a site they don’t recognize, and a familiar payment button reassures them.
- Donor habit. A segment of donors keeps funds in a PayPal balance or prefers to give that way, and someone on the development team has heard about it.
The first two can often be solved without PayPal at all. The third is the only one that really requires accepting PayPal money.
Option 1: Accept PayPal outside Altru and record it by hand
You can take PayPal donations or payments through a PayPal account of your own, then enter them in Altru as revenue. Altru lets you record payments that didn’t run through its card processing; how you label them depends on the payment methods your organization has set up, so check your configuration or test in a sandbox before you commit to a coding scheme.
This works for low volume. Know what you’re signing up for:
- Double entry. Every PayPal transaction has to be keyed into Altru by someone, on a schedule, or it never shows up in your reports.
- Duplicate constituents. PayPal gives you a name and an email, often a different email than the one already on file. Expect new records for people who already exist in Altru unless whoever enters them searches carefully first.
- Reconciliation. PayPal deposits arrive net of fees and on their own timing. Your finance team will need a way to match PayPal payouts to the batches you post in Altru.
- Acknowledgments. PayPal sends its own receipt. Your Altru acknowledgment process won’t fire until the gift is entered, so donors may get two receipts, days apart, that don’t match.
For tickets and memberships, this approach is much worse than for donations. A PayPal payment can’t reserve a timed-entry slot or create a membership in Altru on its own, so someone has to do it manually, and the buyer waits.
Option 2: Use PayPal only for a narrow purpose
Some organizations keep PayPal for one thing, like a year-end giving button or a specific campaign, and keep everything else in Altru. That limits the manual work and makes reconciliation predictable. If you go this route:
- Set a fixed day each week to enter PayPal gifts into Altru.
- Use a dedicated appeal or source code so these gifts are easy to find in a query later.
- Search for existing constituents by name and address, not just email, before creating new records.
- Decide who sends the official tax acknowledgment, and make sure PayPal’s automatic receipt doesn’t read like one.
Option 3: Solve the underlying problem instead
If the real complaint is “paying on my phone is a pain,” a digital wallet does the same job PayPal would, and the payment can still land in Altru. Apple Pay and Google Pay let a buyer pay with a stored card in a couple of taps, which addresses the speed and trust concerns for most mobile visitors.
It’s worth looking at your web form experience overall, too. A long, unbranded form that doesn’t look like the rest of your website will lose people whether or not PayPal is on it.
How to decide
- Say yes to PayPal if you have a meaningful group of donors who specifically give that way and someone with time to enter and reconcile those gifts every week.
- Say no, or not yet, if the request is really about mobile convenience, or if it would touch tickets and memberships. Manual entry there creates more problems than it solves.
- Revisit it if Blackbaud adds wallet or PayPal options to its own processing. Check with support periodically rather than assuming either way.
Where Social Good fits
To be clear, our tools don’t add PayPal to Altru either. What Checkouts does offer is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the transactions write back to Altru. For organizations whose PayPal request is really about faster mobile payment, that tends to cover it without a second payment system to reconcile.
Quick answers
Can I add a PayPal button to my Altru donation form?
Not as an integrated payment option that we’re aware of. You could link to a separate PayPal page, but those gifts won’t flow into Altru automatically.
Can I record a PayPal gift in Altru after the fact?
Yes, as manually entered revenue. Confirm with your Altru administrator how your payment methods are set up so these gifts are coded consistently.
Is Venmo any different?
Same situation: it would be a separate account outside Altru, with the same manual entry and reconciliation work.
