You can easily import data from PayPal Giving Fund's donation platform into Beacon using our pre-built import library template. We'll create all the appropriate donations, donors, and payouts for you!
Tip: You may also want to add the Facebook template if you use Facebook for fundraising, as there is more fundraising and donor information available in their reports.
Don't worry, even though there's some crossover in data, our templates have been designed to play nicely together! 😅
Initial setup
If you're wanting to import from PayPal Giving Fund for the first time, there's a couple of drop-down options you'll want to add to your Beacon account before you create your template and run your import. This will help all of your data import into your account seamlessly, and ensure everything links together as it should.
Step one: Add new drop-down options
To properly attribute incoming donations and payouts to the correct platform, we're going to add options to some 'Source' drop-down lists.
Open any Payment record, edit the 'Source' field, and add 'PayPal Giving Fund' as an option
If you have the Finance element, open any Payout record, edit the 'Source' field, and add 'PayPal Giving Fund' as an option
Step two: Create your template and adjust settings
Let's add the template, ready for final tweaks!
Head to Import data > Manage templates
Choose 'Install from library' and add 'PayPal Giving Fund - Donations' from the template library drop-down
Success: All done! You're ready to import your data.
Importing your data
Download your data from PayPal Giving Fund as a CSV file
This should be available from:Statements → Hover cursor over the statement you'd like to import → Download individual CSV breakdown
Go to Import data > Run import
Upload your CSV from PayPal Giving Fund, and start the import
Frequently Asked Questions
Will this import overwrite data from a Facebook import?
Yes and no! Most information is more detailed from the Facebook import, and so this template is designed to leave that in place.
The data that WILL be updated is information that was estimated or calculated in the Facebook template:
Fees
Payout date
Do payments get marked as Gift Aid claimed?
No. The Gift Aid data from PayPal Giving Fund is insufficient to be able to link back to the specific donations, so it's not possible to know which donations have had Gift Aid claimed and which have not.
We set all donations as 'Gift Aid allowed?' unchecked, so that you won't accidentally double claim on any PayPal Giving Fund donations.
What happens with the Gift Aid rows from the report?
Gift Aid rows are ignored from the PayPal Giving Fund report. This is because:
Gift Aid amounts in Beacon are stored on the original donation
It's impossible to update the original donations to mark them as claimed as PayPal Giving Fund don't provide this data
For finance processes, we recommend you reconcile any Gift Aid from PayPal Giving Fund manually.