paypal - online membership renewal for charity?

jo70mo

Hi,
I work for a charity that is a support group. We usually send out renewal forms to members once a year and accept them back by post. However a few members have asked if we can start to use paypal to make it quicker and easier.
It would be easy to add a paypal button to our website. However, our renewal forms ask for up to date address details etc and contain a gift aid declaration for those who choose that route.
Obviously a straight forward paypal button won't allow us to do this.
I can edit our website to some extent (it uses a silverlight CMS system) and wondered how hard it would be to make a custom form that also took the correct payment via paypal.
There are 4 membership rates to choose from and looking at the paypal buttons that seems feasible I'm just not sure how to go about collecting more information than the standard button allows.
Does anyone have any thoughts/ experience that might help?
Thanks
Jo

steve1980

Paypal offers a custom made button that you can specify the amount payable. The only thing is going to be the gift aid part.

You could create the form online which when the user presses send it sends you the form which has the gidt aid box ticked and then forwards on to Paypal for payment.

jo70mo

Thanks Steve,
That's what I was hoping to do. Just I'm not very experienced at the form creating/ forwarding side. We have a guy who maintains our website for free and will make major changes etc for us.He is very busy though and I don't want to take the Michael as I have just asked him to investigate creating a user forum for us! I just wondered if the paypal stuff is something I could do quite easily or if I should just ask him to do it. Part of me wants to learn how to do it myself ;-)
Jo

jo70mo

I think I have the answer now.
Silverlight allows user generated forms which seem quite straightforward to use. However my admin controls don't have that option at the moment. So I have asked our web guy to let me have those permissions and then I can create one. On submission it allows you to direct to another page so that can be a webpage with the paypal button embedded.
Woohoo
Hope I can get it sorted.
Jo

steve1980

A forum can be installed, set up and run in about 5 minutes. I use PHPBB forums for all my sites that use them. Having looked at your DNS records it looks like your host is Google. Not sure you'll be able to have a forum as it uses MySQL which I'm pretty sure Google don't supply.

An easier way to do your payment/gift aid page would be to set a form up online. Once someone presses submit the user gets sent through to a thank you page with your link to Paypal underneath.

If your designer is too busy then let me know and I'll see if I can help.

jo70mo

Thanks Steve.
The site that is associated with me on here (eg in my profile) is not the site of the organisation I work for so we should be fine to get a forum set up :-)
Thanks so much for the offer of help. If I get stuck I may well take you up on that.
Thanks
Jo