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A Non-Profit’s Processes Serve a Higher Purpose

South America Mission is an organization dedicated to transforming communities in South America by establishing churches across the continent. Since it is a non-profit, donations are integral to their mission. So the folks at SAM knew they needed to make donating as straightforward as possible. That’s when they reached out to Romega Digital, where we’ve made a habit of cleaning up businesses’ confusing daily processes.

The Plan

South America Mission’s goals seemed simple. They wanted to make it easier for people to set up recurring donations, update their billing information and get their donation history. They also wanted the donation process to live on their website rather than going to another portal. Ultimately, they decided to rebuild their entire online donation process.

The Implementation

The Romega team used WooCommerce, a framework native to WordPress that was specifically designed for e-commerce. (We also used this for Tucker Farms, which you can read more about here.)

This time, rather than traditional products, we made donation designations for individual missionaries and ministries organized by country. Because of this change, Romega customized a lot of the default WooCommerce language. This meant going from “orders and products” to “donations and designations” to avoid any potential confusion.

Once users select a missionary or a ministry, they can make a one-time donation or create an account to schedule recurring donations. These can be in specified or manually-entered amounts. For repeat donations, donors can save their credit card info to their account. If their credit card expires or something goes wrong on a later donation, that user is notified via email to update their payment method.

After anyone makes any donation, they can download a PDF receipt for their records. They can also log back in at any time to see a list of all their donations and download receipts. Lastly, Romega set up a custom export that lets SAM staff easily pull donor records into their membership/donation software.

The Outcome

Donors make our mission work possible, so we wanted to treat them well by giving them a donation portal that is intuitive to use, integrated with the rest of our site, which instills confidence, and accessible for retrieving past donation histories. Romega created an elegant donation portal for us that fulfills all of our needs. We’ve already seen great engagement and are hopeful for donated income growth that will fund many missions to come.

– Ken Massey
Director of Development
South America Mission

With our custom email notifications, the South America Mission staff can now track donation numbers easily. As Ken Massey mentioned, they’ve already many donations since their revamp. We are so proud to have been able to play a part in this process.

South America Mission is a great example of a company whose needs exceeded the software available to them. Though we were able to customize an e-commerce solution to make the experience fit a donation platform, it’s often more of a hassle to get what your business needs out of built-in software. If you find yourself in this predicament, get in touch to explore how custom software can help you.