Stripe is a well known online payment processor. Integrating your Social Sync account with Stripe will let you use our nonprofit branded fundraising pages to collect donations.

Social Sync uses Stripe's Connect platform to make the setup of payment processing relatively straightforward. All the underlying payment technology and compliance is handled by Stripe.

For this reason, setting up Stripe does involve some regulatory processes to prove that your nonprofit status, the identity of key decision makes and connect your organisation's bank account. Stripe's own onboarding processes will handle this, and they generally take a frictionless approach, letting you take payments with as little hassle as possible and will defer asking for information until its absolutely necessary.

Step 1: To get started with the setup, first go to Settings > Integrations in Social Sync and click the Connect button on the Stripe integration:

Step 2: Next you'll see a login screen where you can either log into your organisation's existing Stripe account or choose to create a new one from scratch. Stripe will detect the email address you enter here and either direct you towards an existing account (see step 3a) or ask you to create a new one (see 3b) if the email address is not recognised.

Step 3: The onboarding flow will now take you through a series of screens to customise your new Social Sync integrated Stripe subaccount (see FAQ 2 below), which will be created within the existing Stripe account you logged into in step 2.
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You'll need to provide info including your organisations legal name, address, tax status, website, etc... The exact information required differs from one country to the next. Simply complete each question with your info and hopefully you'll be able to complete the account creation process without too much hassle.

Once the onboarding is complete you'll be redirected back to Social Sync.

You have the option to set up a receipting process in Stripe, or directly through Social Sync to give you that added bit of control.

Simply head to your Branding page via your Settings. Scroll down and turn on the Email Receipts toggle.

Once this feature has been enabled, you can input your legal details, receipt subject line and email copy.

You also have the option to add dynamic fields so that your receipt is personalised to each supporter!

Stripe is a trusted financial technology company providing online payment processing services since 2010. It serves millions of businesses and 1000s of charities globally, offering solutions for online payments, subscription billing, and platform payments.

Stripe has built a solid reputation in the fintech industry for its reliability, security, and commitment to customer satisfaction. Here are some factors that contribute to Stripe's trustworthiness

Starting in July 2021, Stripe implemented a single platform connection policy that allows only one platform to be connected to a Stripe account at any time.

This security measure ensures that when users interact with multiple platforms (like Social Sync), each platform's activity remains completely separate and secure.

Rather than sharing access to an existing Stripe account, which could create conflicts or security concerns, Stripe's onboarding automatically guides users to create individual accounts under the same user login for different platforms. This approach protects both user data and transaction integrity by maintaining clear boundaries between different platform integrations.
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When you connect Social Sync to Stripe, you'll be guided through a simple process to create a dedicated Stripe account specifically for Social Sync - but don't worry, this doesn't mean starting from scratch.
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If you already have Stripe accounts, you can reuse your existing business information and legal entity details to quickly set up the new account, making the process fast and seamless.

All your separate Stripe accounts will appear under the same login, so you can easily switch between them from one dashboard. This account switcher is in the top left of the Stripe dashboard.
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You maintain complete control and transparency - you can always view which applications are connected to each account through Stripe's Authorised Applications page, and you can revoke access to any platform at any time if needed. For more detailed info, please see Stripe's documentation.

In certain countries, Stripe is required to collect, verify and maintain information about a company's beneficial owners and directors. These requirements come from government regulators and help promote transparency and prevent financial crimes.
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Some of these requirements (e.g. information to protect against fraud and keep your account current with global Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations), may not be enforced when connecting your Stripe account. Instead the additional info will become a requirement only once your account reaches a certain threshold volume of transactions.
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In these cases, Stripe will proactively get in touch with you directly to collect the required information. Its important to action this promptly as if you cannot update your account information by the deadline, payouts to your bank account and your ability to accept payments will be paused.
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Fortunately, it should take less than five minutes to update your information. If you need help, you can get in touch directly with Stripe Support.

As explained above, all Social Sync transactions are separated into a sub-account of your main Stripe account. You can use the account switcher in the top left of the Stripe dashboard to view the account containing transactions from Social Sync.

As mentioned above, Social Sync transactions will flow into a child account of your main Stripe account. Only some user roles have access to data from "connected accounts"
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This article has more info on Stripe's user roles and permissions and they are very granular. "Support Associate" and "Support Specialist" are two roles which do allow a user to view and access connected accounts.

We send unique transaction references to Stripe which are shown in the Stripe dashboard in the transaction's description column. Each description follows a fixed format of:

{Your org name}, Charity Number: {your charity number}, Donated to: {donor name}, Type: {Transaction Type}
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e.g. World Changers, Charity Number: 123456, Donated to: Joe Bloggs, Type: Donation
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This description will also appear on the donation receipts Stripe sends to your donors.

Additional data such as donor name, email, etc... is also sent to Stripe to allow them to verify and process the transactions.

This is completely normal. Stripe's dashboard shows all payment "intents". Each intent needs to be matched with a valid payment "method" in order to create a valid transaction.

In Social Sync we send payment intent data to Stripe every time a user loads one of your donation forms. We also resend this intent if they choose a payment amount which is different from the default. The intent is again resent when the user adds their email address and finally, when the user adds their card details, and clicks the donate button, a 'succeeded' transaction event is recorded.
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Its therefore normal for any successful donation to have this chain of payment intents logged as a donor navigates the donation form. This granular approach to event logging, can also be helpful with debugging any payment bottlenecks.
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If you prefer you can filter Stripe's payments table to ignore the 'incomplete' payment events.

Yes, however it may not be enabled by default. To enable automated receipts, toggle Successful payments on in your Customer emails settings. Receipts are only sent when a successful payment has been made – no receipt is sent if the payment fails or is declined.
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To send receipts via Stripe's Dashboard, first find the specific payment you want to send a receipt for. Click Send receipt within the Receipt history section of a Payment details page. To resend an email receipt, input a different email address, or specify a comma-separated list of addresses to send it to several recipients. A record of the last 10 receipts is visible on the payment’s page.

You can also alter the appearance and functionality of Stripe's receipts with the following options:

Branding: Modify the logo and colours in your Branding settings. The upper limit for a custom logo image file size is 512KB. Ideally, the logo should be a square image exceeding 128 x 128 pixels. JPG, PNG, and GIF file types are supported.

Public information: Specify the public information you want to include, such as your contact number or website address, in your Public details settings.

Ultimately you will have control over what payment methods you want to accept via Stripe, however, as standard, Social Sync will let you collect donations via:

The latter may require additional setup inside your stripe account.

If you’ll be selling tickets through Social Sync (in addition to collecting donations), there may be tax obligations depending on your location.

Social Sync automatically marks ticket sales as taxable and donations as non-taxable in Stripe, but you are responsible for collecting and remitting any applicable taxes.

To help you get set up:

These resources explain what to do in Stripe, when to enable Stripe Tax, and how to stay compliant based on where you're based.
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