Setting Up PayPal Donations For a Community Group

I was asked recently to help set up a PayPal account for one of our town’s local community groups. They are looking to raise a small amount of money to help fund some local town enhancement initiatives. This is a fairly common scenario. PayPal however does not give you the option to pick this kind of organisation. So what can you do!? After contacting PayPal we were given the following instruction:

1. Navigate to PayPal and choose to set up a ‘PayPal For Business’ Account.

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2. PayPal does not give any obvious options to users when having to choose a ‘Business Type’ for a Community Group because it is not a business. You cannot choose “Non-Profit Organisation” as your group is more than likely not officially registered as a charity.

So you will need to choose “Sole Proprietorship”.

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You will then need to choose a Category and Sub Category. For this, choose “Services – Other” and then “Events and Wedding Planning”.

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For the account setting you can set these as default where possible.

3. When the account is created you can then create a Donate button:

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You should then be left with some embeddable html code to add to your website etc.

Be sure to connect your PayPal account to a bank account you have set up for the Community Group!

Note that these instructions were given to us by PayPal for a Community Group collecting a small amount of money (<5k) in the country of Ireland.