When you record donations for someone else, the best practice is to use the Offline Donation recording process. or the similar offline registration processes for events and volunteers.
However, if you:
- use the online contribution form/event registration form or volunteer form usually linked from your web site that was created for anonymous online contributions
- AND if you are logged in
- AND if you miss the message saying: "Welcome Your Name Here. (Not Your Name Here, or want to donate as different person?)" (NOTE not all contribution pages will display this message - it depends on your page theme if it will show or now)
Then...you will have a problem!
The problem will be two fold:
- Your user name and address will be overwritten by the individual's info, and
- You will record the donation against your record which is now carrying the name of someone else.
If the contribution was a one-time payment then the following fix will do the trick:
Since you are an authorized user in the system, you need to find the record that used to hold your name and change it to your correct name and address.
Then you need to add the donor's contact information if it isn't already in your PowerBase.
Now you'll need to fix the contribution records for both your record and the donor's record. BUT BEFORE YOU DELETE THE CONTRIBUTION RECORD from your record, make sure you keep a copy of the all the payment information, including the INVOICE ID, the TRANSACTION ID, and the SOURCE. Here's a couple ways you can make sure you have all the payment information to copy into the new contribution record:
- copy all the information from the existing contribution record (on your record) into a text document, or
- or when looking at the contribution record, click on the "printer" icon to print the window and print to PDF (there are great print to pdf tools such as CutePDF Writer)
We recommend that someone with authority to delete the contribution records will need to first delete the contribution record associated with your contact record, then add a new one to the donor's record using the offline contribution process and record (by copying and pasting for the text file or pdf file created in the previous step) the payment information from the original contribution record.