Caution: PayPal Giving Fund isn't the ideal way to donate to the Library here.

mclemore

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Bottom line: Unless you don't care about being recognized by us, use PayPal to donate to us, but please don't donate to PayPal Giving Fund unless you are prepared to do so anonymously!

We had a user contact us stating that they donated to the Library here on March 23 and didn't get forum validated. We had no record of the transaction. It turns out that he had used something called PayPal Giving Fund, instead of using one of our links or historical alternative methods.

In this case PayPal's charity gave us a single PayPal contribution payment on April 25, 2023 that included a handful of transactions that had taken for us, including this one from March 23 -- more than a month earlier.


It turns out we've had a total of $87 or so worth of donations come through this method. Exact, one isn't donating to our library. You are actually donating to PayPal's non-profit, which in turn will forward collected donations on a monthly basis as a single transaction. They get use of funds apparently in the meantime.

And, if the charity doesn't have a PayPal account already, they can give the $ to some other charity than the donor intended. The Library has a PayPal account obviously, so this part isn't likely a problem here.

The biggest problem (in addition to waiting up to a month for funds) is that there are no API notifications for such transactions, because they aren't donations made via PayPal. They are donations TO PayPal Giving Fund. It doesn't validate you on this site, nor add to fruit symbols, etc.


How PayPal promotes this:

A report of pros and cons:

Complaints about same:

In 2020 they settled with the attorney generals of nearly 2 dozen states on their practices:

California has a new law regulating such platforms:
 
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