Note: The following information is specific to donation payment processing. See Payment Capabilities for a more comprehensive explanation of Blackbaud and Luminate Online payment processing.
Your merchant account, donation campaign, an donation form configurations all affect which payment methods are available to your constituents. Consider what payment options you want to offer and ensure that you are configuring a merchant account that supports those payments, associating your campaign with the correct merchant account, and including the compatible data elements on your donation form.
Merchant account considerations
This is the first step in configuring which payment methods you accept and impacts your entire organization. Establish one or more merchant accounts to specify which payments can be processed and where those funds should be deposited.
Tip: We recommend using a Blackbaud Payment Service account with a Blackbaud Merchant Services account compatible with a checkout data element because it is the easiest way for you to accept the most payment methods and track processing end-to-end.
If you choose to use a Blackbaud Merchant Services account for your payment processing, a single select imports the configuration into Luminate Online Payment Capabilities as a gateway. If you choose an alternative payment processor, the integration requires more work and not all payment methods may be available. Review the summary in the chart below and see Payment Capabilities for more details and configuration instructions.
| Payment Method | Recommended payment processing supported payment methods | Alternative payment processing supported payment methods |
|---|---|---|
| Credit and debit card |
Automatically includes all cards supported by Blackbaud. |
No longer available. |
|
Direct debit |
US ACH and Canadian ACSS |
US ACH via a Blackbaud Merchant Services legacy account or integration with direct processors such as iATS or PayFlow Pro. |
| Digital wallets |
Apple Pay Google Pay PayPal (single payment - support for recurring coming soon) Venmo (single payment, US only) |
PayPal |
| Cash and check | Not related to merchant account selection. You may add cash and check payment options, regardless of the merchant account, during donation form design. | |
Donation campaign considerations
Your organization may have multiple donation campaigns and merchant accounts, but each campaign is associated with a only one merchant account. The campaign can only process payment methods configured for that merchant account.
For example, if you want to accept campaign donations via Apple Pay, your must associate the campaign with a Blackbaud Merchant Services account configured to accept digital wallets.
See Create a campaign for more details and instructions.
Tip: When converting campaigns from legacy merchant accounts to new checkout merchant accounts, we recommend you copy the campaign and make changes in the duplicate.
Donation form considerations
Each donation form belongs to a single campaign and inherits its associated merchant account. The merchant account determines which payment methods are available to display on the form. You configure these options in the form’s Payment Types data element.
For example, if your merchant account supports credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets, you can choose to display all of these options, or limit the form to only credit and debit card payments. Digital wallets can still be enabled on other forms that use the same merchant account.
Donation forms behave differently depending on whether they are associated with a checkout merchant account:
-
Forms with a checkout merchant account - Must include a Checkout data element. You may also include a Payment Types data element, but only the Checkout element will display.
-
Forms without a checkout merchant account - Must include a Payment Types data element and must not include a Checkout data element.
Warning: All donation forms in a single campaign are associated with the same merchant account and must have the correct data elements present.
Note: The full requirements of PCI 4.0 were enforced March 31, 2025. Your organization has its own PCI audit date to comply with the requirements. To ensure Blackbaud's compliance before our audit, we ran an Auto-Compliance Migration Script from May 1-16th to enforce updated payment processing. The script updated all unchanged forms with the checkout modal, potentially causing layout and processing changes. This script did not update API forms, which you must manually update. See Auto Migration FAQs.