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How To Pass Fees to Your Donors

This article will explain how to change your fee settings so you can pass them on to your donors, or let them decide to cover fees.

How to change who covers transaction fees

1. From your Dashboard, click edit on a fundraiser to open the Fundraiser Builder.

2. From the sidebar, under Fundraiser Settings go to Fees Coverage

3. Select if you would like to enable 0% Fees on your fundraiser

  • This is a special feature that gives donors the option to help cover fees at checkout. If the donor decides not to, Trellis will cover the fees instead.

  • To learn more about our 0% Fees feature, read this article.

4. For transactions where 0% Fees does not apply, or if you disable 0% Fees, choose fee coverage options:

  • If you'd like the purchaser/donor to cover your fees, select Purchaser.
  • If you'd like to absorb the fees yourself, select Organization.
  • If you'd like to let the purchaser decide to cover the fees, select Optional.

4. You can select who covers fees for the following fundraising drivers:

  • Event Tickets
  • Items for Sale
  • Auction Items
  • Donations
  • Fund-a-Need
  • Silent & Live Auction 
  • Sponsorships

Please Note:

ERS raffle ticket fees cannot be covered by your purchasers.

Once you're done, don't forget to press Publish Changes at the top right!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are fees higher on some transactions?

There are a couple reasons why transaction fees may be higher on two different transactions with the same thing purchased:

  1. The purchaser used an AMEX credit card or international credit card, which carries higher fees.
  2. The donor is covering the fees, which end up at a slightly higher amount due to how fees are charged by Stripe.
The All Transactions Export can give you insight as to which type of card was used for the purchase, and whether the donor covered the fees.  

How are donor-covered fees calculated and why are they slightly higher?

When donors cover the fees, they are actually adding a small donation to their purchase to cover the transaction fees. The processing rate applies to the entire amount being charged on the card, including the amount a donor adds to cover fees.

For example, if the purchase is $100 and your processing rate is 3.5%, the donor pays $103.63. The processing rate of 3.5% is then applied to $103.63, which equals $3.63. After this is deducted, your organization is left with $100 net.

If we only added $3.50 for the donor to cover the fees, then 3.5% applied to $103.50 = $3.63 in fees, which would leave you with $99.87 net.

The flat transaction fee starts at 0.30 (30 cents) but may increase to 0.31 or 0.32 depending on rounding after the processing rate is applied.

What happens if there are multiple fundraising drivers in a cart?

If a purchaser has multiple fundraising drivers in their cart, (for example, a silent auction item, donation, and item for sale) then our system can only apply one method of fee coverage to the entire cart. Our system follows this hierarchy to know which method to apply:

  1. Auction Fee Settings
  2. Event Tickets and Items Fee Settings
  3. Donation Fee Settings

This means that if there is a silent auction item in the cart, the auction fee settings apply to the entire cart. If there is no silent auction item but there are event tickets or an item in the cart, then those fee settings apply to the entire cart.

Can we enable 0% Fees for Event Tickets but disable it for donations?

Unfortunately no - the 0% Fees feature is designed to maximize your savings and coverage is based on purchase area, rather than fundraising driver.

For example, 0% Fees applies to any standard checkout (from the cart), Mobile Fund-a-Needs, and Item One-Click-Buy flows. It does not apply to back-office transactions, such as from the Sales Entry System or the Check-In Tool. Learn More

Why does our report show transaction fees for some checkouts but not others?

If you are using 0% Fees, any checkouts where 0% Fees applies would show no transaction fees. If 0% Fees does not apply to that checkout, then the report will show the applicable transaction fees, and who covered them.

Here are some common cases why checkouts have transaction fees when 0% Fees is enabled:

  1. The checkout was made by a donor but is over the $3,000 threshold.
  2. The checkout was completed via the Sales Entry System or the Check-In Tool, meaning the donor was never presented with the 0% Fees option. The Checkout Overview sheet will show you where the transaction was made, so you can see if it was a back office transaction completed by your staff. 

Learn more about 0% Fees here.