If your just getting started or if you are wanting to test a few donations, RaiseDonors has a few options for you. The first method will not interact with Stripe and RaiseDonors always approves the donation. This approach is best if you are wanting to do quick testing to verify the process, thank you pages, and thank you emails. The second method actually communicates with Stripe's sandbox and allows you to see test donations in both RaiseDonors and Stripe.
WARNING
Please be aware - these options manipulate your page to not collect live money. If you were to accidentally share these links with your marketing team and/or real donors, you would not collect any revenue. Please ensure these methods are for internal use only.
Option 1
From the page editor you can select "View in Test mode" from the top right navigation. This will pre-load the donation page with dummy donor information. To submit the form you'll need to use any one of Stripe's test cards available. RaiseDonors won't actually send any donation data to Stripe - so you won't see a transaction in Stripe. Using a test card from stripe allows you to submit the donation and view the process.
Additionally you can take any page and put it into this test mode by adding the URL parameter
forceTestModeOn
For example, if your page URL is,
https://raisedonors.com/my-nonprofit/page-name
you can put it into test mode like this,
https://raisedonors.com/my-nonprofit/page-name?forceTestModeOn=true
WARNING - If you are currently collecting live donations - please be very careful with the next set of instructions. You could accidentally turn all of your donation pages over to Test mode - and no longer collect real donations.
If you need to force your entire account to be in test mode, you can do so. This is most common with new organizations who are not yet using RaiseDonors with live donations. You need to log into RaiseDonors and goto the Payment Providers section. Click Edit into the applicable stripe account. Locate the test mode section and click edit. You can now set the Test Mode to "On". This will force every donation (regardless of the url parameter) to not communicate with your gateway - and pretend to place a donation. No real money will be processed.
Option 2
RaiseDonors will securely communicate with Stripe and send what appears to be "real" data over to Stripe. Except that no real money is moving, it's all going into Stripe's sandbox area. Every Stripe account has a sandbox area. You can view this by toggling the button "Test Mode". That is how you move back and forth between production and sandbox mode in Stripe.
To get this working you need to visit your API keys area in Stripe while in Test Mode. At the same time, you need to log into RaiseDonors and goto the Payment Providers section. Click Edit into the applicable stripe account. Locate the test mode section and click edit.
WARNING - If you are currently collecting live donations - please be very careful with the next set of instructions. You could accidentally turn all of your donation pages over to Test mode - and no longer collect real donations.
In RaiseDonors, "Test Mode" should be set to "Off". This ensures your account is able to process live donations. "Sandbox Mode" can be toggled to "Yes". This will instruct RaiseDonors to send ALL of your donations to Stripe's sandbox area. No real money will be processed or collected. Set this setting to "NO" if you are currently collecting live donations.
If you are collecting live donations and you wish to control how and when you send test donations to Stripe's sandbox area, you can do this. Test Mode should be set to Off. Sandbox mode should be set to No. Now place the TEST Publishable Key and TEST Private Keys from Stripe into RaiseDonors and click save. This allows RaiseDonors to continue processing real donations in Stripe - but gives you the flexibility to conditionally process donations in the sandbox mode. So how do you send a test donation?
Good question! You need to use the URL parameter "StripeUseSandboxDevMode". This will allow you to use any production ready page and modify it to send to Stripe's sandbox.
For example, if your page URL is,
https://raisedonors.com/my-nonprofit/page-name
you can put it into sandbox mode like this,
https://raisedonors.com/my-nonprofit/page-name?StripeUseSandboxDevMode=true
This will submit a test donation to RaiseDonors and a full transaction to Stripe's sandbox area.