Enable your LGL Forms account to accept PayPal payments

Overview

To collect donations and other payments through LGL Forms, you need an integrated payment processing account with PayPal or Stripe. This article describes how to set up PayPal as your payment processor. (A separate article explains how to set up your payments through Stripe.) As of November 2024, the integration that LGL Forms has built for PayPal uses the PayPal Complete Payments platform.

Fees

PayPal charges a fee to process payments and offers a nonprofit rate of 1.99% + 49¢. (LGL does not add any fees of its own for payment processing.) In LGL Forms, you can add an option for donors to increase their donation by 3% to help cover the cost of payment processing.

A PayPal Business account is required to use PayPal as a payment provider for LGL Forms.

It is not possible to integrate a personal PayPal account with LGL Forms.

What PayPal Complete Payments offers

This integration allows donors to pay using PayPal or a credit card, for one-time and recurring donations
It also supports Venmo as a payment option in LGL Forms. If a donor selects to pay via Venmo, they'll click on a Venmo QR code and pay via Venmo
The new integration supports Google Pay, however only for one-time payments, not recurring donations

How to set up the PayPal Complete Payments integration

Before going through any of these steps, we strongly recommend that you first log into the PayPal account you want to connect LGL Forms to. Make sure it's the PayPal Business account for your organization, not a personal account. Then, in the same web browser, complete the following steps.

In the LGL Forms area of your Little Green Light account, navigate to the Admin page and click on the Payment Accounts tab. From there, click the blue Add payment account button.

In the Add payment account area, you will see sections for Stripe and PayPal Complete Payments. Open the PayPal Complete Payments section and click the blue Set up PayPal button.

You'll need to go through a login screen, and afterward you should see a success message.

You can then return to the LGL Forms area, and you'll see that a new PayPal account is listed among your payment accounts. The default name is "PayPal CP #1" ("CP" stands for "Complete Payments").

You can now select that payment processor when creating a new payment form or when editing any of your existing payment forms. Remember that for any existing forms for which you want to switch to use this new PayPal payment account, you'll need to make an update to that form.
After selecting "PayPal CP" as your processor on the forms Edit page, add the payment options you'd like to offer your donors: Venmo, Google Pay, and Credit Card. If you don't select any of those, the only checkout option will be PayPal.

Google Pay: The Google Pay option is not supported in this integration for recurring donations, so if your donor is making a recurring donation, they will not see Google Pay as an option.

Important note about Venmo: The Venmo option here works as part of LGL Forms. This does not mean that Little Green Light will know about payments a donor initiates directly in their Venmo account. In other words, the Venmo payment they make has to be for a transaction initiated in an LGL form and then completed using Venmo.

What is the donor experience?

Your donors will see a checkout button using their PayPal account and any other payment options you've selected in the form editor. This example shows all of the available options:

If the donor chooses to pay using PayPal, a hover window will appear on the screen where they can log into their PayPal account and complete payment:

If the donor chooses to check out using Venmo instead, they will see a QR code, which they can scan using their Venmo app on their phone to complete payment. After completing that payment, the checkout screen on their computer will show that payment was completed. LGL Forms will also record that the payment was successful.

If the donor chooses to make a recurring donation, then the Google Pay option will not display, and the donor can check a box allowing PayPal to save the credit card for recurring payments.