This joomla! thing is pretty cool. You can build just about anything if you have time, creativity, and like working in community.  Working with high school students in a small town is pretty cool too.  They have tons of energy and the challenges go both ways. 

One of the tough parts about working with teens in a small town is that the really fun adventure stuff (rafting, camps, concerts) all cost money - and there aren't many people to sell candy bars to in a small town.  As a web guy and a youth pastor, I had to figure out a way to raise some funds in a non-traditional manner that would also let me track the progress per-student. Here are the tools and steps I used to create a donation solution for my church's youth group that allows users to donate and shop online in a way that helps our students.  If you need a fund-raiser for your church or school group, this could work for you.

This joomla! thing is pretty cool. You can build just about anything if you have time, creativity, and like working in community.  Working with high school students in a small town is pretty cool too.  They have tons of energy and the challenges go both ways. 

One of the tough parts about working with teens in a small town is that the really fun adventure stuff (rafting, camps, concerts) all cost money - and there aren't many people to sell candy bars to in a small town.  As a web guy and a youth pastor, I had to figure out a way to raise some funds in a non-traditional manner that would also let me track the progress per-student. Here are the tools and steps I used to create a donation solution for my church's youth group that allows users to donate and shop online in a way that helps our students.  If you need a fund-raiser for your church or school group, this could work for you.

Give Credit Where it's Due

This would not be possible without the great joomla extension "Advanced Paypal Module" by borghunter. The module I created just adds onto that terrific script.

Before we get started

There are a few assumptions I'm working with here:

• Your group has a website, which is powered by joomla. If you're not using joomla, none of what's coming up will make sense. You may be able to apply the same principles, but no guarantees.
• This solution works with joomla! 1.0.x.  I haven't played around with joomla! 1.5 yet, but I'm sure the same principles could be applied.

Step 1: Get a PayPal Account for your Group

PayPal is free to sign up for and only takes a few minutes.  You will need to validate your PayPal account by proving that you own your bank account.  PayPal does this by depositing several pennies in your bank account, then asking you to verify the amounts deposited.

Step 2: Intall the Advanced PayPal Module.

The basic Advanced PayPal Module by Borghunter is great for group-level donations.  I use this module as a top-level donation on my Youth Group site and church site. It looks like this:   

You can download the Advanced PayPal Module here . 

Step 3: Create a Simple Content Item for each student.

My content simple said "Welcome to Billy's Fundraising Web Page."

You will need links to all of these new content items.  I found it fastest to create the links individually from within the content items with the "Link to Menu" feature. 

Step 4: Install the SRS Group Member PayPal Module.

I needed to be able to track donations on a per-student basis, and I wanted to have a picture of each student on each donation "page". Basically I added a few new parameters to the Advanced PayPal Module: 

• student_alias: This (a) ties to the name of the student's picture file (without the .jpg extension) located in the directory in the next point and (b) is dispayed for the end user.  This name should be capitalized. You need to change this variable for every student.
• student_picture_directory: points to the a directory that has pictures of my students.  All of the files are named Name.jpg. Change this to a directory where your pictures are.  Set this once, and use it for the rest of your students.
• student_welcome: a simple text field that let's me describe the donation process to the user.  You can leave the default value or change it.

4.1  Give the module a meaningful name, like "Billy Donation". 

4.2  Publish the module to a position that appears just below normal content.

4.3  Publish the module to the content item created in step 3.

4.4  Set the variables. 

4.5  Save the Module

If all goes well, it could look something like this:

Step 5: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Once you've created the module for your first student, you need to do the following steps for the rest of your students.

5.1 In the "Site Modules" page, copy the "Billy Donation" module you just created.

5.2 Open the "Copy - Billy Donation" module.

5.3 Give the module a new name.

5.4 Change the student_alias variable.  This should be the only variable you have to reset.  For example, change it from "Billy" to "Sarah". 

5.5 Publish the module to the content item created in step 3 (for Sarah this time, not Billy).

5.6 Save the Module.

Step 6: Optional - Add some Affiliate Links

If you don't know, online stores will pay you a small percentage of purchases made from traffic you send them from special links on your site.  This is called affiliate advertising.  We've tried several affiliate programs with limited success... but people in our little town are slowly being trained to start their online shopping with us.  I'll outline some strategies on how this works in a future article.

Step 7: Make the URLs Friendly

I used a fairly easy-to-install component called  sh404SEF .   It turns the ugly joomla URLs into much prettier human-friendlier URLs.  You don't want to send rich Aunt Bessie a confusing URL in a letter, do you?

You can get sh404SEF here. 

Step 8: Market Your Fundraiser 

Create an email or snail-mail letter for your students to replicate and send out to their rich aunts (everyone has a rich aunt, right?).  Be sure that each letter or includes the human-friendly URL.

Future Ideas:

This solution worked for me, but it could definitely be improved upon.  This would have been perfect as a component where you had one admin interface that let you input one variable for each student, then it magically created the "content" and menu links.  That's a project for another day.  

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