SOAR

When setting up a PayPal account:

• Select Business account – not Personal or Premier
• Select Website Payments Standard – not Website Payments Pro
• Select Sole Proprietorship for Business Type – not Non Profit Organization
• Select Sports and Outdoors for Category – not Non-Profit
• Select Camping and Outdoors for Subcategory

PayPal has a specific account type for non profit organizations that caters to online collection of donations at a reduced transaction fee. To qualify for this account type the majority of your online payments need to be of the donation type and you need to provide PayPal with a lot of paperwork to prove non profit status. Packs and Troops will not qualify for this so you want to avoid it.

Sunday January 4th, 2009

SOAR Customers,

It is our policy to provide you with notification of any issue that has interrupted service to your website.

We do this to ensure good communication with our customers and to make you aware of the issue so you can answer questions raised by your unit members.

Service Outage – 1/4/09 4-10 AM EST

At 4:00 AM EST on Sunday January 4th, 2009 one of our customer servers went offline. The server in question hosts approximately 40% of our customers, so a large number of customer sites became unavailable.

We put a call into our hosting provider at 4:30 AM EST to log the issue and have them start working on it. After diagnostics by our hosting provider it was clear there was a hardware problem – the RAID (disk drive) controller had failed. The state of the disk drives and their data integrity was unknown.

Monday December 29th, 2008

SOAR Customers,

It is our policy to provide you with notification of any issue that has interrupted service to your website.

We do this to ensure good communication with our customers and to make you aware of the issue so you can answer any issues raised by your unit members.

EBlast

Any scheduled EBlasts for Sunday (12/28) and Monday (12/29) did not go out automatically. An error was found in the EBlast scheduling logic that deals with end of year wrap around. This effectively prevented any EBlasts from going out this week, due to the way the calendar fell this year.

Each time a member clicks an Add To Cart button, their item will be added to the shopping cart within your SOAR website. Once there items in a member's shopping cart, a "View Cart" button will display in the User Block in the top left of the page.

When they click the "View Cart" button they will be taken to the shopping cart page where they will see the items they have added. They can delete individual items from the shopping cart.

When they are ready to checkout, members will use the "Checkout" button on the shopping cart page. This will transfer their shopping cart to PayPal and they will be taken to the PayPal page for your unit to complete the transaction.

After you have created your PayPal account and followed the PayPal Account Setup instructions you can enable Online Payments on your SOAR website.

Go to Admin/Control Panel/Online Payments/Setup to get started.

• Click the Enable checkbox to make this feature active.
• Enter & verify (enter a 2nd time) your PayPal email address
• Make sure this email address is correct, otherwise you may be sending money to someone else !
• Enter the label that will be shown in the Navigation for the Online Payments page
• Enter any instructions you want displayed at the top of the Online Payments page
  

When setting up a PayPal account:

• Select Business account – not Personal or Premier
• Select PayPal Payments Standard – not PayPal Payments Pro
• Enter your email address and unit contact information
• Select Business Type – DO NOT select Non Profit Organization
  • The business type you select should match the Tax ID number of your unit's bank account
• Select Sports and Outdoors for Category – not Non-Profit
• Select Camping and Outdoors for Subcategory
• Select lowest Monthly Sales
• Enter your Tax ID number

PayPal has a specific account type for non profit organizations that caters to online collection of donations at a reduced transaction fee. To qualify for this account type the majority of your online payments need to be of the donation type and you need to provide PayPal with a lot of paperwork to prove non profit status. Packs and Troops will not qualify for this so you want to avoid it.

Wouldn’t it be great if your unit members could simply pay for yearly registration fees, recharter fees, event fees, and other item costs online? Now customers with the Advanced package can with SOAR’s new Online Payments feature !

SOAR has leveraged the simplicity and power of PayPal (www.paypal.com) to allow unit members to pay online using credit cards and PayPal accounts. Create a PayPal account, turn on the SOAR Online Payments feature, and define a PayPal button (or two!) on your unit website and you are ready to start accepting payments online.

Each “button” you create will have an Add To Cart button, including any Events you define in the Event Signup Feature. Members can add items to their shopping cart as they browse your unit website. When they are ready member can “checkout”, using a convenient button in the User Menu, and pay for their items using a credit card on the PayPal website.

Does your unit have special events that you would like to get confirmation of attendance in advance? What about assigning costs to events and recording who has paid ?

The new Event Signup feature will do just that !

A new ‘signup admin’ tab is available in any Event on your Calendar to those with Add Content permission. Through this page you can setup the Event Signup feature and specific costs per person for the event.

You can also leverage the new Online Payments feature to collect payment online via credit cards or PayPal accounts. Make sure to setup the Online Payments feature first before trying to enable it on an individual Event.

The Online Payment feature is available in the Advanced package and allows units to collect payment online via credit cards and PayPal accounts for items such as yearly registration fees, recharter fees, event fees, and other items.

To use this feature, please follow these steps.

1. Create a PayPal Business account with Website Payments Standard at www.paypal.com.
2. Link your PayPal Business account to your unit checking account and get it verified.
3. Follow the PayPal Account Setup instructions below.
4. Go to Admin/Control Panel/Online Payments/Setup to enter your PayPal information.
   

Enable

Turn on or off Event Signup for a Calendar Event. If Event Signup is disabled for an Event, it will delete all records of attendance.

If you want to close registration and still see attendees, use the Close Registration option instead.

Type

By Family - In this style all family members should be accounted for in a single registration. To accomplish this only the names of Scouts and Adults without scouts are shown. Parents should be included in the registration of their scout(s).

By Indivdual - In this style each person should register indivdually. If a Scout registers they cannot indicate attendance for Adults. If an Adult registers they cannot indicate attendance for Scouts.