Our 501c3 non-profit alumni association collects donations for scholarships (with or without scholarship name designation), general fund for operating expenses, and annual membership dues of $12/year, which they can sign up for as many years as they want, or life memberships of $500+. Alumni couples can join for the price of singles if we only send one set of newsletters. That's the background.

I want to set up PayPal button(s) which will allow us to allocate to each of these. Do I need to make a separate button for each type of donation?

Does your store/shopping cart feature work outside of reunions? That's about the only thing we're NOT collecting for on our all-years website.

I don't want to have to use multiple buttons unless I have to, but if I do, will we be able to distinguish what the payment was for--which button it came from?

It looks like the only way to test is to go "live" with it. Can I just add buttons to a hidden test page?

They're waiting for me to get this started & I have no idea how to deal with all these separate concerns.

Yes you're best bet is to simply set up a button for each donation. It's really quite easy to do it this way.

First, no there is no store currently that works outside of the Reunion Planner. That's our Fall project though. Much more on that later this year.

What you need to do is go out to PayPal, go to their Merchant Services Area, click on "Buy Now" buttons and configure your first button. The button doesn't have to say Buy Now, it can say "Donate" and a variety of other things. Go ahead and set up your first button and then copy the code to a Notepad file or other text edit area.

Now go back in and set up button 2, get your code, and copy it to your text file too. And now do the same thing for your third button. When done you'll have the code for all 3 buttons in the same text file. Save your file. I'm having you do this so you'll have a backup of your button code in case you make a mistake in the next steps.

Ok, now go into your Edit Site Pages area and activate any Customizable link. We're going to use this as a test area. Simply activate it, save the page, and now view the page live in your browser. And now bookmark that page. Next go back into your Edit Site Pages area and deactivate the page. The page still exists, deactivating it just removes it from your site navigation so nobody else will be clicking on the page while you're testing.

Now paste your button code into the page using your Source view. If you want to get fancy, you could do something like create a 2 column by 3 row table. Put your first button code in cell A1, your second button code in cell A2, and your third button code in cell A3. And then in cells B1, B2, and B3 you could type a description of each of the donations. Save your page.

Now use your bookmark to access the page. Take a look and see if you like how it came out. Remember, the page is deactivated so nobody can see the page while you're testing. Edit the page all you need until it's just the way you want it. Once perfect, go into edit mode, click Source, and copy all of your code to your clipboard.

Finally, go into the actual page you want the buttons on, go into Source view, paste your code, and save. Voila, 3 donate buttons ready for your Classmates to use.

By the way, because you can give each button it's own name and description, yes you will be able to see exactly which button was responsible for the donation.