Common reasons for donation failures

While we aim to help remove all the obstacles on your way to drive impact in this world, sometimes your donation request might not go through. This could happen for many reasons including:

• Your program has exceeded its budget
• The cause you are donating to has fallen out of standing

By far, the most common reason is The cause you are donating to has fallen out of standing. This is why we recommend that you always validate a cause's eligibility before donating.

Common reasons for a cause falling out of standing:

• A cause can fall out of good standing with the government
• A cause can fail to renew its self-certification, moving from eligible to ineligible.

How is the cause eligibility defined

Benevity decide a certain cause to receive donations based on the following:

Benevity eligibility For a cause to be visible in our database, it must meet the following criteria:

1- The cause in good standing with the government.

2- The cause meets all our country-specific vetting criteria.

Program eligibility Passes the Benevity eligibility but also requires to pass your company's specific eligibility requirements. This includes category filtering, exceptions, and self-cert among other things.

Payment eligibility Passed the above criteria, but requires EFT to be paid out, and thus cannot be donated to until it provides EFT.

Routing eligibility Certain causes can only be routed through certain foundations.

Validate a cause's eligibility to receive donations.

Warning: This would only be needed if your implementation uses a static list of causes or allows users to save causes to their profile. Benevity constantly ensures that the causes that can receive support through our platform are in good standing, therefore if you have preselected a cause without verifying the cause through the Causes API first, there is a chance that the cause you are donating to has fallen out of standing.

In order to validate a cause's eligibility to receive donations, all that you have to do is to hit our search api specifying the cause_id while the "visibility" filter is set to "donate"

Sample request:

Sample response:

If the cause is invalid and cannot receive donations, you will be seeing a response like this "0 results":

{
    "data": [],
    "meta": {
        "search_information": {
            "total_results": 0
        },
        "search_parameters": {
            "autocorrect": "false",
            "q": "id:840-953313195",
            "visibility": "donate",
            "page": "1",
            "sort": "default",
            "page_size": "25"
        },
        "facets": {
            "country": [],
            "state": [],
            "categories": [],
            "subcategories": []
        }
    },
    "links": {
        "self": "/search/causes?autocorrect=false&q=id%3A840-953313195&visibility=donate&sort=default&page_size=25&page=1"
    }
}

For a valid cause, the response would instead show the details of the specified cause.