How to implement a donation barometer

The following article describes the steps to build your own donation barometer for donations registered through the RaiseNow Manager.

Prerequisites

In order to develop your own donation barometer, you'll need to have the following:

A RaiseNow Account for manage.raisenow.com
The RaiseNow Merchant Identifier
A RaiseNow API user to query the RaiseNow API. You can create one following this Knowledge Base article: How to create a new user in the RaiseNow Manager. Make sure that you set API permissions and the flag for an API user as otherwise your user will expire.

Implementation guide

The complete documentation can be found on GitHub.

The donation barometer consists of two main components:

one server-side component which queries the RaiseNow API.
the frontend component which displays the donation amount statistic.

1. Server-Side Component

In order to aggregate donations made through RaiseNow for your organisation, you can query the RaiseNow search API from your server-side component. Once you've obtained the donation statistics, your server-side component can expose an API to your frontend.

Why should you use a server-side component to query the search API? The search API is protected by credentials, querying the API from the frontend will expose these credentials to the public, allowing anyone to use them and query as well as update your data at RaiseNow. It is your responsibility to keep these credentials secure.

Authorization

To access the RaiseNow API, you need to authenticate the request using HTTP Basic Authentication with your API user credentials.

Search Query

To obtain statistics of your received donations, you can use the following API request:

GET https://api.raisenow.com/epayment/api/<MERCHANT_IDENTIFIER>/transactions/search?<QUERY>'

whereas

MERCHANT_IDENTIFIER is your RaiseNow merchant identifier as obtained in the section Prerequisites.
QUERY is the search query as a URL-encoded string. It follows the following format:
- A sort part, which describes how donation should be sorted. Using the created date and sort it in descending manner will give you the most recent donation.
  - sort[0][field_name]=created
  - sort[0][order]=desc
- A filter part which will filter the returned transactions. The following will return all successful production donations made in CHF.
  - filters[0][field_name]=last_status
  - filters[0][type]=term
  - filters[0][value]=final_success
  - filters[1][field_name]=test_mode
  - filters[1][type]=term
  - filters[1][value]=production
  - filters[2][field_name]=currency_identifier
  - filters[2][type]=term
  - filters[2][value]=chf
- A facet part which will define how the donations are aggregated. Among the total sum of donations having matched your filter query, this facet will give you also the max, min, avg, and std. deviation. Note that the name of the facet is also contained in the response. This is especially useful if you are defining multiple facets.
  - facets[0][field_name]=amount
  - facets[0][type]=stats
  - facets[0][name]=total_amount
- A section which defines what kind of fields are returned by the search query.
  - displayed_fields=epp_transaction_id,created,currency_identifier,amount,payment_method_identifier
- A section which defines how many records per page should be returned.
  - records_per_page=5
- You can find the complete list of options also in the RaiseNow Developer Docs and further examples of queries in our Knowledge Base Transaction Search API.

This will give you a response looking as follows:

{
  "result": {
    "transactions": [
      {
        "epp_transaction_id": "<TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER>",
        "created": "1642428270", 
        "currency_identifier": "<CURRENCY>",
        "amount": <AMOUNT_IN_CENTS>,
        "payment_method_identifier": "<PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER>"
      },
      {
        "epp_transaction_id": "<TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER>",
        "created": "1640073719",
        "currency_identifier": "<CURRENCY>",
        "amount": <AMOUNT_IN_CENTS>,
        "payment_method_identifier": "<PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER>"
      },
      {
        "epp_transaction_id": "<TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER>",
        "created": "1639470666",
        "currency_identifier": "<CURRENCY>",
        "amount": <AMOUNT_IN_CENTS>,
        "payment_method_identifier": "<PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER>"
      },
      {
        "epp_transaction_id": "<TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER>",
        "created": "1639415198",
        "currency_identifier": "<CURRENCY>",
        "amount": <AMOUNT_IN_CENTS>,
        "payment_method_identifier": "<PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER>"
      },
      {
        "epp_transaction_id": "<TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER>",
        "created": "1639412837",
        "currency_identifier": "<CURRENCY>",
        "amount": <AMOUNT_IN_CENTS>,
        "payment_method_identifier": "<PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER>"
      }
    ],
    "sort": [
      {
        "fieldname": "created.raw",
        "order": "desc"
      }
    ],
    "additional_info": {
      "lang": "de",
      "search_time": "138.7160",
      "total_hits": 900,
      "page": 1,
      "total_pages": 180,
      "records_per_page": "5"
    },
    "filters": [
      {
        "field_name": "last_status",
        "type": "term",
        "value": "final_success",
        "filter_group": 0
      },
      {
        "field_name": "test_mode",
        "type": "term",
        "value": "production",
        "filter_group": 1
      },
      {
        "field_name": "currency_identifier",
        "type": "term",
        "value": "chf",
        "filter_group": 2
      }
    ],
    "facets": [
      {
        "name": "total_amount",
        "type": "stats",
        "stats": {
          "min": 1,
          "max": 5000,
          "mean": 120.93333333333,
          "count": 900,
          "total": 108840,
          "standard_deviation": 324.61111092095,
          "sum_of_squares": 107997520,
          "variance": 105372.37333333
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

whereas

transactions contains up to records_per_page transactions having matched your filter query. The variables are defined as follows:
- TRANACTION_IDENTIFIER is the identifier of the donation at RaiseNow
- CURRENCY is the currency in which the donation has been made, e.g. chf
- AMOUNT_IN_CENTS is the amount of the donation in cents
- PAYMENT_METHOD_IDENTIFIER the identifier of the payment method
sort describes by which field has been sorted
additional_info gives you an impression of how many records have matched your query
filters describe which filter have been applied in the query
facets gives you detailed information

Typically, your server side component will just return the total of the facets section in order to show the total collected amount.

Example

The complete documentation can be found on GitHub.

You can find an example of a PHP server side component in server/server.php.

To run it, follow these steps:

Install composer dependencies using composer install
Run php server.php

2. Frontend Component

Once you have your server-side component ready, you can use the code snippet in client/index.html to display your barometer.

Articles in this section

Prerequisites

Implementation guide

1. Server-Side Component

Authorization

Search Query

Example

2. Frontend Component

Comments

Articles in this section

Prerequisites

Implementation guide

1. Server-Side Component

Authorization

Search Query

Example

2. Frontend Component

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