Recently I received an email from a Social Animal reader who had successfully placed a Paypal button on her organization’s Facebook page using my tutorial. She wrote:

“I just added a Paypal Donate Button to our Facebook page thank to your tutorial! I was curious to know your thoughts on adding the petfinder code for adoptable animals on a facebook page. Is this even possible and would you do it the same way you added that Paypal Donate Button code?”

Her idea is a very good one; however, it is not possible in the same way you use the paypal donate button. Facebook does not allow the use of Iframes in the FBML application, and that is how Petfinder exports the pets for adoption lists.

There are a couple of problems here—one, iframe is a VERY outdated way of displaying HTML information, and I’m dismayed that Petfinder still uses it. I hope their developers are working with them on a new way (or at least new options in addition to the iframe) to display and pull information. I would (and have) recommend RSS to them. I am hoping to work with Petfinder to develop a solution and of course, I’ll keep you posted here if anything comes along!

The other bad thing is that even with the FBML app (the way you put the donate button on your page) it’s still not a great solution, because the button is not highly visible. What we need is to be able to put it ON our page, where it’s more visible, like in the sidebar!

There are a couple of ways to do this, but it requires the knowledge of some fairly advanced HTML. I am working on putting together a module, or a pre-made script for you to just insert. I CAN put together a tutorial for advanced users, but I’d like to find a way to make it available to beginners as well, because as we have learned and are learning more every day, Facebook is a HUGELY valuable tool for fundraising online! In fact, nonprofits (there are about 600,000 on Facebook) raise around $150,000 each WEEK on Facebook alone! Pretty impressive numbers.

The good news is that I’m working on coding solutions for both these problems. Facebook is pretty friendly to javascript, so I’m working on a javascript method for adding the petfinder or Petango display list to your facebook page.

As soon as I get this done, I’ll post it here, and you guys can be my “beta testers!” Sound good?

Keep those questions coming, and I’ll email you back and post them on the blog so everyone can learn!

I wanted to give a big shout out and congratulations to my friends at CARA (Community Animal Rescue and Adoption) in Jackson, MS. This video posted on YouTube gives a great overview of their shelter and what they do, but also details how they’ve been able to build up their efforts through social media.

CARA is the largest no-kill shelter in Mississippi, and their support extends far beyond the borders of their community because they take the time to focus on steady communication with fans and friends all over the country. A few minutes a day on Facebook and Twitter has made an incredible difference for this organization, and it can for yours, too!

Watch the video and see what this group is doing right–and take a page from their book and start a social media plan at your shelter!

Social media can definitely make a huge difference to your organization. But for it to really work, someone has to spend some time on it, that’s for sure. It’s all about engaging with your fans and community, and that takes some time.

You really have two choices if you have decided not to do it yourself (and believe me, that is OKAY if you can’t/don’t want to do it yourself!): hire someone, or find a volunteer to do it.

If you find a volunteer, that person is ideally going to be interested in your organization, engaged in your activities and invested in your success. A volunteer is great to do this, too, because he or she will be aware of what you’re doing. Is there an adoption event this weekend? Do you need cat traps donated? Are you having a fundraiser for a special needs animal? Did you recently have a great adoption that you want to tell everyone about? These are things that a volunteer will (hopefully) be pretty tuned into, and can share via social media without you having to do much prompting.

On the downside, though, volunteers can sometimes get burned out. You can’t be TOO critical if they are slow, make mistakes, etc. because, after all, they’re volunteers. They can be moody and fickle. But they’re free!

If you hire someone, you get a level of professionalism that you don’t get with a volunteer. You have some control over the quality of their work, because you are paying them. If they don’t deliver a satisfactory performance, you can fire them! However, finding a person who is truly qualified can be difficult. Just about anybody will say “sure, I’ll do your social media for money!” I mean, what could be easier, right? Just play on Twitter and Facebook all day and get paid?! However, to have a good strategy and really do it effectively, it’s not as easy as it would seem to be.

The main problem with paying someone to do social media for you (besides the fact of having to pay them!) is that they may not be tuned in to what your organization is doing. They may not be in the same state or city as you are, and they may not be familiar at all with your organization. How, then, can they accurately and effectively represent you via social media, if their finger is not on the pulse of your organization?

Good social media firms make an effort to become familiar with your organization, and stay connected, so that they can accurately represent you via social media. For example, I do social media for several clients whose organizations I have never even visited. But I have spoken with them extensively, I’ve become very familiar with what they do, and I stay on top of it. I’m dialed in. My biggest challenge is making sure their staff remembers to keep me in the loop on stuff, so I can promote it! I have to be able to represent them in social media as if I AM them, as if I’m on the inside.

Most of us in the animal welfare world are conditioned to not pay for ANYTHING unless we absolutely have to. We try to get everything we can for free. And that makes sense because we don’t have very much money, usually! But sometimes, it’s true that you get what you pay for. The key is not to look at it like you are “losing” money, but that you’re spending $1 to make $10. And the key there is in HOW you pay your consultant or provider.

If you pay someone $500 or $5000 or $5 a month to do your social media, just a flat fee, then there’s really no accountability, is there? What I prefer to do, as a provider, is tie my performance into your profits. What I do is take an agreed-upon percentage of all donations that come through the web site. Therefore I know that if I do a really great job, and generate a lot of money for that shelter, then I can make more money, too. Everyone is happy! If I sit around and be lazy, and don’t actively campaign to raise money, however, then they don’t make any money…but neither do I. It’s kind of like being on a comission-only sales job. I only get paid for how smart I work and how good a job I do.

I also only take clients, in general, in fields that I’m familiar with—and usually that means animal shelters, because that’s the are where I’m most comfortable. I can talk about being in an animal shelter because I’ve spent a lot of time in animal shelters! If you were a biotechnology company, or a fashion magazine, I probably wouldn’t do a very good job at doing your social media, because I don’t know much about your business. Not even enough to fake it!

So, back to the original question: where would you find someone? If you’re looking for a good volunteer, make contact with your local community colleges or universities. Most marketing departments teach social media (or they should), and your nonprofit organization would make a great test project for a class. Often PR/marketing classes will divide into groups and each group will take an organization for the semester. This is a great way to get talented people for free, AND often they will stick around after the class is over and keep helping you, if it’s been a good experience. Colleges in general are a great place to find people. Sure, some college kids can be flakey. But this generation, called the Millenials (born after 1980), research is showing that they are extremely interested in volunteer work and “making a difference.” So don’t discount young people. Even if you get someone for a couple of months and then they quit, well, at least you have had someone for 2 months!

If you already have a Facebook page, twitter account, etc. then that’s a great place to find people. Advertise there! Tell your fans you’re looking for someone to maintain your social media presence. Chances are your most active fans live and breathe social media…and they’d be thrilled to do it on your behalf.

If you want to hire someone to do this, contact PR firms or agencies; they may have reduced rates for nonprofits. I also have availability for a few more clients and can give you some pricing information. I have a few other people I can recommend as well.

It also comes down to trusting someone. Many of us started our own rescue; it’s our “baby.” Let’s be honest: we have a hard time delegating and trusting anyone to do anything for us…because we only know it’s done right if WE do it ourselves, right? Well, sooner or later we have to accept that we CAN’T do everything ourselves. There are too many dogs to walk, too many litterboxes to clean, too many emails to answer, too many applications to check on.

So we think we CAN’T do something new like social media, even though it will help our organization so much in the long run. Help us to grow, get more donations, more volunteers….but do we really WANT that? It’s a valid question. As much as we always say we want volunteers, we want more help…if we had it, what would it mean? It would mean a loss of control, to a certain extent. We’d have to trust other people to do things that we currently struggle to get done ourselves.

I talk to so many people about this technology, and they say they wish it could go back to the way it used to be, to a simpler time. But things can’t go back to the way they used to be. This is the world we live in. These are the tools we have available to us, for good or ill.

So what are we going to do with the tools we’re given? And who will we enlist to help us?

Sometimes the hardest thing is just asking for help—but it can return the greatest rewards.

Have you found solutions for getting someone to do your social media? Share your success with us here! We’d love to hear your stories and ideas.

Recently I got a question via email from a Social Animal blog reader:

“I am currently managing the FaceBook page for my shelter. The event I created is actually managed under a different name; it was set up before I realized you could manage multiple pages under your email. I can’t seem to invite all 200+ fans of my Facebook page to the event, although I have posted a message on the fan page to make sure you RSVP for the event, with a link to it, and the event is open to anyone to attend, anyone to invite friends to, etc.

I am missing the boat on having it on all 200+ fans’ own facebook profiles, but not sure how to get on board.”

So basically, this person created an event under a personal profile, so it’s not going to display on the fan page for the organization. It is possible (and in this case, preferable) to create the event under the fan page, that way it’s XYZ Humane Society’s event, not John Doe’s event. But even if that didn’t get created right, it’s fine–you can still promote the event on the Fan Page for your organization.

What this person really wants to do is “invite” all of his organization’s fans to the event.

Here’s what I told him:

You can’t actually send a message to your fans from a Facebook page. As a profile or a group, you can send an email message (through facebook) to all your members or friends. But as a page, you cannot send a message to your fans. This is really the one downside about a fan page. But you still have to have a fan page for your shelter (Facebook rules state that organizations and companies must have pages, not profiles). (What’s the difference between a page, profile and group?)

Only a person (with a profile) can “invite” people to an event. So even if you recreated the event under your organization page, your organization could not “invite” people to the event. What has to happen is that your fans can invite all THEIR friends. So if I’m a fan, I can RSVP to the event and invite all of my friends (and they can invite theirs and so on). So the way you have to do it is get your FANS to take the reins and do the job of really promoting the event on a one-to-one level.

So even though the event was created under your own personal profile, that’s okay. You don’t have to recreate it. You can just share the event on your fan page’s wall.

So how do you promote the event and encourage your fans to invite their friends? What you’re doing, for starters. Ask them to do it. Ask them specifically to invite their friends. “Invite 10 friends today!” and you can promote it through other channels—twitter, blog, etc. if you use those. Have you had the event before? Post some photos from last year’s event and ask fans to do the same. Do you have video from last year? Put something on Youtube. Be sure to list the event on any local event calendars; most newspapers/radio station/tv stations have event calendars. Put it on the petfinder.com public calendar.

Also, if you’re a fan on FB of any local media or other organizations, you can share the event on their walls as well. This gets exposure to all of THEIR fans, and hey, they might come and cover the event, too.

Hopefully this helps clear up the confusion over promoting/inviting people to events on Facebook.

What questions do you have about social media? Email me your specific questions, or post them in the comments on the blog here, and I will answer them and hopefully we can all learn something in the process!

Everywhere I go, I hear that people are pretty confused about the differences between Facebook profiles, pages and groups, and which one is appropriate for their organization or business. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook rolled out yet ANOTHER type of page, the Community Page, which makes things even more confusing!

Here’s the most important distinction that you need to understand. Facebook profiles are for people. Individuals, using the site personally, like you or me (or some people set up profiles for their pets!). If you do business as a person or individual, for example, if you’re a realtor, then it would be appropriate for you to use your Facebook profile for business. But generally, Facebook profiles are for personal use. Facebook profiles ALWAYS have to represent a real person.

Facebook Pages (they refer to them as “fan pages” too) are for organizations, companies and businesses. Facebook’s official definition is:

Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner. Like profiles, they can be enhanced with applications that help the entity communicate with and engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends.

So any organization–a football team, animal shelter, restaurant, dry cleaner’s, etc.–should always have a Facebook PAGE. (You can create a Facebook page here)

But you’ve all seen profiles that represent businesses and organizations! Well, these are in violation of Facebook’s policies. If Facebook identifies these profiles, they can and will remove them from the site.

Facebook makes it a little more difficult to set up a profile if you’re a business or company, because it requires you to have something that it recognizes as a “name,” and it requires you to select a gender. For example, if my business is called “Emily’s Oklahoma City Lakeside Cafe” it would not recognize this as a “name” and it would not let me create a profile. So I’d have to modify my name a bit…for example, here’s one of my favorite restaurants on Facebook. It refers to the restaurant as “she” because the person setting up the site chose “female” as a gender, and had to have something that Facebook recognized as a “name,” meaning a first and last name, so she had to condense it to “MamaRoja Mexicankitchen.” So if I were still trying to set up a profile for my restaurant, I’d have to be “EmilysOklahomaCity LakesideCafe” or something clumsy like that.

These should be flags or deterrents to setting up a profile instead of a page, but people still do it.

Don’t do it. Play by the rules. It’s not worth getting your profile deleted!

The main differences between pages and profiles:

• On a profile, someone is your “friend.” On a page, someone is your “fan.”
• With a profile, you can send messages to one or more friends, that go directly to their inbox on Facebook. As a page, you can’t do this–you can only send updates (which not as many people see).
• Pages and Profiles can both post status updates, links, photos, etc. that appear in their fans’/friends’ news feeds.
• Pages cannot “add” people as friends. However, your fans can suggest your page to their own friends to become a fan.

So, where do Groups fit into all this? Groups allow for more interaction between members, sort of like a forum or message board (BBS) system. Here’s what Facebook has to say about Groups:

Groups and Pages serve different purposes on Facebook. Groups are meant to foster group discussion around a particular topic area while Pages allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans. Only the authorized representative of the entity can run a Page.

So one of your employees might set up a “group” for your organization, and that would be fine. But only an official representative of an organization can set up the official Page for that organization (or at least someone who is willing to say that they are an official rep!).

So for example, for our client the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, we have set up a Page that is their official presence on Facebook. We post events, updates and other news. But we also have groups for specific volunteers within the organization, like Trap/Neuter/Return volunteers, clinic volunteers, foster parents, etc. That way those people can talk about subjects that are specific to their areas of interest.

Ready to create a page? Click here to get started.

So what the heck is a Community Page?

This is something Facebook has just rolled out. If you’ve spent much time on Facebook, you have seen lots of “unofficial” pages. These can be for celebrities, like unofficial fan pages for the Twilight movies, or for beers or sodas or sneakers or whatever. There are also funny groups like Tim Tebow Crying (sorry, Florida fans..this is just one of my favorites) or “Can this dung beetle get more fans than Glenn Beck?“(also a favorite).

These pages are becoming really popular, some having hundreds of thousands of fans. So now you have the option to choose to be a “community page” if you are creating a new page on Facebook. Now, if you’re making a page for your organization or business or brand, there is no reason to select a community page. Your page still definitely qualifies as a regular Facebook page.

What is kind of cool about the Community Page idea, though, is that Facebook says “If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.” What that means is that it will become basically the same thing as a Wiki. A Wiki is a web site or page that allows anyone to contribute content, much like Wikipedia. So if you create a community page that goes extremely viral, then it could evolve into something completely new on Facebook!

Again, for your purposes with your company or organization, you don’t really need to worry about Community Pages. Hopefully this has helped you understand the differences among the different ways you can represent yourself on Facebook. What other questions do you have about Facebook that we can answer? We can help you craft a social media strategy that will bring you business!

In preparation for my seminar at the Texas Unites for Animals Lone Star Conference next week, I put together a few strategy ideas for Facebook that I’d like to share. If you have questions; let me know–I am going to go into more details about this at my session on Sunday in Austin!

Facebook Strategies

It’s very important for your organization to have a facebook “fan page,” not a “profile.” if you have a “profile,” which is reserved for real people, Facebook will delete the profile if discovered or reported. You can also use a Group if you wish.

Facebook is almost more engaging than Twitter because you often know the people you’re talking with, and at least they use their real names. They are able to post longer messages and also photos and or video.

• Facebook, like Twitter, is very real time. If you have a lot of followers, chances are SOMEONE is online all the time, whenever you post.
• Don’t post and get off right away. Be there in case someone has a follow-up question.
• SAY THANK YOU.
• Comment back. If someone posts a photo of a pet they adopted, comment on it! Just takes a second, but it makes their day.
• Even if someone is not your “friend” on facebook, you can send her a private message. If the situation warrants it, message that person privately.
• Resist the temptation to “police” people and comments. Chances are, your fans will self-correct each other.
• Have a personality! Even though you need to be professional, you still need to be a person. You can be funny and personable. Keep in mind your personal profile (if you’re an admin) is not tied to your Facebook page at all.

What other questions do you have about Facebook?

Put a Donate button on your site

It’s free and easy to put a “Donate” button on your site. Make it as easy as possible for people to give you money! You never know what they may see or read on your web site that spurs them to make a donation, and you want that button to be prominent and visible as soon as that urge hits.

The easiest way to make a donate button is to use Paypal. Set up a free Paypal account, and people can donate to you via credit card or a bank account transfer. The best part is you never see or handle their credit card information; it’s all handled by Paypal.The downside to this is that Paypal charges you a transaction fee for every donation (around 3%), but no matter what, if you accept credit cards, you are going to be charged fees in one way or another. Paypal makes it very easy (and free) to transfer your donations from your Paypal account into your bank account, too. If you don’t know how to create a Paypal donate button, see the video tuturial on how to create a Paypal donate button. Best of all, you can put the donate button on your Facebook page as well.

Make your “List”

We would all be shocked if we added up the time we waste looking for passwords, trying to remember passwords and login information, sending requests for lost passwords… So take a few moments to write down ALL that information in one place. Do it for your own personal information, as well as anything for work, and for your animal rescue site stuff.

Do it in case something happens to you. I took over a web site for an organization whose webmaster died (age 42) of a freak infection he got after a routine teeth cleaning. It was a nightmare to get access to their web site and other accounts because nobody else knew the login information. You never know what’s going to happen…so take a few minutes and record this information somewhere.

Set up a Google Alert

Google alerts are extremely cool, free and easy. Basically, you’re letting Google do all the heavy lifting on searches for you…while you’re sleeping! You can set up a Google Alert for absolutely anything. Right away, set one up for your shelter name, in several different iterations. For example, for the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, I set up Google alerts for the phrases “Central Oklahoma Humane Society,” “OK Humane,” and “Oklahoma Humane Society.”

What the Google alert does is it searches web sites all over the world, all the time, and as soon as it sees something with that phrase, it sends you an email to let you know (you can get the emails as frequently or rarely as you wish; I signed up to get mine once daily). What’s the advantage? Whenever someone mentions you on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. you’ll know. If someone is talking about you in a chat room or message board or Craigslist, you’ll know.

You can also set up alerts to follow topics of interest to you. For example, “anti-tethering legislation Florida” would be a good one if this is something you’re interested in. If your executive director is someone in the media a lot, keep tabs of the mentions of him or her by setting up a Google alert on that person’s name.

Keep in mind that you want it to be pretty specific. If you just type in “New Jersey dog” you’re going to get a lot of stuff to wade through that probably isn’t applicable.

To set up a Google alert, simply go to www.google.com/alerts and fill in your search terms. If you’re not sure of the terminology, go to Google and do a few test searches to make sure you get the kind of results you had in mind. You will need to have a Google account set up, but that just takes a few seconds, and you should have one anyway to take advantage of all the tools Google offers.

Change your Attitude (can vs. can’t)

This doesn’t specifically relate to social media or marketing, but it’s HUGELY important. When we started to change the way we looked at our situations, we underwent a major paradigm shift. We started saying, “What can we do to find this animal a home? How can we help this person become a more informed adopter? How can we help this person overcome barriers to adopting this animal?” Instead of looking for reasons why we COULDN’T do something, we used language that helped us find ways that we COULD. It’s amazing what a small shift just in the types of words we were using caused us to change our outlook. Try it for a day and see what it can do for you!

Get a Hero

We all know of people in our industry who are doing this right. Why not make them your role model? It’s a whole lot easier to model (okay, even copy) what someone else is doing successfully than try to reinvent the wheel.

Besides, the great thing about our business is that we aren’t in “competition” with each other! If my shelter is in Oklahoma and yours is in Florida, we can take ideas from each other, and it doesn’t matter one bit! of course, it’s nice to ask for permission, and you have to be mindful of any copyright or trademark infringement. But it’s all about saving lives. If somebody in another state has a great idea, see if you can use it!

Subscribe to my newsletter

This is definitely the easiest one! You can sign up for The Social Animal newsletter here. I’ll never sell or share your email address, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I send out a newsletter about once a month with helpful information about non profits and social media.

Sometimes you don’t know where to start…so you never do. Here are 10 things you can do right now—this very moment—that will help you jump start your organization’s social media effectiveness in 2010. You can do all these things in less than one hour! Think how productive you’ll feel when you’re done!

1. Define a Goal

You can’t figure out how to do something until you decide what you want to do. Keep your goals simple and be specific. For example, “get more volunteers” is a pretty nebulous goal. If you say “I want to recruit 5 new volunteers this month,” that is specific, you’ve given yourself a time frame, and now the task of figuring out HOW to accomplish this goal is more achievable because you know WHAT you want to do. Now is the time for new year’s resolutions, so why not go ahead and set one goal that social media can help you accomplish. Do it right now! Why not?

2. Join Facebook

Maintaining an effective Facebook presence for your shelter or rescue group does take a bit of time and effort over the long-term, but you can JOIN Facebook right now if you’re not already a member. It’s free and really easy. You have to have a personal account on Facebook (whether you use it or not) before you can set up a Page for your organization anyway, so go ahead and join.

3. Create a Facebook Fan Page

After you’ve registered with your personal profile on Facebook, you should go ahead and take a few minutes to create a “fan page” (usually just called a “page”) for your organization.

It might seem like a good shortcut to just register a “profile” for your organization, and not bother with creating a personal profile. However, this is in violation of Facebook’s terms of use and they WILL delete your profile if they discover this. Profiles are for People, Pages are for businesses and organizations. So be sure to create your own personal profile (again, you don’t ever have to use it if you don’t care to, but each page has to be administered by a person, so you have to have a profile in order to create a page).

It only takes a couple of minutes to create your page. Go ahead and create it; you can always come back later to edit and refine your content. (don’t forget to do it, though!). if you need help creating a facebook page, see my tutorial on how to create a facebook page here.

4. Register at TechSoup.org

Techsoup.org is truly “the technology place for nonprofits.” Registration is free. Techsoup’s main goal is to provide information and products (software and hardware) to 501(c)3 nonprofits at a discount or for free. Subscribe to their newsletter to keep up with their latest offers. They believe technology can make nonprofits much more efficient and effective, and aim to make it easier for nonprofits to obtain technology (usually in terms of software). You can get some really good deals!

5. Put a Donate button on your site

It’s free and easy to put a “Donate” button on your site. Make it as easy as possible for people to give you money! You never know what they may see or read on your web site that spurs them to make a donation, and you want that button to be prominent and visible as soon as that urge hits.

The easiest way to make a donate button is to use Paypal. Set up a free Paypal account, and people can donate to you via credit card or a bank account transfer. The best part is you never see or handle their credit card information; it’s all handled by Paypal.The downside to this is that Paypal charges you a transaction fee for every donation (around 3%), but no matter what, if you accept credit cards, you are going to be charged fees in one way or another. Paypal makes it very easy (and free) to transfer your donations from your Paypal account into your bank account, too. If you don’t know how to create a Paypal donate button, see the video tuturial on how to create a Paypal donate button. Best of all, you can put this on your Facebook page as well (see that tutorial here).

Check back in the next day or two for Part 2 to see the other five things you can do right now!

This video will walk you through (step by step) how to insert a Paypal “donate” button on your Facebook page for your shelter, using the FBML app for Facebook. You need to have your button code ready; I show you how to create a Paypal donate button in a previous post.

Let me know if you have questions or there’s anything I need to explain better!

Using a free application on Facebook, you can insert a Paypal button that people can use to donate to your organization–right from Facebook!

I’ll show you in the next post how to insert the button on your Facebook page. First I’ll show you how to create the button in your Paypal account. The only thing this tutorial assumes is that you have a Paypal account already set up.

1. After you’re logged in, you’ll see your dashboard. Click on “Merchant Services.”

2.Next, click on the “Donate” link under the Create Buttons header.

3. Here’s where you add the specifics about your button. It’s already going to be tied to your paypal account, so don’t worry about having to put in an email address or anything.  Since you selected a “donation” button, that is already filled in for you in the first field.

Type in the name of your organization. This will display on your checkout page, where the user enters their credit card info, and it will also show up on their Paypal and credit card statement–so be sure it matches the actual name of your organization or somehow accurately identifies who will be billing the customer.

Don’t worry abut entering a Donation ID. In most cases, this won’t be necessary.

If you want to customize the appearance of your button, click on that link. This would be if you wanted to import your own HTML for the button, or select a different default Paypal button. For most cases, you can just ignore this as well and leave the button as it is.

Select your currency type (most likelyUSD) and whether you want donors to input their own donation amount. Select “secure merchant account ID” and hit “create button.” You can edit those advanced settings if you wish, but there is no need to for a basic button.

4. Paypal automatically creates the HTML code for your button. It’s all ready to go–all you have to do is cut and paste! So go ahead and copy and paste this code and save it somewhere, like in a text file or something. This is the code you’ll need to paste into the app on your Facebook page; I’ll show you how to do that in my next post.

You can also choose to save this button, if you want to save it in your Paypal account, if you’re going to use it again later or need to access it later for any reason.