Processing Online Donations Through the NGP API

UPDATE: This article is outdated. We have since updated the code we use to accept online donations with the NGP contribution API, and we have written about it in our newer article "Accept campaign donations with the NGP contribution API".

Many of our political clients request that we integrate their website with NGP's fundraising and contact management service. Although NGP boasts powerful tools for keeping track of donors and maintaining mailing lists, their third-party API is sadly lacking in both functionality and documentation. After much trial-and-error (and some last-minute help from Josh), I was finally able to successfully interface with NGP's server to process donations directly from a client's website. To save you the same hassle, here is our solution:

NGP only accepts data in the form of an XML fragment passed via a SOAP transaction. We are going to use the NuSOAP library to handle the actual API call (PHP5's built-in SOAP library should work, too, but I had some strange errors when I tried it). Put the NuSOAP folder and the proxy file at the end of this post somewhere publicly-accessible on your server—I put it in the web root. Open up ngp_proxy.php and change the Credential String at the top to your own string, which you will need to get from NGP.

Now you need to create your donation form. This part is up to you, depending on what particular information you want to store and what donation options you want to provide. See below for a list of all possible fields. Just make sure to set the action of the form to the ngp_proxy.php file you just uploaded and the method to post. You can include a hidden input to specify a page to redirect to after a donation is successfully processed: <input type="hidden" name="success" value="http://mydomain.com/thank_you.html" />.

Disclaimer: Processing donations is serious business! Make sure you have SSL enabled on your server, so you aren't transferring credit card information in clear text. New Media Campaigns takes no responsibility for any security issues that occur as a result of using this code.

That's all there is to it. If you have any suggestions of improvements, please share in the comments.

Download the Proxy File

All Supported Fields

Fields with a * are required by NGP.

• last_name*
• first_name*
• middle_name
• salutation
• prefix
• suffix
• address1*
• address2
• address3
• city
• state
• zip*
• email
• home_phone
• work_phone
• work_phone_ext
• fax
• employer
• occupation
• cycle* - Election year the donation is for
• member
• attribution
• source
• recurring_period- Frequency of the donation. One of:
  • MONT
  • WEEK
  • BIWK
  • FRWK
  • QTER
  • SMYR
  • YEAR
• recurring_term - Number of times to make the donation
• amount*
• cc_number*
• cc_exp_year*
• cc_exp_month*
• cvv

UPDATE: This article is outdated. We have since updated the code we use to accept online donations with the NGP contribution API, and we have written about it in our newer article "Accept campaign donations with the NGP contribution API".