Many of you know I work at a church for my full-time job. Last week, the senior pastor at my church asked me to look into a giving kiosk so worshippers could donate using their credit card when at the church. Of course, ready-made solutions will run in the thousands of dollars. So, I decided to do it myself. Here's the mount I'll likely be getting to secure an iPad to the wall: http://www.metropolitandisplay.com/servlet/-strse-1277/Classic-Aluminum-Pro-iPad/Detail And here's the app I created this weekend to run on it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xi2o632p26ycx7v/kiosk.mov Mount: $150 iPad 2: $300 (on sale at Target) App: $Free :) ------------- Total Cost: less than $500 Not too bad if I say so myself. :)

Where there is a will, there is a way. Especially when you have some skills. Praise the Lord.

Congrats, looks very promising. do you have a card reader attached to the ipad kiosk? are donation receipts sent via email? may you have more great weekends.

No card reader. Card info is manually entered then destroyed once the charge goes through.

Nice work, Chris! Was it difficult to integrate with Stripe? For v2, I suggest layout the form in a two-column format. The current form looks like a river, making it harder for the user to easily comprehend and fill-out. Be an interesting technique for securing a magnetic card reader onto that fixture. Keep on trucking! -- Niraj

Good stuff @Chris, I did the exact same thing, but went the Android tablet route instead of iPAD to save even more money. A nice Android tablet can be had for $100-$150

Very impressive! One suggestion I would have on the recurring donation screen...include a picture of a check and what parts show the account # and what parts are the routing #. That way, if they're at church, and have a check they can reference, they'll know where to find all the info. I can never remember what parts of the long string of numbers at the bottom of my checks are what! Excellent job! Mark

Good job Chris. This is something that is very helpful for churches and saves time too.

Greay job! Did you notice a sort of glitch when transitioning from one screen to the other on 1'21"? Where the new screen takes place while the previous one still didn't go away? I have noticed that before in other apps made by BT. Is it a known bug or is there something we could do to avoid it happening? Congrats once again.

Keep in mind this is a first draft. Stripe integration was definitely the longest part of the work, but not difficult considering I use Stripe on my website and am already familiar with the API. Mark - for sure I'll be adding camera support. Need to get an iPad with a camera first to test it on. Lol. Screen transition will be fixed before it goes live. Can't use a card swiper because all I've found require you to use their app, and are meant for a cashier to do the swiping for the customer rather than self-serve. If anyone knows of a swiper that has API access for the hardware ease let me know! Seems silly that none do.

Nice job Chris!

Hey Chris, Actually, I was thinking just include an image of sample check on that screen so they can use it as a reference against their checks to understand what numbers are what. I don't think you need to actually capture an image of their check. Mark

Just found an API that might work really well for card reading - card.io - not a swiper, but still pretty slick - you just hold the credit card up to the camera and it reads it. Will see how well it works and report back.

@chris1 we use VancoServices for all of our secure mobile and online giving. They provided me with an API for integrating their pay system into my Kiosk app. By using their API it shifts all the PCI security compliance to them rather than our Church. The thing I like about Vanco is that they provide a card swipe attachment for the iPad or Android Tablet at no additional cost.

Awesome job! That's so innovating for a church. When do you sleep again?! :)

Nice job. 3% discount rate seems high - I'd look at other options than Stripe in the long run, but always better to get something up and running instead of never getting the "perfect" solution finished :)

Way to go Chris1! Always love seeing your creations come to life and for an excellent cause!

@RobWainwright - I'll take a look at Vanco - thanks. There's also the challenge of how to mount a card swiper when the iPad is mounted to the wall. As for PCI compliance, Stripe manages that as well. @pdog - 2.9% is pretty standard I've found. What rates are you getting? The only cheaper rates I've found are using services that lock you down to their app and format and offer no flexibility for developers.

Just took a quick look at Vanco - It looks like it has the same issues as the other card swipers out there - you have to use their app. Am I missing something?

This is amazing, and so creative. Could it also be used within a church app so people could donate anywhere, or is this designed to work within the kiosk?

Sharon - this is designed to work inside the kiosk only. There's an important reason for that: Apple does not allow donations inside an app for some strange reason. At least, not inside an app that is distributed on the App Store. In this case, I don't need to distribute it - I just need to load it on a single device. Thus, Apple's reviewers will never see the app.

Of course, I forgot about that donation rule. Great work-around. Because it's only on one device is the app downloaded from the app store, or does it just run on the device?

I would think you can get lower rates by getting a merchant account yourself - e.g. Beanstream or Costco (Elavon). Would mean more integration but should get the rate below 2% I would imagine - just don't quote me on that. There are also brokers who can shop around for you but make sure they understand the app and mobile aspects.

@Chris Just showed the video to my pastor friend, his only comment was, that instead of the carousel, to just have a mosaic tile buttons or just square buttons like an atm machine, so its straight forward. It's what people with money to give away are used to.. (aka Bank) Such a happy go lucky guy. He was like Ed, where do people know to go, tap on a screen enter information to put money into if not an ATM machine. A one off app for dedicated ipad kiosk makes sense, and since this is a first draft, that's his suggestion. Tailor the app to an ATM UX/UI. Gonna PM you about something.

@chris1 you may be right about vanco, I haven't implemented their card swiper (yet), but the Vanco testing engineer that I worked with indicated that it could be used via their API, I am sure they prefer that you use their APP, but my understanding is that any of their services are available through their API. @EdReyes when I was developing my custom KIOSK app, my pastor said to keep it very simple and user friendly, so I actually used a jquery mobile theme, very clean... I kept it very simple, accordian type menu/buttons.

@Rob, yup that's what he said to keep it simple, less moving parts.

Well, if I were the arguing type, I'd argue that most people are more familiar with apps than ATM's these days. I went with the Carousel plugin because I wanted something that would be attractive from across the room, so that people see it and say "what is that? I should go check it out". The animation catches the eye, even if something like the Mosaic plugin would be more beautiful. Just took a quick look at Beanstream - looks like they follow the 2.9% + $0.30 model as well. Elevon is higher than that. Both have discounts if the card is physically swiped rather than manually entered, but not a terribly large discount. Could be that if we were a high-volume business we could get lower rates, but not for the amount of traffic we do. Especially since this is the first real move to electronic giving at the church.

@chris good points.....it is always great to hear other points of view!

Yep most all payment services I found have basically the same rates credit card fees. The ones I steered clear of were the ones with hidden fees, like batch processing fees, quarterly statement fees, paper statement fees et al!

Yep - that would be bad. Noticed some had monthly fees as well. Crazy. I'll stick with Stripe.

Very impressive @chris1 @Stephen Praise the Lord... love it! :-))

Yeah love the carousel works well aesthetically for niraj and I's super bowl app. I'm not the one for too simple myself. Gotta love the eye candy that draws anyone to an app. Totally agree with the 'what's that' point of view.

Good research on the rates Chris. I agree it's best to stick with what you have for now. You will help the church much more with some of your other plans, and some promo to the congregation etc., than squeezing out a smaller rate at this point.

Yep. My next focus is on improving the special projects screen. Right now the data is being loaded from a csv file, but I want to build a simple control panel on our finance web page to handle the data. My goal is to track the amount donated to date through that, and show a progress bar in the app.

Will there be any progress on this? http://www.buzztouch.com/forum/thread.php?tid=CC87BE6E851702F5B5204A7&fid=29FCCE999D443E6BA90435B&sortColumn=FT.id&sortUpDown=&currentPage=1 Cheers! -- Smug

@chris since my church already has a MySQL DB running on our webserver, I just created some PHP to take the form data from folks who sign up for events via the kiosk app and and save it in the DB. I also use it as the backend for all the Event data to be displayed.

Smug - my attention lately has been geared toward bugs - finding them and squashing them. David and I felt that was more pressing. Rob - yep, that's the way to do it. Not sure we'll be using this kiosk for event signups, as the main church app will handle that. The "projects" list on this kiosk app is more for one-off to-do's, such as upgrading media equipment in the church.

Well, it looks like card.io isn't going to work after all. Just spend a good couple of hours implementing it into the app, fully integrated with Stripe, only to find out it doesn't support the front camera. :(

@chris1 on my todo list is to check into the VeriFone card reader. I was told by a follow developer that they offer a full API for integrating their card reader into a custom mobile APP. I have not done the research yet, but i will let you know if it holds any promise.

cool - thanks

There is also "card.io", an SDK I played with months ago… but they want a hunk of the percentage. But it's cool looking; you use your camera to take a picture of the users credit card, and it processes from that. Cheers! -- Smug

@smug thats the one @chris1 found does not support the front facing camera

oh. gotcha. I guess it pays to read the entire thread, lol! Sorry! :) Cheers! -- Smug

Been there, done that :)

Yeah - card.io would be a great addition. There's no need to use them as your payment processor. The scanning did seem a little bit buggy though - took quite a while to get a card scanned, and only then it was a card with minimal design on the front. Cards with a more complicated design wouldn't scan for me. Can imagine that's a pretty tough task though.

Chris - another idea for holding the iPad instead of a wall mount (if you didn’t want to start drilling holes) are stands with a cable and lock. Here’s how I used them at an event last summer. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cb36f6hxuermy72/j_sjbwrzAm

Chris, When will you accept Bitcoin ;) Nice work! Craig

Craig - after the big fiasco Bitcoin just suffered, I'm not too keen on it just yet. There's way too much volatility in that market. I wouldn't dare invest the church's money in that - too much speculation.

Chris, I was just kidding really. But coinbase does offer an API for people to pay using bitcoin and it is converted to local currency upon receipt. I too was not sure how people would deal in bitcoin with the value volatility, but then I learned how coinbase made it possible for people to transact using bitcoin so that the seller didn't suddenly lose 1/2 the value 5 minutes after the transaction.

Interesting. Doubt anyone at the church would actually use it, but it would be interesting to see their reactions! Lol