From Donation to Wall: How We Track Your Gift

Here's the actual mechanism, not a marketing description of it: every donation on this platform moves through a specific, verified status before it counts, and here's exactly what that looks like.

The payment status your gift actually moves through

A donation starts in a pending state the moment you begin checkout — it isn't counted as given yet. It only moves to a confirmed, successful state once the payment provider (M-Pesa or the card processor) verifies the transaction server-to-server; a donation that fails or is refunded is tracked as exactly that, not silently dropped. This matters because it means the totals shown on a cause page reflect verified, completed gifts — not checkout attempts that never actually cleared.

What happens after the payment clears

Once a gift is confirmed, it's attached to the specific cause you gave to, and you receive a receipt tied to that transaction. What happens after that — how the recipient organisation actually spends the funds and what they publish about it — is up to that named organiser, not something this platform's payment system tracks automatically. That's the honest boundary: we can tell you your payment was verified and received; we can't independently audit what the recipient did with it beyond what they choose to publish.

Why this two-part system matters

Separating "was the payment real and verified" from "what did the recipient do with it" is more honest than blending the two into one vague "your gift made an impact" message — it tells you exactly which part of the chain this platform can vouch for directly, and which part depends on the organiser's own published ledger.

— The ArtCollect Desk