Collecting Annual Dues with PayPal: Help?

I've searched the forums but haven't quite found what I'm looking for.

I'm going to institute $5 per year annual dues. The dues will be due Jan. 1, 2010, and anyone who hasn't paid by Jan. 31 will be ejected.

I've set up a PayPal account for our group. It will also serve as our group's bank account for the most part, and I will get a PayPal debit card so I can pay the Meetup.com subscription.

The group has 100+ members. I will not be accepting cash payments. That's too many people for me to keep track of.


So I plan to send out an email to the group soon that payments are due. From my reading I thought there would be a "pay with PayPal" link or button somewhere on the group's home page once I set up the "money" tab, but I don't see an obvious way for them to send in their money. Am I missing something basic?


I had also toyed with the idea of making a meetup event called "Pay your dues," and requiring payment to RSVP yes. I could use the No RSVP list to determine who to boot. The problem with this is that 1. I don't want the list of who has RSVPd yes or no to be public, and 2. some folks have given me voluntary donations in the past and I don't want it to look like they haven't paid. Is there a way to make a meetup where the RSVP list isn't viewable?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Hi Amanda,

Shavanna suggested some ways to put up a donation button that you can read about here in this thread: Donation Button - especially check out how Jeff uses the sponsor section to make his own donation button.

Unfortunately, there's no way for an RSVP list to be viewable from members in the same group. What some organizers do is that they use the member title section to designate different levels of sponsorship like "Gold member" or "Bronze member". You can also download the member list in an Excel format and play around with it to include a donation column.

I'm sure other organizers will chime in here with how they handle dues in their groups too.

Hope that helps and keep us posted on what you end up doing! :)

Lana