GivebearHelp and support
How staff help donors find receipts, manage recurring gifts, and get unstuck.
This section is for the people who answer donor questions: your staff and volunteers. Most of those questions have the same answer, which is to point the donor to the right self-service tool. The rest come to your team because money or identity looks wrong, and those need a careful, consistent response.
Givebear gives donors their own home for everything they hold with you. It is called My Givebear, the supporter portal, and it lives at givebear.io/my. Donors sign in with a magic link sent to the email they used when giving, joining, or registering. There is no password to reset. From there a donor can review donations, download receipts, manage recurring gifts, view memberships, and find event tickets without contacting you at all.
Your job, most of the time, is to help a donor reach that portal and find what they need inside it.
My Givebear (supporter portal)
Receipts and recurring gifts
Contact support
Start with the donor's question
Match what the donor asks to where the answer lives. Most paths end in the supporter portal.
| Donor asks | Send them to |
|---|---|
| "Where is my receipt?" | Receipts and recurring gifts |
| "How do I change or stop my monthly gift?" | Receipts and recurring gifts |
| "How do I sign in to my account?" | My Givebear |
| "Where is my event ticket?" | My Givebear, then event check-in |
| "I was charged twice" or "I want a refund" | Contact support |
What donors can do without you
The supporter portal is self-service. When you understand what lives there, you can resolve most questions in one reply. A signed-in donor can:
- Review their full donation history and lifetime total.
- Download a PDF receipt for any single gift.
- Download an annual statement per organization, useful at tax time.
- Change the amount or frequency of a recurring gift.
- Pause, resume, or cancel a recurring gift.
- Update the card on a recurring gift.
- View memberships and save a member card to Google Wallet.
- See event tickets with their check-in codes.
Recurring gift changes apply on the donor's own Stripe records under your connected account. That means a donor cancelling their own gift is the same as your team cancelling it. See donations and finance for the dashboard view of the same records.
The magic-link email only arrives if the address has a donation, membership, or ticket on file. If a donor says no email came, first confirm they used the exact email they gave with.
When the answer is not self-service
Some questions are not the donor's to fix. Route these to your team and treat them carefully:
- A charge looks duplicated or unfamiliar.
- A donor wants a refund.
- The refund state does not match what the donor expects.
- A receipt shows the wrong amount, fund, or name.
- A recurring gift cannot be found at all.
For anything involving money, do not promise a refund or a payout date before an authorized staff member reviews the actual transaction in the dashboard. Contact support covers exactly what to gather first.
How fees and payouts work
Donors sometimes ask why the amount they gave does not match what your organization received. Givebear processes payments through Stripe on your connected account, and a plan-based platform fee plus Stripe's processing fee comes out before payout. Point donors and staff to pricing for the current rates rather than quoting a number from memory.
Related guides
Donor help often overlaps with how you run the rest of Givebear.