I made A donation back the middle of march how long before the green star shows up?

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How much was it (minimum for the star to show is $10.-) and how did you do it? If by credit card, and more than 10 bucks, it should be almost instantly.

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I agree with Ageless that if you use a credit card, the star appears reasonably quick. In my case, it showed up in about a day and a half. But the other kicker is that to get proper recognition, you need to use the same email address on the donation form as you use for your S@H account. Not sure what would happen if you used PayPal, but I suspect it would also be fairly quick.

Of course, if you sent the donation by snail-mail, it could take longer. And you needed to ensure that the donation was clearly marked for S@H and again with your correct email address. When I read those instructions, I didn't have a lot of confidence that I'd get the proper recognition, so I went the online/CC approach.

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Not sure what would happen if you used PayPal, but I suspect it would also be fairly quick.

Or impossible. ;-)

As far as I understand, they can't use Paypal as Seti itself doesn't have a bank account. I'll go check what it was that Matt said about that. Await the edit. ;)

Post by Matt Lebofsky, 22 august 2005:
"Yeah, the PayPal thing was easy to set up as far as programming/etc. - the hard part was getting a bank account to put the money in. This was both a political and legal issue and eventually we decided it was effectively impossible, so back to square one. We will soon be using the UC donation system instead, which currently doesn't have the same useful features as PayPal, but at least it is equally secure and tied to a bank account we have access to.

And math-wise, it's about 3% off for the credit card, and 6% for University overhead. For $20, that ends up about $18.20 for us. This is actually really good. Normally grants we get through, say NASA or NFS has University overhead of about 35%. And even that's really good - I've heard other universities have overheads as high as 70 or 80%. Anyway.. the overhead on the donations pays the people who actually process all this stuff, maintain the servers, etc."

Posted by Someone, 30 august 2005:
"After you get a PayPal account you can get a PayPal Debit Card. The debit card is a Master Card, so you can use it as a Master Card Credit Card to pay your donatins. Than SETI gets the money through Master Charge from your Paypal Acount."


On the star losing thing:
Post by Matt Lebofsky, 29 september 2005:
"As for the lost stars, it is true that I am not getting all the confirmations from campus. Not sure why, and it is incredibly frustrating. Once again, a PayPal system would not have this problem. If you are missing your star, please e-mail the donors@ssl.berkeley.edu address with a note to that effect and include a copy of the e-mail confirmation you have received from campus."

Hopefully this has enough information. :-)

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Not sure what would happen if you used PayPal, but I suspect it would also be fairly quick.

Or impossible. ;-)

Thanks Ageless for correcting my abbreviation. When I referred to Paypal, I did mean the Paypal Debit Card since this was the only Paypal option available on the donation page. And since it's just another credit card, I figured it would be just as quick. I'll try to be more explicit next time. :-]

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