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Greetings,

Im a newbie to joomla but not new to CMS.  I have a need to do a website for a non-profit children educational program where people will be able to sponsor a child to assist in their education from less fortunate families in Africa.  I want to use Joomla to do it with and I was wondering if Joomla is capable of doing what similar website have as follows:

https://www.children.org/pm_children1a_control.asp?TRKID=20591S10743360&RS_ID=2

http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/master.nsf/home_pledge_feature2

The sponsorship section of those websites is what I will need to do as well.  Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated.  Are there any Joomla componets that will cover that?  Thanks in advance.

I have not seen a component just for child sponsorship however I have seen the following component modified for something such as this.
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/

I would not recommend modifying this component if you are new to PHP script or programming.

I don't see anything specifically unique about these sites.
One of the things you have to remember is that when it comes to donations and money, no matter what system you use, you are talking about:
1) Secure sessions - Certificates, SSL, security
2) Transaction processing - bank accounts, fees, sending data to accounting to process, customer support to deal with issues

Most of these things are not something any software package can just walk you through with "next" wizards.
As with all things that are complex you do one of two things:
1) roll up sleeves, learn, google, and build
2) Buy it from somebody who makes your life easier for a price.

Hard to go around to software solutions (especially open source) and expect avoiding either one of those paths.

If you are worried about setting this stuff up, you can always go with paypal or with groundspring.

I strongly urge you to read up on this subject of donations for NPOs here:
http://www.onenw.org/  (watch the Plone Koolaid, they are hot on Plone there and it's very tecchy)
http://compumentor.org/
http://www.techsoup.org/

These are all great places to read about NPO sites and tech advice on solving your problems.

I did a big Joomla site for a national NPO and because they were pretty disorganized, we decided to outsource the whole donations thing out to groundspring. But it's not cheap, they take a pretty decent cut, although they have good NPO reputation. I'm sure there are many others out there, so read up a bit and compare services.
You can always use a wrapper to wrap the service, or punch out to the service site directly and use the same design layout on your custom page with that service (with links at top etc. that take back to site.)