You will need the Contributions Settings permission to set up giving portals.
When a donor gives through a giving portal, One Church Software follows a set process to match the gift to an existing profile.
Warning: A matched profile never moves. If your account has two or more organizations and an existing person gives to a second organization, they stay where they are. The gift does not add them to the second organization.
How a gift is matched
It checks the email address the donor entered. If the email matches exactly one profile, that profile is used.
If there is no unique match, because the email is not in the system or belongs to more than one profile, the portal asks for the donor's name. It then tries to match the email and name together.
If there is still no match, what happens depends on the gift. A recurring gift creates a new profile to hold the giving schedule. A one-time gift that does not match shows as Unmatched. You can leave it as an external donor, create a profile for it, or match it to an existing one.
Online charges link to a profile by its ID when there is one. Otherwise they link to the first profile that matches every value the donor gave.
When a gift creates a new profile
A gift only creates a profile through the sign-in a donor gets when they give without being signed in:
On a one-time gift, when the donor saves their details.
On every recurring gift, including a recurring payment made on a form.
Without that sign-in, a gift that matches no profile keeps the name and contact details the donor typed, and is not linked to anyone.
Which organization a new profile joins
If your account has two or more organizations:
A new profile joins the gift's organization and takes that organization's privacy defaults.
For a recurring gift, that is the organization of the gift's merchant account.
If the gift has no organization, or its organization is archived or unknown, the new profile is placed in the default organization.
If your account has one organization, a new profile has no campus and no organization.