An Overview of Secure Credit Card Donation Processing & PCI Compliance

You definitely don’t need to become a certified expert in credit card processing, but it’s good to know about best practices for credit card security so you ask the right questions of your donation-processing provider and are knowledgeable when talking about this with your staff, supporters and board members.

So what is PCI compliance all about?
PCI standards seek to ensure that sensitive data such as credit card numbers and personally identifiable information are gathered through appropriate systems and physical security measures. Any entity that stores, processes or transmits payment cardholder data must be PCI-compliant. There are four levels of PCI compliance that are mainly based on the transaction volumes that the "merchant or processor" is doing annually as well as whether or not those transactions occur on the Internet (card not present) or in a physical location (where the card is present).