I tried that Greg...Seems like you have to register the charity with them
Bonsai Nut is not a charity... and any contributions you make to the site are not deductible on your taxes. As long as your giving does not exceed $14,000, no tax reporting is required by either giver or recipient. Bonsai Nut has not had the problem of approaching $14,000 in donations in any year
To make things even MORE complicated, I had to register a business name, so I used "Adsira" as the company name for filing taxes each year. So the donation should go to "Adsira" and the purpose would be "Bonsai Nut Web Site". I created all of that administrative bureaucracy to get the PayPal donation button to work... and now it only works part of the time.
To make matters worse - I keep getting spammed by PayPal, which is trying to get me to sign up for business financial services that I don't need.
Fortunately, I don't sell anything on the site. If we were to produce and sell something (for example Bonsai Nut t-shirts) I would set the t-shirt store up as a separate store-front under the Adsira business umbrella - but separate from Bonsai Nut. I need to do this to make sure that Bonsai Nut remains a separate "anonymous and free" web site that doesn't require personal information in order to register or use. Right now as I receive donations for Bonsai Nut I'm not even 100% certain which users are sending them unless I know who you are personally. For example I might get a donation from "John Smith" but there is nothing that would directly link that donation to user "bonsai boy" on the web site. This anonymity is really important for a number of reasons - first because I believe in your right to privacy and second because if I started asking for personal information (real name, address, phone, etc) it would make the site more appealing to hackers. Right now there is nothing significant to be gained from hacking the site - because I don't hold any of this information.