Removing required email field

[JAL]

Hi
I have a completely new setup of CiviCRM (Drupal), and I'm adding membership and donations pages before going live.
I have no problems with the CiviContribute setup, the front-end pages work fine, the profiles are there, the payment processor is set up, but unfortunately the email address field is ungovernable.
Having included an email field in each profile, member and donate, the pages then had the email field within the payment option area, not the profile, and as a required field.
I need it to be a required field in the membership signup form, but not on the donations page. I would like it to be under the name and address, not under the contribution options.
Whatever I've tried, it always came up as a required field, so for the donations page I removed the profile altogether, and just had the set of contribution options. When viewing the live web page, lo and behold the email field came up just after the contribution options, and as a required field.
How do I turn this off please? It's of importance to the new project that donors be able to contribute anonymously. I'd like to have the contribution options followed by a set of fields that can be entered if the donor wants to give details, but which aren't required. That's entirely achievable so far except for the pesky email field.
Is there a simple solution? Or is CiviCRM structured so that you absolutely have to register at least an email to make a contribution - i.e. anonymous donations are disallowed?
Thanks
JAL

[joanne]

I actually don't know the answer to your main question, but I have some thoughts.

CiviCRM is a contact relationship management system, it tracks interactions (emails, memberships, events, donations) for your contacts.  If you know nothing about a person ie, they are truly anonymous, then they are not a contact so CiviCRM wasn't designed for them.

I not surprised that Civi needs an email address, it needs to assign the contribution to someone. Having said that, you may be able to get around the issue by telling people who want to donate anonymously to log into your "Anonymous donor"  login where the password is XXXX to make a donation.  But then I don't know how you stop someone from editing the name and email address for that login.

And another thought -
Have you ticked Email Receipt to Contributor? on the Contribution Thank-you and Receipting configuration page? CiviCRM will then definitely want an email address so it can send the receipt.

[JAL]

Hi
I thought it was the case that CiviCRM needs a contact field input to work. And after all, if I want to set up anonymous donations, I can always just add a Paypal donate button to the site - but then, CiviCRM won't record and report the contributions.
It's quite important that people should be able to donate as anonymously as possible. Some people don't want to give out their email addresses readily, as they don't want to be spammed, but are happier giving out their online nickname than their email.
On the understanding that CiviCRM was ensuring that at least one contact field was used, I therefore set up a profile with the First Name field required, but the email not required. When seen in the preview on the profiles page it comes up right, with the first name field required, and the email not.
I then added this profile to the donations page, and in live view the email field has jumped up to the contributions section and become a required field, while the profile has the required First Name field as well.
I attach a screengrab of how that looks.
My membership page also has the email field up with the membership drop-down options, and not with the profile. Since I want it on the membership form as a required field that’s not so bad, but it still looks wrong.
It seems therefore that what’s happening has to do with the radio buttons/drop-down menu for the contribution amounts, and not with the profiles, or any default need to have at least one required contact field. Yet I can’t find anywhere on the system to turn off this inclusion of an email field in with the contributions.
So I’m at a loss!
(NB I have indeed checked that the email receipt box is unticked for the donations page).
Any ideas?
Cheers
JAL

[Dave Greenberg]

There is currently no way (w/o coding) to remove the required email field from online contribution pages. Work was done to make this optional for online event registration - which seemed important and useful to quite a few organizations. However the equivalent work was not done for online donations (and frankly I'm not aware of many / any requests for this).

Note that CiviCRM does required EITHER email address OR first+last name to create a contact record. Contributions can not be recorded without a linked contact record (altho some organizations link anonymous contributions recorded in the back-end to a single 'Anonymous Donor' contact record).

If you have resources to do some coding, I suspect you can use the buildForm hooks + ?? to eliminate the required email field (as long as your profile has required First and Last Name fields).

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Developer+Resources

[JAL]

Thank you for your authoritative answer! I'm completely new to this, so I'm just finding my way around while setting up the new project.
There's no reason of course why you should want an anonymous donation to have anything to do with a contact management system; I just wanted to remove the email requirement because we'll be running a 'give a fiver' campaign and we don't want to put off people who would make an impulsive gift but wouldn't fill in a form registering that they've done so. We'll have a paypal donate button for them.
However, may I just use this space to mention that nowhere in the documentation does it say what you've just told me. I think it would be helpful just to have a line saying that all contribution pages will have, under their contribution options, a required email field, and that you can't move this field lower down in your added profile, or delete it. Just having that mentioned in the online/ebook documentation would have saved me quite a bit of fruitless work!
Thanks
JAL

[Dave Greenberg]

I've added the following text to the Contributions >> Setup chapter, Include Profiles section:

Contribution pages will always include a required Email Address field, regardless of whether you include any other fields in your profile(s).

This will be included when the next edition of the User and Admin Guide is published.

Going forward, we're always looking for more folks to help improve the documentation. There's some info about how to get involved in the 2nd section of this page: https://civicrm.org/participate/documentation

[Guy Iaccarino]

I know I'm REALLY late to the party on this, but the thing that would be most helpful (IMO, of course) would a condition that says that:
IF the email field is included in the Profile that is on the Contribution page,
THEN Civi should exclude it from the top of the contribution page,
ELSE inlcude the email at the top of the page.

It looks awkward and confusing up there on its own separated from all the other contact info. Additionally, if you are collecting information about an organization, it's not clear whether or not the email is for the individual contact or the organization.

[Dave Greenberg]

Guy - We took a different approach w/ Event Registration (all contact fields come from profiles). However I think your suggestion for the online contribution form (which is reverse of what we currently do) is simple and clean. Can you file an issue for this in the issue tracker? I don't think we can get to it for 4.5 (already quite behind schedule) - but we can hit it for 4.6.

[CiviTeacher.com]

Thanks Dave. Folks who've been using Civi for a long time (myself included) take for granted that email always appears at the top of the contribution page with the default label "Email Address *" ... above any profiles... regardless of if email field is included in a profile or not. 

For new people, they are very confused by this behavior.

I think it's OK that Email Address is REQUIRED, it's more of a placement and label issue IMHO.

Filed as: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15067

[Guy Iaccarino]

Dave - I can file the issue as you request, but why make the event registration different than the contribution pages? Why not make the events approach - all fields from profiles - the approach for events and contributions? Would that be better than one approach for events and another for contributions?

Sorry I missed your reply.

Thanks