Some gatherings are priced low on purpose. A donation-based kirtan, a community sit, a class where the teacher would rather people come than pay — the ticket price is set to remove a barrier to entry, not to reflect what the evening actually costs to run. If you organize one of these events, you already know the trade-off: keep the door open to whoever wants to walk through it, and hope that generosity fills in the rest.
BrightStar's tip jar gives buyers a way to close that gap themselves, right at checkout, without you having to raise the listed price for everyone. When the tip jar is turned on for your event, checkout adds a short support step between ticket selection and payment. It shows a small set of suggested amounts, carries a short message from you explaining what the money supports, and always includes the option to skip. Whatever the buyer chooses is added to their order total and moves through with the rest of the sale. Nothing is preselected, and skipping takes one click — the buyer who only wants a ticket gets exactly that.
How the support step fits into checkout
The support step sits in one specific place in the checkout flow, and it only shows up when you've turned the tip jar on for the event:
- 1Buyer selects their ticket type and quantity, the same as any BrightStar checkout.
- 2If the tip jar is on, the support step appears next, before payment. It shows a few suggested amounts along with your message about what the giving supports.
- 3Buyer picks a suggested amount, enters their own, or skips in one click. Nothing is chosen for them ahead of time.
- 4Whatever they choose is added to the order total and arrives with the rest of that sale's money.
- 5Buyer moves on to the payment step and completes checkout as usual.
Tips and donations are two different things
The same checkout step can carry both a tip and a donation, and the two behave differently even though the buyer sees them in the same place.
A tip goes to you, the organizer, as appreciation for the gathering — it's collected as part of the buyer's order and arrives with the rest of that sale's money. A donation is directed at a cause you name: you set the cause and the recipient when you configure the tip jar, and the buyer sees where the money is going before they give.
An order can include one, the other, or both. Whenever either is present, the support step shows a running summary so the buyer sees exactly what they are adding — ticket, tip, donation — before they reach the card form. That summary is what keeps the tip jar honest: nobody arrives at the payment screen wondering what a number on their receipt was for.
Why nothing is preselected
The support step never starts with an amount already chosen, and getting past it without giving takes one click. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight. A preselected amount nudges people toward paying more than they meant to, and a buried skip option turns generosity into friction. For a donation-based kirtan or a sliding-scale class, the point isn't to extract the maximum from every buyer — it's to make giving easy for the people who want to give, and to leave everyone else exactly where they'd be without the tip jar at all: at the ticket price they saw when they clicked buy.
Is the tip jar available on your event
The tip jar is part of BrightStar's Elevate feature set, so it isn't available on every event tier. If your event is set up under Seva, the support step doesn't appear at checkout at all — buyers move straight from ticket selection to the normal fee and payment steps, the same flow as any event without a tip jar turned on. If you're deciding how to price a sliding-scale or donation-based gathering, this is worth checking before you finish setting up your event, since it determines whether the option to collect tips or donations will be there for buyers to see.