Fund-raising terminal and method for accepting monetary contributions by use of an information bearing card

An electronic fund-raising monetary contributions terminal and a method of inducing and facilitating the solicitation and making of hundreds of monetary contributions with the terminal at fund-raising drives, fund-raising sessions and events attended by a large number of potential contributors including cardholders of card records constituting pre-authorization by card issuing organizations for monetary transactions using their card records such as credit cards and debit cards. The terminal is self-powered and has a housing in the form of a case dimensioned for being held on the palm of a contributor and passed from one contributor to another for making successively individual monetary contributions by a multiplicity of contributors using respective pre-authorization cards. A card reader is provided on the housing for reading indicia on the card records presented to it for making monetary contributions and identifying the individual cardholder making a corresponding contribution. The terminal has manually activated operators for designating and entering in the terminal numerical information of the monetary amount of the corresponding contributions made. The numerical information entered is immediately recorded and stored correlated with the corresponding contributor's identification indicia for future down-loading to a network for post-contribution processing of the information recorded.