Record-breaking donations on Give to the Max Day

Minnesotans broke the record for donations during Give to the Max Day, a one-day fundraiser for schools and charities.

GiveMN.org reported $18.2 million in donations, according to a tally early Friday, compared with last year's record of $17.1 million.

This year there was no repeat of the major technical problems that shut down the donation website for several hours.

But there were minor problems. For example, it's still unclear how much each charity received because the website experienced numerous problems with duplicate receipts, no receipts and tallies that sometimes went down instead of up.

And late Thursday fundraisers received an e-mail from GiveMN asking them to suspend access to donation reports.

"[It] looks like it is the Wild West of giving and sometime tomorrow or next week when the dust finally settles we'll be able to see what happened," said Damon Runnals, artistic director of the Southern Theater.

Most donors reported no problems giving to their favorite charities.

But others reported seeing duplicate charges pending on their credit cards, and receiving numerous receipts for the same donation, all with different confirmation codes.

Late Thursday afternoon many people had trouble accessing the site, but GiveMN technical support said the trouble was linked to a security program and was specific to people using Firefox web browsers. They stressed that the website itself never crashed.

"It's definitely frustrating, but at the end of the day, I'm just glad the site is still up and accepting donations. As long as the donor experience is going smoothly, we can work out the stuff on the administrative side," said Tanner Curl, Deputy Director of Development at The Loft Literary Center.

GiveMN charges a 4.9 percent fee on each transaction to help cover processing costs.