Remove barriers to online donation and make giving as simple as possible.
Everyone has heard “follow the money,” implying that if you pay greater attention to where the money is coming from and where it’s going, you will find success.
The same could be said of nonprofit fundraising. So how then do you “follow the money” to find a large group of like-minded individuals to rally in support of your cause? You go online, of course.
According to the National Philanthropic Trust, 100 of the largest charities reported receiving 13% more in online donations in 2013 compared to 2012. Of these charities, 25 collected more than $10 million each in 2013 from online gifts.
On the internet, donors can find any cause to which they might want to donate. But will donors be able to find you? And will the giving experience help or hinder their desire to give now?
While there are many options out there for online fundraising, it is important to find the one that is right for your nonprofit. Some donors are put off by branded giving websites such as GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, or YouCaring, just to name a few.
This reluctance is due in part to the perception that a portion of each online donation will be withheld by the site in question as a transaction or processing fee, which is understandable since that actually is how these sites earn a profit, varying from 2.9% to 7.5% of the total donation amount — sometimes upwards of 18% to 20%, depending upon how fees are calculated. (Not to mention that in addition to charging donors a percentage, they often also charge recipients a fee. Ouch.)
Other donors might be hesitant to donate because of security concerns. It is important to give this particular issue extra consideration due to the pervasive nature of identity fraud. As you may recall, multiple websites had massive password breaches thanks to the Heartbleed cyber-attack, whose repercussions were felt all over the internet.
And while a 5% transaction fee might be a fleeting annoyance to some donors, the more serious risk of compromised financial data can have longer-lasting – and in some cases, credit-destroying and/or bankrupting – consequences.
Other options you may come across in your quest to find the right online fundraising solution are:
- Online donation pages which are strictly for one-time events only, not ongoing fundraising
- Self-hosted merchant accounts or unsupported "freebie" HTML code which are difficult to use and require separate imports into your donor database
- Third-party products that have their own branding and do not resemble your website
- Tools that do not allow transactions such as employer matching or recurring gifts
So what’s a nonprofit to do?
Here’s a thought: if your nonprofit already needs a constituent-based relationship management (CRM) software solution, why not select one that has cloud-hosted online fundraising features? This way, your donor database can be directly linked to your “give now” page.
StratusLIVE is ready to show your large nonprofit just what it can achieve when all components of fundraising software – including CRM, give now, donor database, analytics and more – are integrated. Learn more at StratusLIVE.com.
