Getting donors online

http://www1.networkforgood.org/

Get Donors Online

Network for Good is here to give you all the tools (and moral support) that you need to fundraise online. And we do it all for less with no hidden fees.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers (FAQs) regarding prospect and funder research. Lots of good information here!

http://www.idealist.org/info/Nonprofits

ePhilanthropy is now part of Network for Good – to provide nonprofits with free access to the best available online fundraising and nonprofit marketing resources. Please go to http://www.networkforgood.org/OffsiteFrame/?PageID=100423

Click and Pledge (www.clickandpledge.com)
Offering reasonable functionality at very affordable prices, Click and Pledge could be a good choice for organizations who only expect a few donations.  The donation form can be integrated somewhat with the look of your website.  The tool also has strong international support.  They charge a $5 monthly fee, plus 4.5% and $0.35 of each donation.

Network for Good Basic DonateNow (www.networkforgood.org)
Network for Good is a low-cost but completely un-customizable tool that could be a good choice for organizations interested in testing an online donation program. The extensive Network for Good branding gives the donor little doubt that they have left the organization’s website to make a donation on the Network for Good website.  The charge is a 4.75% transaction fee.

Inexpensive, but not focused on donations

There’s several tools that offer very attractive prices – but they might be less attractive to your donors.

PayPal Donations (www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside)
With no way to customize the look of or the fields on the donation form, PayPal’s user experience is unmistakably PayPal. People’s reaction to PayPal vary widely – it’s widely known and trusted by tech-savvy donors, but may be (wrongly) associated with fraud in less tech-savvy donors’ minds. However, it’s one of the cheapest ways to take donations.  While donors used to have to create a PayPal account to donate, that’s no longer true – they can simply use a credit card as a donor most typically would expect

Google Checkout
(checkout.google.com)
Google offers their Google Checkout service for free to nonprofits they’ve approved for a Google Grant (their non-competitive grants www.google.com/grants/ for Google Ads and other things).  This means that you literally pay nothing, including transaction fees – which is a hard price to beat. However, it isn’t optimized for donations – it forces the user to create a Google Account, and to associate a credit card with their Google Account, before they can get on with actually making a donation. This may be confusing to first-timers – and if people don’t donate, it doesn’t matter how free it is.

Amazon Payments
(https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/asp/donations)
Similar to Google Checkout, Amazon offers a payment tool optimized for e-commerce rather than donations… but at 1.9% +$0.30 per transaction, it’s also very inexpensive.  Like Google Checkout, donors need to sign in to Amazon and setup their credit card before they can fill out the donation form. This may confuse donors who don’t have an Amazon account, but Amazon is widely used enough that many of your donors may already have one.

Best values for all around good tools

There are a number of tools that offer solid features and a lot of customization at affordable rates. Some of the most widely used ones include:

Network for Good Custom DonateNow
(www.networkforgood.org)
This, the second of Network for Good’s donate options, is entirely different from the first. It’s an affordable option for organizations that don’t need complex customizations or their own merchant account. Their clean and professional donation form can be seamlessly integrated into each organization’s website.  It’s $30 per month, and 3% per donation.

GiftTool (www.gifttool.com)
GiftTool is a solid choice for middle-of-the-road needs, particularly for organizations that need to support events or product sales as well as donations. They offer complete integration of their clean and user-friendly donation form into your website. They charge a flat rate – currently $1.23 – per credit card donation, making them attractive to those who receive large donations, but less so to those who expect a lot of little ones.  You can use their merchant account or your own.

QGiv (www.qgiv.com)
QGiv provides online donation (as well as event registration) functionality that is fully integrated into your site, with a lot of features including tributes and recurring donations.  You need a merchant account, but they set it up for you. It’s $20 per month, with 3.95% plus $0.25 charged per transaction.

DonationPay (https://donationpay.org/) offers full service merchant processing to non-profit organizations, with no set-up fees and unlimited fundraising pages. They give you a secure processing account and their staff can help you get set up with a custom designed payment page. In addition, they offer industry standard donation management tools (advice) to help you increase online contributions, and our staff can help develop individual fundraising tools for your organization. $19.95 per month plus 3% per operation (on some international payments, fees go up to 4.8%).

A full service option that allows a non-profit to just add a link to their page is Razoo (www.razoo.com).  They do not charge a monthly or yearly fee that I could see, and charge only 2.9% per transaction. 8000 charities are registered with them.

Another service to consider is <a href=”http://www.donortools.com/”> Donor Tools</a>.  This is a <a href=”http://www.donortools.com/features/unlimited-users”>donor management service</a> that provides branded donation pages, donor tracking, thank you letters and email, reporting, and self-service so donors can monitor their own giving history. Donor Tools integrates with Pay Pal. The starter account is $5 a month, and the only thing left out is integration with QuickBooks. I think they charge a fee per transaction, but it is not very clear.

Fundly (http://fundly.com/) is easy for non-profits, charities, politics, clubs, schools, teams, churches, and many other causes to quickly raise money online from friends, family, colleagues, and other supporters via email, Facebook, Twitter, websites, blogs, and social media channels. They provide easy fundraising tools, online donation processing, a donor management system, customer support, etc. Their cheapest rate is 4.9% per fee with no monthly charge. After that, it seems to get expensive fast. Take a look.

Other options

Auctionpay (www.auctionpay.com) is a good option for organizations looking for a middle-of-the-road donation, registration, and event solution at a reasonable price — it’s $30 a month with a 3.5% per-payment transaction fee. ActionPay’s donation form can be integrated into the look and feel of a Web site to some degree.

Gifttool (www.gifttool.com) is a solid, high-end option, and offers robust support for donations, an online shopping cart, event registration, pledge-a-thons, and more. It can be integrated into the look and feel of your site. When you use more than one of its payment functionalities, GiftTool’s monthly fees are high. However, the company charges a flat $1.23 per transaction rather than a percentage of the payment, making the pricing attractive for those accepting large payments such as conference registration fees.

MemberClicks (www.memberclicks.com) is an integrated database, payments, membership, and email solution with an interesting form-building feature that allows organizations to create and update their own complex payment forms for online registration, dues, memberships, donations, or products; it even supports some basic custom workflow and business rules. While you’ll need to set up your own merchant account (which has its own affiliated fees) to use MemberClicks, the service itself only charges 1 percent of the payment, plus a flat 40 cents per transaction, with a $25 monthly minimum fee.

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