Take donations on your website--the right way

by Ben Di Maggio

Just about every non-profit client we've ever had has asked for "online donations" to be included in their new website. It's an obvious thing to ask for—every year, more and more of your constituents do their giving online. If you've seen pages like, for example, The Project for School Innovation's support page, it looks pretty straightforward. As with many aspects of websites, though, it's a bit more complicated than it seems.

Before you slap that "Donate Now" button on your site

Here are some key questions to answer before moving on to how you'll take donations.

How much can you reasonably expect to take in? Has your organization been making a lot of money in online donations already? Or do you perhaps have an audience of especially internet-friendly constituents, who might be expected to embrace online giving as soon as you make it available? (Perhaps you're an advocacy group for net neutrality, or copyleft, or People for the Ethical Treatment of LOLcats.) Or, alternately, are your constituents not very internet-savvy?
Is it important to keep track of your donors' contact information? For non-profits, the answer to this question is seldom "no"—if someone cares enough about your organization to donate money to it, they're someone worth keeping in touch with. The real issue to resolve is how their information is going to get from the donation process into your contact-relationship management (CRM) system.
Are you taking money for other things on this site? Event tickets? Goodies in exchange for a donation? Branded merchandise?
Is it important to you to keep your branding very clear? Our two big donation options are going to differ on this point, so this is important to decide.
Recurring? Do you want to allow donors to "set it and forget it," so that they're giving you 10 bucks a month indefinitely?
Attach extra information to this donation? Is it important for your donors to be able to say that this donation should be in memory of/in honor of someone else? Should they be able to specify to which part of your organization they want this money to go?

Two ways to do it

Broadly, there are two ways to accept donations on your website:

Shopping cart software on your website. In this option, you set up software that manages the experience your donors have while giving. When someone clicks that "Donate Now" button, they stay on your website, and that's where the transaction takes place. They see your branding throughout, and you can alter any little thing about it—what exactly they're getting for their money (event tickets or a hat with your logo or just a warm fuzzy feeling). The money goes into an account which you own, and is available to you within a few days.
Third-party donation services. Here, you pay for some service that manages the whole transaction process for you. When the donor clicks "Donate Now," they're sent to a page on the third party's site (this page's similarity to your website varies with the service you choose), and the process is controlled by that third party. The money goes into the third party's account, they take their cut, and send you a check or direct deposit once or twice a month.

Shopping cart or third party?

How to decide which route to take depends on your answers to the questions above. We can't answer them for you, but we can tell you the pros and cons of each.

Shopping Cart

Third Party Tools

Pros

They're flexible.

Donor information can be automatically placed in your CRM

You can sell other things in the same way (event tickets, t-shirts, books, etc.)

You have full control of branding

You can control which other information you collect from donors (e.g. survey questions, "in honor of"/"in memory of" requests, specifications about where to direct the money)

You can control which information you give out to donors (post-donation email, tax receipts)

They're fast.

In most cases, you'll get your money within 5 days of the donation.

They're simple.

You won't have to do a tremendous amount of work setting these up. Some, like DonateNow and GiftTool, permit you to do event ticketing as well as straight donations, but even setting these up isn't too technical a process.

They're cheap.

Your setup costs with third-party donation tools will vary between 0 and $200. Very broadly (there's a lot of variation among services) your per-transaction fees will be 3-4% per transaction.

Cons

They're expensive.

Taking into consideration the money you'll spend on the consultant, the payment gateway, and the merchant account, you can expect to spend between $5k and $10k setting up your shopping cart. On the bright side, you'll likely spend a bit less per transaction here.

You have to do it their way.

Third-party donation services are set up to provide a service for a lot of organizations, so you may not be able to customize everything you want. You may have limited control over branding, what information you collect, and connecting the form to your CRM.

It's going to take a little work to think your online-donation decision through. When you've made the right choice, though, you'll know. The solution will pay for itself quickly, and online donations will be a significant, and growing, part of your organization's funding.

For more information on this subject, please see the excellent articles by our client Idealware:

How to Easily Take Online Donations

A Few Good Online Donations Tools

Of course, we'd be happy to talk more about it with you too.