FAQ NonprofitSite123

1.    Cash (e-check)
2.    Credit card
3.    Recurring payments
4.    Donations made in someone else’s name, in honor of, in memory of, etc.
5.    In-kind donations (by creating an in-kind offer, fulfilling an in-kind request, or even posting an in-kind offer for sale in the nonprofit’s e-store – where the proceeds go to the nonprofit)
6.    Planned gifts – involving wills, trusts, and life insurance
7.    Investment donations (e.g., stocks, bonds, etc.)

1.    Collect various types of donations
2.    Sell event tickets
3.    Collect membership dues
4.    Sell items through an eStore
5.    Create a “thon” (e.g., walk-a-thon, etc.)
6.    Allow individuals to sponsor thon participants
7.    And more!

What are other ways, besides fundraising, can you get visitors involved on your website?
Your visitors can:

Will NonprofitSite123 ever use any information provided by your visitors or donors?
Absolutely not. No information will ever be sold, swapped or given to third parties.

Why is it important for us to accept money securely within our site, not kicking the user off to a 3rd party pay site (like PayPal)?
Let’s talk about the pros and cons of these 3rd party donation sites – like Pay Pal, Network For Good, Just Give, and others. The advantage of these sites is that with a few lines of HTML code and a few minutes of effort, you can offer online donations. The typical disadvantages, however, are numerous (note: not all of these disadvantages pertain to all of the 3rd party sites):
1. It is bad Internet practice to kick the user off of your site, especially when it is unnecessary. A certain percentage of your users will notice that they've been kicked off of your site and will abandon their transaction as a result. You will likely have no idea what percentage this is, but it's likely to be higher than you think.
2. Some donors want their donation to be tax deductible. As long as they are on your site, they will be confident that their donation is deductible. But as soon as they go to another site, particularly a for-profit site (and it's that organization that will appear on their credit card statement), they may (rightly or wrongly) question the deductibility of their donation and therefore not complete it.
3. Donor loyalty is 67% lower on 3rd party sites than on a nonprofit's own website.
4. Donors on a nonprofit's own website give more initially and over time than those on a 3rd party site.
5. Once the user gets to the other site, it is no longer branded as your site.
6. On the other site, the user can no longer navigate to other areas of your site – except if he hits the back button a few times. There is typically no navigation bar or menu.
7. There is no shopping cart or gift basket, so the user cannot pay for multiple transactions at a time.
8. With most other sites, donations are simply processed by asking the donor for the amount they wish to donate, and their credit card number. You cannot employ more sophisticated donation processing, like recurring donations, preset donation amounts, targeting the donation to a specific program or service, making the donation in someone else’s name, opting in to your e-mail list, or paying by e-check.
9. What appears on the donor’s credit card statement is not your name but the other site’s name.
10. Because of this, there is a higher risk of chargebacks – where the donor may not recognize the charge on their credit card statement, since it doesn’t contain your nonprofit’s name. The donor may then dispute the charge with his credit card company.
11. Related to that, the money doesn’t go straight into your bank account. It goes to the other party, and they periodically disburse the funds to you.
12. Because of that, the 3rd party gets the float.
13. Also because of that, there is a risk that you may never receive your money. In case you think that’s a remote risk, consider the following story. Perhaps the largest processor of online donations was a company called Pipevine out of San Francisco. They essentially had 2 bank accounts – an operating expenses account and a sort-of escrow account into which the online donations were placed and out of which these donations were periodically disbursed to the nonprofits. Well, they started having financial difficulties. They dipped into the second account. Things went from bad to worse, and they went out of business. $18 million of donor money never made it to the nonprofits it was intended for! Civil lawsuits are pending, and people may even go to jail.
14. Some sites have long delays before sending you your money, sometimes because they will only send it to you once the amount surpasses a certain threshold.
15. Most of these services charge fees, sometimes significant ones. And sometimes hidden.
16. Some of these services, like Pay Pal, require your donor to sign up with them and possibly log in – extra, unneeded steps that may deter some donors. In fact, recent studies show that each extra page you send your donors to results in a 50% abandonment rate -- even higher if the extra page is on a third party site.
17. The donor can often only pay for donations, not event tickets, e-store purchases, membership dues, etc.
18. You have no control over the privacy and security policies of the other site. Because of this, your donors’ data may be sold, traded, etc. We have spoken with executive directors who can directly trace donors’ spam and even viruses to these 3rd party sites.
19. There is no audit trail. In other words, if 50 donors make donations to you, you have no way of knowing this, other than to trust that the third party will forward the money to you.
20. There are few if any reports for you – on both the transactions that have taken place on these third party sites, and on the people who performed those transactions.
21. In some cases, the donor does not receive an online thank you/tax receipt – either on screen or via e-mail.
22. No ability for the nonprofit to download data 24/7.
23. There is a special problem with Pay Pal: it has a negative reputation for some people. Like the beautiful new home with a giant, pink, plastic flamingo in front, some people will not care, others will think “how tacky”, but no one will say “wow, this is great!”.