Catholic Financial Services (CatholicFS)

Vendor Site: www.catholicfs.org
Example Client: www.arch-no.org

Update 7/07: The district attorney of Kern County, CA has filed a civil complaint against CatholicFS that alleges, among other things, that they "diverted monies that were donated online." See the comments for more information.

CatholicFS is an affordable but very new service (as of August 2005) that appears to be similar in concept to PayPal. Individuals and organizations can transfer money or setup a donation form with at least some minimal organization branding. Difficulties in reaching the vendor and their lack of a track record make us nervous about recommending them in the short run, but they may be worth a look as they get established, particularly for Catholic organizations.

Fees and Transaction Costs
Setup Fees : None Fees When Few Donations: Low Fees When Many Donations: Low

• No setup or monthly fee
• $0.39 per donation plus 2.99% of the donated amount (American Express is additional)
• eChecks are charged at $1.95 per transaction
• $1.00 charge whenever money is transferred from CatholicFS to the organization’s bank account

Merchant Account: Vendor’s

• The organization will use CatholicFS’s merchant account
• While we have no specific information from the vendor, we would expect that the charge on the donor’s credit card would show that it was made to “Catholic Financial Services”

Company Background: Unprofessional

• Update 7/07: The district attorney of Kern County, CA has filed a civil complaint against CatholicFS that alleges, among other things, that they "diverted monies that were donated online." See the comments for more information.
  
• Catholic Financial Services is owned by Catholic.org, which runs a large online newspaper
• The Catholic Financial Services tool appears to be similar to PayPal – it allows individuals or organizations to transfer money via credit card or eCheck
• The vendor reports, “While CatholicFS was specifically designed to support traditional Catholic donation and transaction processes, it is available to any organization needing to perform online transactions”
• They started taking online payments in August 2005
• We were unable to find more than a single organization using the service

Setup and Support: Acceptable

• CatholicFS staff will setup the donation form with the organization’s logo and branding
• CatholicFS was the only vendor that we were unable to reach via phone or email to get sufficient answers for this report. A number of phone messages were unreturned; we received two emails but neither robustly covered the questions we had asked

Donor Form Integration: Unknown

• The donation form can include the organization’s logo
• While we have no specific information from the vendor, we believe that the donation form cannot include the global navigation bar from the site – it appears to be designed as a popup window
• The standard donation form is very clean, friendly, and well-designed
• A small CatholicFS logo appears at the bottom of the form

Donor Form Flexibility: Unknown

The vendor reports that they are able to “populate specific fields on the page with the organization’s content”

Payment Processing: Unknown

• Commonly process Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover
• They support recurring donations, although it is unclear whether these can be set up by the donor through the standard donation form
• They support eChecks as a standard feature
• CSV code credit card checks, at minimum, are available

Reports & Data: Good

• A web-based administrative interface allows organizations to view donor information
• Organizations can view month-to-month comparisons
• The data can be downloaded into an Excel file; no customization of this file is available

Money Distribution: Good

• The organization can manually kick off a check or an electronic transfer to their bank account whenever they wish. There is a $1.00 fee for each transfer