Click and Pledge

Vendor Site: www.clickandpledge.com
Example Client: www.leldf.org

Offering reasonable functionality at very affordable prices, Click and Pledge could be a good choice, especially for organizations who only expect a few donations. The donation form is designed to be integrated into a website as a popup; it can include some custom fields and a top banner, but not the website navigation bar or a tailored background color. The tool also has strong international support. A new release, scheduled for January 2006, offers a number of promising functionalities, including the ability to customize the donation form background color and support recurring donations.

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

• 4.75% of the donated amount. There are no other setup, minimum or monthly fees

Merchant Account: Vendor’s

• The organization will use Click and Pledge’s merchant account
• The charge on the donor’s credit card shows that it was made to “Click and Pledge”

Company Background: Good

• Private company that specializes in payment processing for events, products, membership fees, and donations
• They started taking online payments in 2002, and have nine employees
• They have more than 2000 clients representing 34 countries and every U.S. state
• They report that they are not yet profitable, but by choice: they are reinvesting heavily into infrastructure. Their representative says: “We are financially sound and have the support of independent investors. We have submitted the Company’s credentials to venture capital investors and received offers. Even though we decided not to accept venture investments at this time, it is important to note that we are considered an attractive investment.”

Setup and Support: Excellent

• Click and Pledge is essentially self-service. Each organization needs to setup their own donation form
• The organization can update basic form elements, such as adding custom fields or changing suggested donation amounts, through an administration tool
• The setup tool is cleanly laid out, but the complex functionality makes the setup not for the technology phobic
• Support is available via phone and email
• Several current clients commented that the Click and Pledge customer service team is friendly, knowledgeable and responsive

Donation Form Appearance: Acceptable

• The donation form cannot include the global navigation bar from the site – it is designed to appear as a popup window
• The organization can upload a logo or banner for the top of the donation form, but form colors and fonts cannot be changed
• The standard form has a shopping cart type setup: donors determine the amount they would like to donate to each of several programs, then click a Continue button to enter payment information. This a bit unusual for a donation setup and may discourage some donors
• As an alternate to using the shopping cart type setup for donation amounts, the organization can allow the donor to specify a donation amount on their own website, and then pass it to the Click and Pledge to process the payment. This setup requires HTML skills on the part of the organization
• The current form is professional, but not as clean as some other tools. A new interface planned for release around Jan 2006 is cleaner and friendlier
• A small Click and Pledge logo at the bottom of the form cannot be removed

Donation Form Flexibility: Good

• Organizations can add an unlimited number of custom fields in the form of text or drop-down boxes Checkboxes and radio buttons are not currently supported, but are planned for the release in Jan 2006.
• The standard form can support tributes and premiums
• Organizations could support the need to have different donation forms for different programs by allowing the donor to specify specific donation amounts on different pages on their own website, and then passing this information to Click and Pledge
• They are in the process of rolling out an impressive interface that allows donors to donate by clicking on pictures of specific items that they would like to provide (for instance, two cans of soup, toothpaste, and some pasta)

Payment Processing: Excellent

• Commonly process Visa, Master Card, Discover, JBC, and American Express (American Express requires a greater transaction fee)
• They can process credit cards issued by banks outside North America. They currently have a number of international clients, for instance in India and the UK
• They support recurring donations, but do not support eChecks
• Fraud prevention is a strength – they do a number of automatic and manual checks to try to flag and investigate anomalies
• They report that they have had five minutes of planned downtime in the last six months, and no unplanned downtime

Reports & Data: Good

• A web-based administrative interface allows organizations to view donor information
• Organizations can view month-to-month or year-to-year comparisons
• The data can be downloaded into a CSV text file. No customization of this file is available in the current release; in the Dec 2005 release, organizations will be able to customize the name and order of fields
• Click and Pledge does not offer any method to access data programmatically that would allow a programmer to build an automated feed to another database

Money Distribution: Good

• The donated money is mailed to the organization twice a month