Donate Now: Selecting an Online Donation Tool (continued)
October 2005
Let Us Know What You Think!
Have comments about this report? Are there factors we overlooked or tools that we missed? Let us know what you think.
29 Comments:
We are considering NetSolutions from Blackbaud. It integrates into their Raiser's Edge product, so wouldn't be a general solution, but it would be interesting to hear what you think of it.
Fundraiser (www.fundraiser-software.com) is a popular donor tracking software and is linking up with ECHO, which you regretably chose not to evaluate.
We actually did review ECHO - it's included in the "Other Tool" section as a tool we don't recommend. We did not, however, review NetSolution, as (as far as we could tell) it is priced out of our criteria for this report - more than $100 in monthly fees (other than transaction charges) for most customers.
Do you have any Canadian resources to list and possibly recommend? You are comprehensive on US resources and vendors, but we need Canadian-specific vendors. Any ideas? Anyone?
CanadaHelps (www.canadahelps.org) is a portal very similar to Networkforgood.com, but for Canadian charities and their donors. I think their business mdoel is mirrored after the Networkforgood process, i.e. no set up fees, use merchant account, donor-directed funding, etc.
We didn't systematically look at Canadian companies, but there's a few that might be appropriate for Canada-specific needs. As mentioned CanadaHelps is in fact very similar to Network for Good, but available only to Canadian organizations. GiftTool (reviewed) is Canadian and offers support for Canadian receipt formats, bi-lingual forms, and other Canada-specific needs. Sporg (reviewed) also operates out of Canada and may have Canada-specific support.
Thanks for the thorough job. The problem I am running into is that as I get real quotes from these providers, the costs escalate. Example: GiftTool advertises $.99/transaction but that is only for a non-donation transaction (like a registration for a free event). There is a $.24 fee per credit card transaction on top of the .99 AND the 3.8% or other merchant account fee AND the monthly usage fee. When your average gift is smaller than $50, that adds up to a decent percentage of your donation gone.
So, I'm not sure I agree that, as you suggest, "doing it yourself" by retrieving the C/C # from a secure database and processing by hand is more expensive. We have to have a C/C terminal here for phone and mail-in donations anyway, so the only extra cost is staff time (and we have clerk-level staff and trustworthy interns so that cost is low). The biggest expense of doing it yourself is the cost of secure site hosting, which many locally-owned ISPs will offer at a lower rate to non-profits (buy local even on the web!), and the expense of paying a web designer to create and modify forms as needed. I'd like to hear more about other reasons for not doing it yourself.
This was an excellent resource - thank you for publishing this much needed information in once place! We are considering Click and Pledge, and would not have found it without this article. It meets our specific needs quite well.
This was a great article and helped us a lot. The issue we are having is that none of these organizations listed seem to be ePhilanthropists but rather just technology companies. We did some research and found that Artez Interactive was the best at developing and growing our events online. We are excited about taking our events to the next levle.
Just a response to Barbara – sorry for the delayed reaction. The sidebar about “doing it yourself” certainly shouldn’t be taken to mean that this solution never makes sense for anyone. Just don’t discount the cost of the staff time to charge and process the receipt in a very timely fashion, handle any problems with the card (like if the number is no good) and more intangible risk that you’re taking on the responsibility to keep credit card numbers safe (including from clerk-level staff and interns who could have foul play on their minds). And then there’s additional setup fees, as Barbara mentions, and it requires some technical know how to make sure you are safely passing and storing credit card numbers. What you get in return is somewhere between $0.50 and $2.00 in savings per $50 donation to take on these responsibilities, depending on your donation volume and what tool you use. Perhaps this is a good tradeoff if you have someone pretty tech savvy on staff, and you are staff rich and money poor, or if you have a high volume of donations and a set process already to deal with this manual work. But remember that the time your staff is spending dealing with donations is time they aren’t using to advance your mission.
This report was referenced in the January newsletter of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York (NPCCNY), of which we're a member, so I came over to check it out. It's an excellent resource. Thank you.
One minor point, however. It is stated a couple of times that it is not possible to customize PayPal pages to look like your organization's Web site. However, PayPal offers extensive customization tools for this purpose. You can read more about them here:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/mer/cowp_summary-outside
"With our Custom Payment Pages feature, you can tailor PayPal's payment pages to the style of your website and give customers a seamless payment experience"
For us at least, PayPal's low processing fees (the lowest we were able to find) trump most other considerations. We felt, as a matter of fiduciary duty to our donors, an obligation to take the lowest processing fees unless another service offered particularly valuable features that PayPal didn't. We've not yet come across any such features, and we've been happily using PayPal for over a year and around 1,000 transactions.
Thanks for your comments, Steven! Yes, PayPal says that you can customize the page, but the page you cited in fact has good visual examples of what they mean - you can change colors or add a banner, but there's no getting around the fact that it looks like PayPal and not like something integrated into your site. A number of the tools offer much more robust visual customization. Not that that makes it a bad choice...
Based on this article I chose Democracy in Action to look into for our online membership solution, and as far as I can tell they are not a gateway solution. They merely provide a storefront for Verisign, and we would need to pay the additional $30 per month plus setup fees for Verisign Payflow Link as our gateway, plus paying for the internet merchant account if we choose to go that route. Also, as a further black mark for Democracy in Action, I set up a temporary account with them, and once I got into the member portion of their website I found it to be horribly disorganized and buggy! I tried to create a membership form using their template and it logged me off three times during the process.
Just wanted to follow up on my earlier post; I made the final decision to go with E-Tapestry. They have an excellent deal right now, with $0 setup fee and free for three months. But what's best is that they are well organized and I'm finding this easy to set up. I said goodbye to DIA.
Do you have any information on GetActive? It is one of the tools we are considering, in part because we need the advocacy piece.
We just signed up with Acceptiva at www.acceptiva.com.
They do all the work that we simply either can't afford or don't have the in-house skill to do ourselves. Their pricing is good and includes a merchant account. I'll let you know how it goes.
I have signed up most of the charities I have been involved with over the last five years with CanadaHelps (www.canadahelps.org)and found them easy to work with, anyone can do the set up, and they are always working to improve their services. They are available to all charities in Canada and give donors several ways to find information about charities and to select the one they want to give to.
You review was excellent! Thank you. I recently came across Qgiv.com - I was wondering if you are familiar with them and how they stack up against what you have reviewed.
I've checked out qgiv. Their technology is about the same as everyone elses but they charge an extra 4% or so on top of regular processing costs. Not sure why or who would pay that much.
I just negotiated a great deal with Qgiv - and their customer service has been stellar. I will keep you posted about how it plays out for our organization. Regardless who you use, it is important to know that rates are NEGOTIABLE - so are setup fees, etc.
This is a great review--an update would be welcome!
Has anyone worked with Acceptiva? Their pricing appears to be among the lowest for their services...too good to be true?
Kate,
Acceptiva's pricing is exactly what their website says it is. Unlike many companies (say QGiv for example) they do not add an extra percentage to the bank processing fee. Acceptiva has hundreds of clients and gave us many to review and contact before we chose them. They are truly a great deal.
You might also want to check out SimpleGive. We have been around for a little more than a year now. We pride ourselves on providing a great product and service at an affordable price.
We are using E-giving.org, which is actually a branch of a company that has worked with churches for almost a hundred years. Their prices, for us, were lower than paypal, because they offer their envelope customers a special discount. The fees havent changed in 2 years, and it even has an event registration module that you can add for only $25 acitvation, lifetime use. To become an "envelope customer" you only have to buy a small order for around $30 annually.
I just checked the paypal web site and they now offer recurring payments but you have to sign up for their Pro model for donations. This costs $30 additional a month, plus the regular paypal fees. Still may be worth it, maybe not.
Have you had any experience with designing your own donation/payment solution? I have technical skills to create a donation page that could connect directly to my organization's merchant account through their API. However, I am not as familiar with all the security issues that would go along with this. Any thoughts?
http://www.creditworld.com.au/credit-cards.html
Your blog is very informative. However, earning money and balance your credit cards is pretty hard task but your post and experienced serve and teach me how to handle and make it more simple and manageable.
Thanks for the tips… Best regards.
We went with Easy Tithe (easytithe.com) for our church. They were very straight forward. No set up fees at all, it works with any merchant account, and no extra transaction fees or anything. Plus we get unlimited free event registration forms.
nice tutorial! really interesting article, many helpful informations!
thx cheers
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