Sporg

Vendor Site: www.sporg.com
Example Client: www.bcpwa.org/

Sporg is a solid tool, but somewhat expensive for what it offers. Both the donation form and administration tools are geared more towards facilitating event registration than donations, and the donation form does not typically include the site navigation bars. It might be worth a look for event or member registration, but there are better choices if you only need donation processing.

Fees and Transaction Costs
Setup Fees: Medium   Fees When Few Donations: Medium   Fees When Many Donations: Medium

• $100 setup fee (plus an additional $200 to add a custom banner to the donation form)
• $199 yearly fee
• $1.00 per donation, plus 4% of the donated amount for each Visa and Mastercard donation (American Express is additional)

Merchant Account: Organization’s

• Sporg will set up each organization up with its own merchant account. The merchant account must be the one used by Sporg
• The charge will show up on the donor’s credit card in the organization’s name

Company Background: Good

• Private company that specializes in payment processing, including donations,events, and member registration, for nonprofits and membership organizations
• They have been collecting online donations since the year 2000
• Neither the Sporg company or the online payment functionality is currently profitable. They report that they expect to be profitable in 12-18 months. Sporg’s President says “Sporg has more than sufficient funding to see us through this period”
• More than 1500 clients and almost 50 employees

Setup and Support: Good

• Account setup is primarily a self-serve effort: the setup fee covers the creation of a merchant account in the organization’s name, but the organization creates and updates their donation form themselves through a “Form Builder” tool
• The setup tool features a clean design, but the complex functionality and a focus on events rather than donations means that setup is not for the technology phobic
• Support is available via phone, email and chat 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM PST

Donation Form Integrated: Acceptable

• It is unclear whether the the donation form can include the navigation bars from the site or not. One company representative told us it could not while another told us it could. As all the example client donation forms we were given do not include navigation, and Sporg wasn’t able to provide examples which did include them, we rate the tool with the assumption that it cannot include navigation bars in the donation form.
• The background color of the donation form can be matched to the website
• The standard form is clean and professional looking, but donors are required to define their donation, and then in a separate step add it to their “Cart” – a process that works better for events than donations
• A small Sporg logo at the bottom of the form cannot be removed

Donation Form Flexibility: Excellent

• Through the Form Builder tool, organizations can add custom fields and change the order of the fields
• Can support tributes and memorials through custom fields
• Can set up and monitor fundraising teams; each person collecting pledges can make use of their own public webpage listing personal fundraising goals, pictures, messages and individuals who have donated to them directly.

Payment Processing: Good

• Commonly process Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover
• They do not handle eChecks
• They do not yet handle recurring donations, but hope to offer this in the next couple of months
• 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 not had any unscheduled downtime in the last six months, and all scheduled support is done in the middle of the night

Reports & Data: Good

• A web-based administrative interface allows organizations to view donor information and build basic custom reports
• Month-to-month or year-to-year comparisons are not available
• Organizations can download text into a CSV file
• Sporg offers an API to access data programmatically

Money Distribution: Excellent

• Money is deposited directly into the organization’s merchant account within a few days after donation