In our current culture, people are used to the convenience and ease of online giving. Online giving has become increasingly popular for non-profit donors who rely on digital payment. Recent research confirms that Americans gave $410 billion to charities in 2017.
Imagine how many non-profit organizations rely on public, member, and sponsor donations to keep their doors open and their programs thriving. Art museums, botanical gardens, community outreach services, and zoos all rely on active donation programs to provide valuable benefits to their communities. Digital payment offers unique characteristics that encourage recurring giving. In case your aim is to strengthen the giving, you can explore the guide to asking for donations to boost business practices.
Nonprofits find that online giving platforms provide profound benefits.
Digital payment platforms offer various payment options based on the preferences of different donors. They support credit/debit cards, online banking, mobile payments, and cryptocurrencies. This diversity increases accessibility and reduces barriers, ultimately encouraging more individuals to donate.
In addition, digital payment platforms provide valuable data and analytics on donation patterns, donor behavior, and transaction history. These insights help fundraisers understand donor preferences, identify trends, and optimize fundraising strategies.
Leveraging data-driven decision-making enhances campaign targeting, messaging, and engagement, ultimately increasing donation rates.
Digital payment and fundraising platforms often work together to boost donation rates. The former does this by providing the necessary infrastructure to securely and efficiently handle financial transactions between fundraisers and donors or investors.
On the other hand, fundraising platforms partner with popular digital payment providers to offer various payment options to donors or investors.
Digital payment platforms employ robust encryption, fraud detection, and identity verification measures to protect donor information. By turning to these features, fundraising platforms benefit from the reputation and trust associated with these payment providers.
Donors can feel more confident giving to campaigns that utilize trusted and secure payment systems, positively impacting donation rates.
But how can you choose the best digital payment platform to encourage donations?
Define the criteria that make things easy—for your donors and administrative personnel. This may include:
Knowing your organization’s priorities will guide your platform decision.
Pushpay encourages electronic giving for churches and drives participation with a unique platform. At its core, this is a convenient app that allows churches to accept and process electronic financial payments, but their feature set goes much deeper. For example, the platform provides a 60-day launch strategy to nurture non-givers towards becoming recurring, fully engaged givers. The mobile app also provides customization options for expanding participation in the community including connection cards, Bible reading plans, and sermon notes.
If you’re a nonprofit based in the UK, you might try Monese. This platform piggybacks on Apple Pay, which helps provide brand trust to your donors and ease of use. And as any nonprofit knows, the less friction involved in donating money, the more likely your supporters are likely to donate. There is no need to manually fill out lengthy account forms with every donation. In addition, users know that their transactions are safe and secure.
Stripe is a successful tech company that is one of the top payment processors for non-profits. With a developer-friendly API, it is highly flexible. Depending on your needs, you might integrate the payment platform with Instacart, Salesforce, Amazon, Slack, or Google. Nonprofits may find Stripe attractive because of its discounted processing fee for nonprofits who meet certain qualifications, a charity pricing structure, and other features.
Like Pushpay was designed specifically for churches, Canada-based iATS was designed for nonprofits. Some of their features include tech support, a mobile app, and one-platform processing for an array of international payments. They also like to say that their first customer is still a customer. Some of the nonprofits who have utilized this platform include the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Ronald McDonald House Charities, and the American Red Cross.
Remember all of those “Buy me a cup of coffee” buttons on blogs? PayPal is another option in the online giving space, and they provide a simple button to add to your organization’s website or put into an email. Donors can also click on a checkbox to initiate the option of automatic monthly payments. The price is free and PayPal is well-known around the world. If your donor group uses PayPal, this could be a great option; if your donor group doesn’t, you might want to consider something else.
Braintree is attractive to some nonprofits because it allows donors to pay with a variety of online payment platforms, including PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and major credit cards. It is a PayPal company, which means it has an industry giant behind it. This can be a bonus to some groups looking to make electronic giving easier, although a large company may mean more impersonal service.
Digital giving shouldn’t be so hard. With this plan of action, you can choose the best options for your organization. It’s easy to get started and easy to see results.