Online Donations and Your Nonprofit

Last week, we published Getting the Best Prices for Processing Credit Cards as a companion piece to A Few Good Methods for Processing Credit Cards. If you're looking into accepting credit cards for purchases and donations at your nonprofit, I'd highly recommend reading both articles.

We've gotten some interesting responses to the piece, both by email and in the community. Both articles focus on merchant accounts — the same services stores use to process sales — but as a number of you have pointed out, these services are overkill for some nonprofits. If all you're looking for is a simple way to accept donations online, then you may not need a full-blown merchant account. Instead, you may be in the market for an online payment service. Although these services don't provide as much flexibility as merchant accounts, they do offer a clean, inexpensive way to accept donations on your Web site.

Susan at United Methodist Home for Children pointed out that she uses Google Checkout for Nonprofits to accept donations online (here's her donation page). Willow blogged about the service when it launched last year. The service is easy to use although, as Robert has pointed out, it lacks some features that could be useful to nonprofits. But it's hard to complain about the price (free until 2009).

PayPal offers a similar service for nonprofits. Like Google Checkout, clicking on a PayPal donate button takes a donor away from your site to a special PayPal page. Drew provided this example (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Our partners at Network for Good offer an online donation system too. The good thing about Network for Good's system is that it was built from the ground up for nonprofits, so a lot of features were made with our needs in mind. Network for Good's service allows users to set up recurring donations and lets you view a donor's giving history. You can even customize your Network for Good page to make it look like your Web site — that may seem like a small detail, but it's conducive to a more inviting experience for the donor.

As for in-house online donations solutions, Justin at Sacramento Loaves & Fishes gets my award for cleverness. He built a donation page that lets donors choose to pay the processing fee. As a donor, I'd be annoyed if an organization forced me to pay the processing fee for my own donation, but thrilled to do it if asked politely.

As you can see, there are advantages to both merchant account providers like NPC and online donations platforms like Network for Good. Whatever you use to accept donations online, the important part is that you incorporate giving into your Web site in a way that's cohesive with your complete message.

For more information about online donations platforms, check out A Few Good Online Payment Multitaskers and Charity Badges: Turn Your Supporters into Fundraisers. Then, come join the discussion!