Wednesday, July 1, 2009

How to gain more online donations

Like anyone, I like to consider myself a generous, caring, compassionate person. But as a wife and mother with a career, I rarely find myself with the time, let alone patience, to dig for my credit card and enter in all my billing information to make an online donation.

It's happened time and again where I receive an email promotion for a cause I love, click through to make a donation, and abandon the site because I couldn't spare another 5 minutes to fill out the forms...

A simple solution: PayPal - the popular payment option used on eBay.com. (And no, this is not a plug :))

Why not give your online audience two options to make a donation - 1) standard credit card entry and 2) PayPal. To the general public, PayPal is free, secure, and only requires a one time registration process to fill in your credit/bank information where it is permanently stored thereafter. So as a user, when you want to make an online donation (or consumer purchase), all you have to do is enter your dollar amount, email address, and confirm. Donation made.

I found this article "Fundraising with PayPal", by Deane Brengle, which talks about the same concept in more detail including any fees involved to the nonprofit.

Here are a couple examples of organizations using PayPal:

Washington Physicians Health Program l Donation Site
Soldiers' Angels l Donation Site l PayPal Case Study
Bob Woodroff Foundation l Donation Site

You can also register your nonprofit to receive donations through eBay via MissionFish.org. (Thanks to Alan Yu for that tid-bit!).

Tip: Once you're set up with PayPal, take it a step further and promote the new donation feature, and how quick and easy it is to use, in your outgoing email promotions.

Labels: fundraising, Internet, nonprofit

posted by becky terhaar at 1:05 PM   0 comments

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