[Nina Williams]

Hi all, I have been under the mistaken impression that Network for Good was a pass through/vendor for online donations. Yesterday, on the Blackbaud forum it was pointed out that they are like United Way and the actual recipient of the donation, and then they donate to us. I verified this. We do not get many online donations, though we would like to grow.

I have been asked to see what options are being used , how others handle Net Donations. How are you getting your internet donations? What are you using and how well is it working for you?

Thank you in advance for taking a moment to respond to this request.

[BookWorm]

We use PayPal to accept online donations. We thought the name recognition would help with online donations but their customer service is not very good...takes waaaay too long to get an answer to something or to get the contact changed on a business account (1.5 years!). I'm currently looking into other options.

[Allison L.]

We're using Paypal for online donations. We also use it for on-the-spot credit card processing (for example, if we have a happy hour at a bar, we can take a donor's credit card info and run it through without them having to make a Paypal account). This is not really how Paypal is meant to be used, but since we're small, that was our best solution.

We had an issue last week where one of our donors forgot they had made a donation to us (or wasn't expecting to see a large Paypal charge on their bill) and told their credit card company that the $1000 charge was not authorized. They had given us their cc info over the phone, so we didn't have any documentation that it was authorized. They cleared it up with their cc company but it was still a mess on our end. Soooo I'm looking into other ways of handling credit cards/online donations too.

[Melissa Siobhan]

I like IATS. I am not well versed with Paypal but based on what their website has now, it looks like the fees might be slightly higher with IATS on some transactions but lower on others. 2.9% + $.30 for $10 = .59 (or 5.9%) but for $100 = $3.20 (or 3.2%)

With IATS it is a flat % for every transaction and the service you get (including having the charge appear as having come from you) is great in my opinion. The fact that it also integrates with the EFT module is fantastic.

[Beth Grierson]

What/who is IATS?

We use LinkpointCentral as the gateway, and Amex and Cardservices for merchant accounts. Linkpoint offers recurring gifts/payments, which is great for managing a monthly giving program. then again, we're also lucky enough to have a highly-skilled volunteer who was able to write the pages on our website for us.

[srolandj]

I've been researching this for about a month now and from what I've found there are four viable options, IATS, NetCommunity, Network for Good, & Paypal. Netcommunity being the most expensive option from what I've found. IATS is affordable, but you have to have your IT department build a custom secure page for donating, which can be an expense. I haven't done much research for PayPal because we really wanted a customized website.

I think we'll be going with Network for Good, since it's a reasonable interest rate and if we decide to do a customized page it's less expensive then going through our web service. If you hear of any other services, please let me know as I'm very interested!

[Melissa Siobhan]

You listed NetCommunity but did not list NetSolutions - is BB now only offering NetCommunity and not the smaller step-sister NetSolutions?

[slogan]

We are currently looking at NetSolutions, and are leaning that way. The plus for us is the having data integration. We have a demo setup for next week.

[Presto]

There are certainly a number of providers for accepting online donations, including Blackbaud. In general, you need a way to:

1. Accepting the donation online (online donation form)
2. A way to process (authenticate, charge, and deposit) the money from the donation.

Please keep in mind that some options are full service (provide the donation form, handle the credit card transaction, deposit the funds, etc.) and others that are just a piece of the puzzle. Some of these solutions give you the data and the money and others just give you the money.

As others in this thread have noted, there are options like Network for Good, PayPal, and Google Checkout that do the very very basics of handling an online gift. These are considered "point solutions" in that they just do one thing and hand over varing degrees of the gift data. There are other more complete solutions like Blackbaud NetSolutions or Blackbaud NetCommunity that provide online giving, data integration, etc.

Most of the confusion is around the actual credit card processing. Here too there are some different choices. There are vendors like IATS (the nonprofit credit card processing division of TicketMaster) that acts as both a credit card payment gateway and a processor. This makes them a full service provider where you pay a per transaction fee and that's it. There are also vendors like PayPal that might just be the gateway and you contract with them and a processor like Wells Fargo that actually deposits the money for you. And all of them have different frequency of deposits.

For some nonprofits, simpler is eaiser and better and that's why IATS is very popular. They are full service and charge a reasonable transaction fee. Other nonprofits may have existing merchant account providers or processors in place and they choose to go the self-service route. There are certainly pros and cons that you need to weigh out.

Finally, you will find that successful online giving programs always include the use of email and a website to drive results. That's true if you raise $1 online or $100 million online. Looking at just the online giving form in isolation is missing the bigger picture. Just my $0.02.

[sunsen456]

We use NetSolutions and it is very good at straightforward donations. Our marketing/communications department gets very frustrated because the ability to make the donation page look different is very limited. You can insert some header text, a logo, and change fonts font color. But you can't really make the look and feel of the page different. I like it because we can create a page for each appeal at minimal cost (my time to set up a new page, which is about 10 - 15 minutes). This leads to very effective tracking of where dollars came from. Also, integration with RE is simple... you download a batch from the NetSolutions server and upload it into your database. Some updating of the file is required, but really minimal effort compared to other file imports we've had to do.

Happy to share more thoughts off-line if you need more information.