Charitble Donation Software | Donation University

Making Charitable Donations Online

This course of Donation University covers common donation options available in charitable donation software and targeted ways of giving your donors the ability to go above and beyond just basic donations.

The Basics of an Online Donation

At a minimum, your provider should collect the donor's personal and billing information as a part of the donation process. Ideally this information is used not only to provide a contact profile but to validate that the correct address is used for the payment method. This is known as Address Verification Services and is a key fraud prevention measure.

Make sure your system lets the donor choose their payment level and gives a wide variety of payment types to choose from. At the very least you should accept major credit cards but you may find that donors will choose to give by eCheck (ACH) if the option is available.

Building on the Basics

With the ability to give a basic amount taken care of, consider providers that add additional functionality that provides a wide variety of choices to put the donor in control of exactly how their gift is made. Many of the most popular additional features are listed here:

Restrictions

A Restriction (sometimes known as an 'earmark') lets a donor choose to restrict their charitable donation to a particular fund or area within your organization. These restrictions should be defined by you and include the option for an unrestricted gift.

Tribute and Memorial Giving

A tribute system should be completely customizable and include fields you specify in order to fulfill the tribute. Fields like tribute address, who the gift is honoring, etc.

Custom Fields

Make sure your system can add custom fields to the donation form. Fields you define and a wide enough variety to accomplish data collection. Dropdowns, checkboxes, text fields, etc. This gives you the ability to ask donors to provide any additional data you need.

Adding Recurring Ability

Second only to basic donation ability, recurring is a key feature that your charitable donation system must have. Recurring options let donors set their preferences and establish an automated gift that does not require them to remember to give, the system remembers for them. Here are a few recurring features to look for:

Simple Recurring Donations

Once the donor picks their amount, this simple recurring feature would allow the selection of a frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc) and a starting date. Letting the donor choose a custom starting date makes it easy to sync a donation with paychecks and the donor can choose to enter the donation now but not have it start until they choose.

Pledging and Tithing

Pledging and tithing options allow your donors to specify custom recurring charitable donations that meet their own individual situations. Pledging and tithing options differ from simple recurring donations in that there is usually a set number of times a pledge will be billed. $100 a Month for 10 Months, for example. Where a simple recurring donation would be $10 a Month until the donor chooses to end the recurring donation.

Membership Levels

Membership levels is a feature allowing your organization to collect membership dues in a variety of different circumstances. This is more of a specialized feature, not every organization has memberships but the basic functionality can be used in a variety of ways. Basic options would include letting your donation system know to automatically renew a membership at a set price or collect a different price if the donor is enrolling in a new membership.





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Qgiv's Donation University by Qgiv, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.