Fundraising
Online charitable donations and fundraising have become increasingly popular methods for organizations to raise funds for their causes. With the rise of social media and online platforms, it has become easier than ever for individuals to donate to their favorite charities and for organizations to reach a larger audience. Online fundraising is a convenient and efficient way to support causes that you care about and make a positive impact on the world.
In this use case we'll look at considerations for building donation experiences to support nonprofits - either as a nonprofit organization or as an enterprise looking to support good causes through their products.
Fundraising as a nonprofit​
Challenges​
As a nonprofit, every donation is critical in helping you to keep delivering your mission but there are lots of challenges in fundraising successfully:
- International limitations: some fundraising tooling offers poor international support and is optimized only in a small number of countries
- Fees: donation platforms may take a large fee, reducing the amount that reaches your nonprofit and limiting the impact you are able to deliver
- Poor user experience: bad design can decrease the trust of donors or increase donor drop-off during the donation process
Types of fundraiser​
The simplest approach for fundraising is a simple donation button to accept payments from users at any time. To make the most of your donor's attention it's best to offer both one-time and recurring payments.
You may also want to run a specific timed campaign to drive awareness of fundraising for a particular area of activity or response to an emergency situation.
Get in touch if you want to discuss building donation campaign pages with Goodstack's platform.
Goodstack donation tools​
If you've claimed your nonprofit on our Causes Portal, you can use our Donation Form tools to quickly get up and running with donations on your website.
Read our Donation Forms user guide for step by step instructions on quickly implementing a donation button on your nonprofit's website.
Fundraising as an enterprise​
There are lots of opportunities to drive donations to good causes as an enterprise, whether you're a B2B or B2C platform.
Defining supported causes​
In your app, you'll want to present options to your users for which good causes they can donate to, whether those are nominated by your team members or championed by your workplace.
Goodstack has a database of 8m+ nonprofits, which you can use to present a search UI for your users to select their chosen recipient.
Read the Search Organisations API documentation to see how to implement search in your platform. We recommend adding a filter by country code in your search interface to improve the relevancy of search results.
If you want to offer a fixed list of supported causes then you can identify which charities should be in your portal and only offer those in your donation flow. The key identifier that you'll need to trigger a donation to the cause is the organisationId: Goodstack's unique ID for a nonprofit. You can use the search API above to retrieve the organisationId. If you know the official registry ID of the nonprofit (e.g. the EIN in the United States or local equivalent) then you can also filter results using the registryId field to make sure you've got the right one.
You may also want to group nonprofits into categories according to your internal criteria, for example those that are relevant to a particular impact metric for your company. Once you've identified the relevant nonprofits, you can use our Categories API to build your list of categories and assign nonprofits to them for easy retrieval in your platform. You can also assign images to categories so you can fetch relevant assets in your UI without needing to hard-code them.
Types of donation opportunity​
There are many ways you can choose to build giving into your product, depending on what you want to achieve. Below are three example use cases we sometimes help power:
- Direct donation from product: offer an opportunity for your platform users to make a direct donation via our donation gateway within your app or platform.
- Roundups in app: calculate a roundup amount at the checkout and create a donation for the rounded up value when your customers make a purchse.
- Percentage at checkout: give your customers the option to select a percentage add-on to the value of their purchase and create a donation for the corresponding amount.