15. Using PayPal Tools for Non-Profits

Raising money to support your non-profit organization’s goals and infrastructure is hard work. A lot of effort goes into conveying your mission accurately and how you plan to go about accomplishing that mission, finding people who will support your cause, and then actually accepting the donations themselves.

In this day of electronic payments and instant transactions, you wouldn’t think that making it easy for donors to give to your cause would be that difficult, but alas, this is still a challenge for many charitable organizations. Specific rules and customer needs can make fundraising very challenging. Fortunately, there are solutions in place for non-profits.

The Problem: How to Make It Easy?

Collecting funds for any non-profit organization is not always easy. Charitable campaigns need to be carefully planned because there’s a lot that’s involved in the collection of donations.

The use of social media by a non-profit organization can capitalize on the fact that the friends, relatives, and co-workers of a cause’s existing supporters are the most likely potential donors to that cause. Sharing information about the non-profit from friend to friend, including rich media campaign content such as videos and photos, is a great way to spread the word about a charity and its cause.

Cash, Check, Charge, and PayPal

Long gone are the days when you could count on setting out a can near the cash register and collecting funds for your cause. With so many organizations vying for customers’ attention at merchant locations, it can be a fight to even get a collection device placed at such a location, let alone count on people actually paying with cash and putting their change in the device.

The fact is, fewer people pay with cash anymore. In 2010, U.S. consumers’ use of cash dropped by three percent—a rate of decline that’s expected to continue through 2015. It’s not a universal trait or a given, mind you. In fact, some studies are seeing an increased use of cash in order to avoid using credit cards and racking up more disposable debt.

How this will end up is anyone’s guess, but even if cash is used as a financial medium, there are still inherent problems for non-profits. Handling cash is cumbersome and time-consuming—not to mention that the risk of theft goes up quite a bit. On the plus side, cash is still immediately available for use, and because there’s no transaction fee, the non-profit can get the full donation amount.

Cash also brings with it the possibility of loss through miscounting. Even the best counters can trip up when counting all those bills and change, which necessitates (at the very least) double-counting everything or else running the risk of miscounting your funds.

Paper checks are a little better, in that they’re harder to steal, and, as with cash, there is no transaction fee for checks, so the non-profit gets the full donation amount. But they can still be lost or miscounted. Handling checks also requires manual processing, trips to the bank, manual reconciliation, dealing with insufficient funds, and bounced check fees, as well as the time to clear funds when the check is good.

Some charities avoid this whole issue by setting up a merchant’s account to enable donations by credit card. That’s one way to do it, but if you do that, you will have higher development costs on your website and the responsibility to keep everything secure. The logistics alone pretty much preclude smaller non-profits from successfully launching such an effort.

But the ability to accept credit cards from your website is really a necessity for non-profits today. Not having an easy way for donors to give to your cause from your website severely limits your fundraising effectiveness and is a missed opportunity.

PayPal has made it easy with the Donate button. In a short amount of time, a non-profit can open a PayPal account, generate a Donate button, copy and paste it to the website, and start accepting donations online. PayPal does require your non-profit to provide documentation and verify your bank account before you can transfer funds out of your PayPal account, a process that will take a few days if everything is submitted in a timely fashion.

Many non-profits that use PayPal also have reported that they saw an increase in donations when they added PayPal. PayPal has more than 100 million active users with more than $4 billion in stored value in their accounts that is spent and donated every two weeks. In fact, in 2011 PayPal helped more than 200,000 non-profits raise over $2 billion.

Would You Like a Receipt?

While many donors are not always looking for a benefit for themselves, there’s no getting around the fact that a lot of donations are made to take advantage of the various federal and state tax breaks afforded those who donate to qualified charitable organizations.

If you run such an organization, then you know that providing official receipts for donors who want to take deductions can be an administrative hassle. Often, it has to be done in batches, after the original donation was made, thus increasing the chances for error.

This problem is highlighted when others are accepting donations on your organization’s behalf, and they do not have the ability to provide official receipts.

Bookkeeping Problems

Along with the task of getting the proper receipts out to your donors, you may also have problems with bookkeeping in general. Keeping track of multiple donations coming in from multiple channels, alongside all the operating expenses and other accounting, is a huge undertaking.

Automating the tracking of your donations as they come in would be the ideal way of managing this information, in order to avoid bookkeeping errors.

Lost Payments

Handling cash and checks can also lead to payments that are actually lost, which is a terrible thing to have happen. You’ve lost revenue that you really don’t need to lose, and you may likely have damaged the trust of your donor.

Again, electronic payments are one way to avoid this problem, but smaller organizations may not think they have the luxury of implementing electronic payments.

Muddled Messaging

Another problem with collecting funds is less financial and more social: depending on who is doing the asking, your organization’s mission statement, and how it’s accomplishing that mission, can get muddled as time goes by.

Even the most well-meaning person may inadvertently mix up the message you are trying to convey for others to help reflect your organization’s goals. Even your own staff members could misrepresent the message sometimes, but the problem is particularly endemic in people who are trying to raise money on behalf of your organization.

A unified message to the public is important for any non-profit to succeed.

The Solution: Social Media Donation Acceptance

All these problems are real, and they affect non-profits and charities all the time. For well-established organizations, this is all part of the way business gets done. But what about those people who just want to raise money for something that’s important, but not a long-term cause?

These types of causes must often resort to face-to-face fundraising, pulling together donations by going door-to-door or asking friends and family. Many people will think that the difficulty is all part of the process...but what if it could be easier?

Accept Donations with FundRazr

ConnectionPoint Systems is a company that has tapped directly into the security and processing power of PayPal to create an online tool for Facebook that lets you raise money for your charitable organization or personal cause.

FundRazr is well integrated into Facebook: it’s a full-featured app that can be added to the wall of your Facebook account or that of your organization. You can easily customize the look of your FundRazr with a photo and messaging, and even revise your fundraising goal. Each time you update your FundRazr, the change will appear in your (or your organization’s) news feed, reminding your social network of your cause and providing the opportunity for supporters to give easily from their own news feed. If people in your social network feel compelled to join you in the fundraising effort, they can copy and paste your FundRazr to their own wall. All donations that your friends generate from their social network are still directed to your (or your organization’s) PayPal account.

Since your supporters use PayPal, their payments are secure, instantaneous, and easily tracked.

FundRazr lets you avoid a lot of fundraising and donation collection headaches, and this simplicity of the collection method makes it easier for donors to give to your cause.

Giving with WhatGives!?

The WhatGives!? app is very similar to the FundRazr app. Like FundRazr, WhatGives!? enables donors to click a single button and give money directly to a cause.

There are some differences, of course. WhatGives!? is not limited to Facebook, for instance. WhatGives!? applications can be placed on Facebook, blogs, and even Web pages.

WhatGives!? also has another great benefit: the capability of being shared. A fundraising organization can have supporters and friends of the organization copy the widget created by the WhatGives!? app and post that widget on their WhatGives!? walls. Not only does this get the collection tool for the charitable cause out there in front of more eyeballs, but all of the money collected goes right back into the organization’s central PayPal account, accepting donations for the cause.

Using a centralized account avoids the bookkeeping tangle of donations coming in for an organization that are paid to the supporter, who then has to collect the checks and cash and make sure the money is delivered properly to the main organization. It also gets around the issue of checks made out to the supporter and not the organization, because WhatGives!? sends donations directly to the central organization.

By bringing all of the money through multiple collection points into a central account and being flexible about where it can be posted, WhatGives!? is a great app for non-profits to use.

Support Your Candidate with BigCanvass

In the U.S., political campaigns cost money. A lot of money. Signs, buttons, newspaper, radio, and TV ads—all these can rack up some serious costs.

Raising money for campaigns is hard, thankless work sometimes. There are very strict campaign fundraising rules to which candidates must adhere, and there’s a limit on individual donations. So campaigns must try to get large donations from corporate donors (which is not often politically expedient), and try to get a lot of smaller donations in a grassroots effort (which can be slower).

BigCanvass is a social giving app that can help. Built by the same people who created WhatGives!?, BigCanvass supports all of the same features of that app, including allowing users to post on Facebook and blogs, as well as copying the widget onto their Web pages.

BigCanvass adds more features specifically for campaigns, most notably detailed reports that many campaigns must have in order to comply with local and federal election laws. Contributor information is also a prime source for more supporter information down the road.

Electioneering is an expensive process, and BigCanvass is a handy tool to help mitigate those costs and enable grassroots support.

Using FundRazr

In order to give you an idea of just how easy it is to use these products, here are the steps involved in linking to, installing, and using FundRazr in your Facebook account. Before beginning, you must make sure that you already have a vetted non-profit PayPal account.

1. In your Facebook account, enter FundRazr in the Search field. The FundRazr app will appear in the list of results.

2. Click on the FundRazr app option. The FundRazr page will appear.

3. Click the Get Started Now button. If this is the first time you have used FundRazr, an authorization dialog will appear.

4. Click the Log In and Add to Facebook button. The Create a FundRazr page will appear.

5. Select the option you want to use by clicking its Go button. In this example, we have clicked the organization option, so the Sign up an Organization page will appear.

6. Enter your name and organization information and select the Type of Organization. The Details section of the app will appear.

7. Enter the pertinent information on the organization. In the PayPal account section, enter the email address for the organization’s PayPal account and click the Check It! button. If valid, a Valid status message will appear.

8. Complete the remainder of the options on the page and click the Sign Up Now button. The Options page will appear.

9. Many of the options are pre-included in FundRazr, so click the Next button. The Build It! page will appear.

Now that the account setup is complete for your FundRazr app, it’s time to configure the actual widget itself.

1. In the Title & Description section, enter the relevant information.

2. Click the Theme section. The Theme palette will appear.

3. Choose a background color. The color will be applied to the widget.

4. Click the Image & Video section. The Image tool will appear.

5. Click the Browse for Image button. The Select File dialog will appear.

6. Select the image to upload and click Open. The image will be uploaded and will appear in the widget.

7. Click the Currency & Goal section. This section will appear.

8. Enter the appropriate currency and goal amount and click the Payment Amounts section. This section will appear.

9. Choose the increment amounts you want to give donors as a payment option. If you want to add additional increments, enter them in the Amount field and click Add.

10. Click the Collect Donor Info section, which will open this final section.

11. Set what information you want to collect.

12. Click Save. The application will appear in the app’s home page.

After the FundRazr installation is approved, you can click the Publish to a Page link to have the application appear on your Facebook page. After you set up FundRazr, the social sharing begins with spreading the word on the campaign. In addition to Facebook sharing and messaging, customers can also tweet and send email messages about the fundraising campaign from within FundRazr.

The Last Word

As you can see, setting up an app like FundRazr in Facebook is very easy. WhatGives!? and BigCanvass function in much the same way, affording you a lot of flexibility to connect your social media audience to any fundraising activity you need.

In Chapter 16, “10 Ways to Profit Through Social Media,”we’ll wrap up the book with a look at the best ways to implement social media for the benefit of your organization.