Unthinkingly

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Secure Socket Layer?

There’s always a lot of curiosity about online fundraising among organizations that are new to the web. Rightly so. Having a “donate now” link could be, by itself, a reason to have a nonprofit website. You can give out the address of your site with all correspondence and know that you’re getting the plate passed at the same time, for much less money than a direct mailing or phone solicitation.

But what’s the best way to do it? You could take credit cards on your site, but generally the trend for mid-to-small organizations is to outsource the process entirely. By far it appears the most common technique is to register with a service such as groundspring.org or networkforgood.org, which take the security issue of processing credit cards out of your hands. Either of these sites provide simple setp-by-step directions and are quite reliable in our judgment. But they take at least a 3% cut of a few percent for each donation. Groundspring take 3% plus a set up fee and a recurring bill of about $15 - $30 month. Groundspring’s fees come with added services: a “tell a friend” button for donators, the ability to give rewards for certain levels of giving, extra security and automated chariable giving receipts.

I’d stick with one of those unless your organization is very large, recieves a large amount of funding through online donations, or has a savvy techie on staff with plenty of time. It’s a good way to make sure your donations are handled accountably, which is important to donors of all stripes.

The “donate now” button is but one of the many ways to use the internet for fundraising. Regarding the wider spectrum of online fundraising, of the best articles on the subject is published by Groundspring: the Online Fundraising Handbook. It’s about 100 pages and isn’t shy about referring you to their “competitors.”

On a related note, if you just need to sell something (like T-Shirts or something), use Paypal’s “merchant tools.”

Growing Your Nonprofit: and Alternative Model

How do nonprofits grow? That’s a much discussed — and much answered question. There are thousands of books, articles, consultants even entire schools devoted to the subject of growing your nonprofit.

But there’s not much to growth if you don’t have a similar rise in creating change. And growth doesn’t necessarily make an organization stronger in the nonprofit world.

That’s the idea of Jane Wei-Skillern, at least, and she has the research to back it up. Her investigation into several national nonprofits has led her to appreciate the “networked” model of development over one of scale. It’s about who you know, basically — and not being afraid to actually stop doing some services that other organizations might do better if they had your help and guidance.

Here’s a bit:

“Previous research with colleagues on growth suggested that growth does not necessarily translate into greater social value creation. Based on interviews and a survey done on nonprofit leaders, managers often cited a preference for growth by branching, i.e., replicating the organization from one site to another and maintaining central control and ownership of the new units.

“What Wei-Skillern and her research colleagues found, however, was that growth did not always lead to the benefits the organizations had anticipated. For example, many organizations anticipated that fundraising would be easier once they were larger. In fact, fundraising did not necessarily become easier with organizational growth, yet significant new costs were created as the organization needed to now manage and coordinate operations across multiple locations.

…

“[One sucessful but small organization] raised the capacity of the visually impaired charities by creating an umbrella organization with a unified agenda and creating a single voice on certain issues where it was critical. But organizations still had their own brands, did their own fundraising, and were run independently.”

Here’s the entire article