Collecting money online makes accepting donations a lot easier. There are a dizzying array of platforms to choose from. Here are the top things to consider when choosing a donation platform.

Management Capabilities

Are you looking for a solution for just one team or club, or do you need a platform that can handle donations for the groups and teams across a school or district? Does the product have away to manage teams and groups? Can those groups run multiple campaigns a year? Can you run a campaign school wide?

To put it in other terms, is the product geared towards running a single campaign or is it geared towards servicing a school or district needs for tracking donations across multiple groups and teams?

Ease of Use

The platform should be user-friendly for both administrators and donors. A simple and intuitive interface can encourage more donations by reducing friction in the donation process.

Donation Specificity

When you collect money, are you asking donors to support a general idea like “Football Team Spring 2025” or are you asking them to support a specific person like “John Doe’s trip to the State Championship”? Some platforms are better suited for general donations, while others are better suited for specific donations.

Payment Options

Look for platforms that offer a variety of payment methods, such as credit/debit cards, PayPal, direct bank transfers, and even options like Apple Pay or Google Wallet, to accommodate all potential donors.

Provider Business Model

The business model of your provider can be largely grouped into 3 buckets.

1. Percentage of Donations
2. Tips from your Donors
3. Pay for Service

Percentage of donations is a very common model and can work well for small campaigns. If the provider is taking twenty percent but it doesn’t require you to put any money down, it can be a fair trade off. But at medium and large campaigns, the percentage can become a very significant amount of money.

Tips from your donors is a model where the provider asks your donor to not only give you money but also pay them. They frequestly ask for a percentage of the amount given to you. While tipping can work well for small donations, asking for 10% or more on top of a large donation can be a turn off for donors when what they really want to do is give money for a student and their welfare, not the for profit company helping process the transaction.

Paying a flat fee for a service is a model where you pay a set amount of money for the platform helping you process online donations. This can be a good model for medium to large campaigns where the percentage of donations would be a significant amount of money. Give With Click excels here as they will charge one flat fee for unlimited campaigns across a year in a school.