My team is looking into setting up a permanent online donation portal. We’ve heard about sites like Donorbox and GoFundMe, but does anyone know of any others or have any tips?
Jotform will allow properly registered charities to setup donation forms for free or reduced cost. I remember getting an email about it but haven’t set one up for our team yet.
Email text:
"Custom apps for effortless online giving
Make it easier for people to support your charity, nonprofit, or small business with an all-in-one donation app that’s easy to customize using our drag-and-drop builder.
Integrate with 30+ popular payment gateways to quickly collect donations or tips on any device and show progress toward your donation goal — while paying no extra transaction fees to Jotform"
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This is doing a lot of heavy lifting here—registering as a 501(c)(3) is probably the #1 thing to do to make receiving money online actually doable. Once you have a charity set up for the team, many payment providers will do just fine, including Jotform, Stripe, and whoever else.
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If you have your own 501(c)(3) set up, I’d recommend making this a task for the programming team. It’s a great way to get them engaged, and they can build it using the Stripe APIs.
If you don’t want to build it yourself, https://givebutter.com/ is one option I see recommended in the nonprofit world. You can have both a permanent donation portal and special donation forms that feel like GoFundMe for specific events / goals. But you will need to be a nonprofit.
If you’re not a 501(c)(3), you might want to look into getting a fiscal sponsor. As an FRC alumni, I help run a fiscal sponsor many FIRST teams work with. Learn more here. It provides embeddable donation forms (example, embedded example).
HCB fiscal sponsor for FIRST.pdf (1.5 MB)
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Does anyone have a donation app they have used themselves? Getting a recommendation on one someone’s already used would be great.
One of my previous teams uses Paypal to handle donations through the team website. It was already set up when I started working with them, so I don’t know if it was hard to set up, but in the time I was there it was pretty seamless. It functioned well for accepting donations from families, and at public outreach events we could have a QR code that directs folks to the donation page (and it was effective, we did get a number of donations on days we did that).
They have a webpage with context about the team, EIN, non-profit status, etc: Sponsor Us! — The Apes Of Wrath
which directs folks to a paypal page: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=UPR2ZVMNLGZTS&source=url&ssrt=1696452787379
where they can either pay with their paypal account, or with a debit or credit card number.
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