Choosing the right platform for your donation campaigns can be tricky, particularly when it’s not clear how much it will cost your campaign to use a given platform. We believe Give saves your organization a significant amount of money over the course of your campaign, and here’s the math to prove that.
What are your Fundraising Options?
Raising money online may seem initially daunting, but a simple Google search will make it clear that — Whoa! You’ve got a lot of options to choose from.
Though there are lots of companies out there, the reality is they are set up in a few different ways:
Use a software platform that is “hosted in the software” like GoFundMe or Kickstarter. You will be raising money through their website, follow their terms and conditions, and be beholden to their design, creative, and functionality decisions. Often, this is okay, because they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about raising money online — I promise, they have!
Setup a PayPal account (they’ll give you a form and a button) and post the link on your Facebook Profile for people to donate. If you’re in a pinch and have a large Facebook following, this would work fine. However, if you consider yourself a business, or even sort-of-a-business, we would recommend against this option.
Build your own website and accept donations on it without leaving your website. For nearly all, from small nonprofits to business enterprises, this is the option of choice. This is the best option because you can control the whole donor experience, with your brand, create a real relationship with your donors, provide accurate information, guarantee fund delivery, keep all transactions secure, all while truly owning and hosting all your own data.
You guessed it — our Give WordPress Donation Plugin is Option 3.
Some might think that using a third-party service lowers your costs and improves your ability to raise more money. If you actually add up the dollars and cents, that’s actually not true. To explain that, we’ve created this pricing comparison of the true costs of Give vs the true costs GoFundMe (just as one example).
How much is this really going to cost me?
On GoFundme’s website, they claim that:
While there may be other third-party donation platforms that use those tactics, this statement is a generalization. In contrast, Give is totally free. Now and Forever. Here’s the link again just in case you want to double-check.
At Give we earn revenue by selling Add-ons — those additional features that make your giving platform and campaigns even more awesome! The only fees you’ll pay are between you and your payment gateway.
So while it’s true that Give is free, you do still need a payment gateway. GoFundMe also uses a payment gateway, but you don’t see those costs explicitly, they are bundled into what they take from each of your donations. Technically, you can also use the exact same payment gateway GoFundMe uses with Give, because they use WePay. Overall, it’s probably easiest to compare the actual costs of Give with our slickest Add-ons against GoFundMe’s pricing and fees with a hypothetical example.
Example: Local Animal Shelter
You are a local animal shelter. You want to do a campaign to raise money to adopt farrow cats. Your campaigns goal is roughly $10,000. You calculate that if you can reach at least 500 donors and encourage them to give an average of $20 per donation, you’d be set. That math makes sense until you calculate all the fees of your campaign platform.
With that scenario in mind, this is how the campaign costs would break down using GoFundMe’s pricing, versus Give with {these Add-ons and this Gateway} :
Costs
GoFundMe
Give
Total Amount Raised
$10,000
$10,000
Total Donors
500
500
Provider Fees
5%
0%
Payment Gateway Fee
2.90%
2.90%
Gateway Transaction Fee
30 cents
30 cents
Add-ons Costs
$0
$144
Per-Transaction Costs
$150
$150
Total Costs
$150
$294
Total Fees
$790
$290
Total Earned
$9,060
$9,416
From this table you can see that while there are more up-front costs with Give because of the Add-ons, once the whole campaign is finished, there’s almost $400 difference between what your charity or nonprofit takes home just for this one campaign.
In this case, our local Animal Shelter is now almost $1,000 away from their goal simply because they chose GoFundMe instead of Give.
Let’s take a look at another scenario at a bigger scale.
Example: National Down Syndrome Awareness Organization
Let’s say you are a national organization and rapidly growing. You have a few thousand donors and an operating budget. You’re putting together a national campaign to raise funds to provide families with children with Down Syndrome across the U.S. with funding and support and resources. You want to raise $1.8 million to achieve this goal. At that scale, GoFundMe says that there will be NO payment gateway costs to you any longer. But instead the amount they take for the whole campaign goes up to 9%. Still, that should make GoFundMe make more sense for you now.
Let’s break down the numbers and find out:
Costs
GoFundMe
Give
Total Amount Raised
$1.8 million
$1.8 million
Total Donors
8000
8000
Provider Fees
9.5%
0%
Payment Gateway Fee
0%
2.9%
Gateway Transaction Fee
$0
30 cents
Add-ons Costs
$0
$271
Per-Transaction Costs
$0
$52,200
Total Costs
$0
$52,471
Total Fees
$171,000
$2,400
Total Earned
$1,629,000
$1,745,129
So, despite the loss of the Payment Gateway fees, GoFundMe’s fees increase to the point at which our Down Syndrome Awareness charity would lose over $116,000.
Other Considerations
There are other considerations when choosing a third-party platform instead of a self-hosted solution like Give as well. Specifically, the time it takes to have your donations in your bank account; whether the platform allows you to own your own donor and donation data; and whether the platform will use your campaign to have ads or other third-parties target you and your donors as well.
Feature
GoFundMe
Give
Keep donors on your website?
No
Yes
Time until you Get your Money
9 days
1 day
Own your own Data?
No
Yes
Will other Causes target you because of this platform?
Yes
No
While these items are not fee-related, they can affect the final outcome of your campaigns for better or worse. For example, studies continue to show the donors are more likely to abandon their donation if they are directed to a third-party website rather than staying on your branded donation page. The numbers above assumed that the same exact donors gave the same exact amount for both platforms, but that may not necessarily be the case — but that’s for another post.
Owning your own data is a very important element that many organizations might overlook. While you can export your donor data from GoFundMe and other third-party platforms, they also own that data, which makes it shared data. Your donors are opting into GoFundMe’s privacy policy when they donate. Their data can be used to target them on Facebook or in Google searches because they donated to you through that platform. For many users and organizations this may seem like a trivial matter; but if you take your donors privacy seriously it isn’t trivial at all.
Choose Your Platform Wisely
While there are other benefits to platforms like GoFundMe, we believe making sure that your campaign earns the most it possibly can is paramount when choosing your donation platform. With Give, our costs are very clear. We price our Add-ons to ensure that we have top quality support for you, and that our business will still be here in the years to come when you need us more. Once you’ve bought your Add-ons your costs with us are over. Costs with other platforms can sometime be a bit more tricky to evaluate for the life of your campaign or over the course of a year. Taking a careful look at the cost of a platform for the entirety of your campaign is the only way to have a true cost comparison.
Find Out More About Give
This article, and all that we’ve put into Give, is informed by our customers and their successes and feedback. Here’s how you can learn more about Give and the success that our customers are having with Give:
Learn about our recurring donations add-on here.
Read our customer success stories, called “Give Stories“.
Meet the Give Team here.
Tweet us at @GiveWP.
Here’s to building the web!