Web donations are a way to collect money from Donors for a specific cause or purpose, usually in cases where the donor and the receiver are in different locations or in different countries too. Many Non Profit Organizations (NPO) use online donations to connect their cause in kind donation request with the common public. Usually a nonprofit website has a web donations page in their website that lets visitors contribute small amounts of money online. PayPal, a secure payment processor who specializes in micro payments, is generally used for this purpose, without any upfront cost. The PayPal website is responsible for the security and funds transfer details, transferring the donations to the NPO’s online bank account. This reduces much of the problems on the part of the NPO, more convenient for the donor, everything is transparent, uses a more trusted system, easily accessible and most secure.
PayPal has a system to set up web fundraising efforts called WebNow, considered one of the simplest way to set-up your website to accept online donations. To accept web donations, login to PayPal, create the “Donate” button, simply copy the HTML and paste to your site to set up the “Donate” option in the NPO’s pages. Donors then click on this button to make web donations, which then redirects them to the secure PayPal pages where they can either use Credit Card, Debit Cards, PayPal account or transfer funds from their bank account. PayPal does not charge the NPO any monthly fees, or set-up fees, or cancellation fees even; they just charge low transaction fees to collect web donations. Donors do not even need a PayPal account to make transfer funds, they can use the guest option.
To receive web donations an NPO needs to first set up a non profit website, quite easier nowadays, and cheaper too. There are plenty of companies that specialize in setting up Non Profit websites, based on templates or custom design. Choose a web design that suits your NPO culture and values, make sure to give prominence to your NPO’s mission and goals. Visitors and donor would also like to see and read more about your projects, reports and case studies before making web donations. Ensure that the website is donor-friendly, donors do not like to spend more time reading unrelated materials or wrong information. Try to highlight salient features of your cause & purpose, and if needed go into details of each activity in a different web page. Also make sure that the “Donate” button is displayed prominently and is static at one corner in all the pages of the web donations website.
The most important aspect in web donations is the trust factor of donors, since they are willing to give money to someone whom they have not seen or heard and that too they are connecting using just a web page in between. Make sure your website, its contents, the reports, data about the projects are presented in a trust worthy manner. The web page that has the “Donate” button should live up to the reputation of the NPO itself, for it functions as its virtual front office.