Charity website donations: the three main options compared

As they have developed, these platforms are now also good options for processing direct donations to your charity. JustGiving, for example, now supports DirectDebit and is one of the most accessible ways for small charities to access the benefits of regular giving by DirectDebit.

The sponsorship platforms typically look after every part of the donation process - payment processing, payment collection and gift aid collection. The charities just receive the total donation amount, less the platforms processing fees.

Any data collected about the donor and their donation is stored on the platform itself and you will be at their whim as to the export options they provide.
Although the simplest option to implement, the obvious disadvantage of external fundraising platforms is that you have no control over the user’s experience as they donate, only limited ability to place your branding on the process and you do not hold any data provided by donors.

Option 2: CMS Donation Forms

The increasing popularity of open-source content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla has led to the development within these systems of various donation processing options.

These systems vary from simple web forms that pass details to a payment gateway to more fully functional systems that can store the users data and keep track of gift aid.

CMS donation systems are sometimes also integrated with e-commerce systems (for example, we sometimes use a Drupal module that allows shoppers to add a donation to their basket as they checkout with other purchases).

Any data collected about the donor and their donation is stored on the website CMS.

The advantage of this approach is that full control is available over the donor’s journey through the website and your branding can be applied consistently throughout. The disadvantage is that a content management system is designed for managing website content and is not the best place to track information about who have given money to you and when. Donor management is important (saying thank you, etc) and this is best done through a CRM system (see below).

Option 3: CRM Donation Forms

As charities grow they inevitably start to wrestle with the challenges associated with managing multiple constituents - volunteers, staff, donors, supporters. There is a wide range of software available to help charities face these challenges, known as Constituent Relationship Manager (or variously Client or Contact Relationship Manager). CRMs for short.

From a fundraising perspective, a well configured CRM can help charities get a deeper understanding of their supporters and can empower charities to make the most of these individual contacts. Reports can be run on high value donors, regular donors, lapsed donors, etc. However, this is only the case if the CRM contains up-to-date information about who is giving money to the charity and how much.

The best way to get this up-to-date information into your CRM is to use a donation form that immediately passes information about the donation into your CRM and associates it with the person making the donation. This avoids the need for time consuming data entry and the associated risks of data duplication and loss. Most modern cloud-based CRMs will support this in some way, even if their solution is not fully branded and integrated.

Some CRMs will allow you to add branding to their donation forms and in some cases it is possible to host the form entirely on your own website, giving all the benefits of brand control while still automatically passing the info to your CRM. This is much easier with some systems than others. If you have any specific questions give us a shout!

Summary Table

Costs

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