Online Fundraising Services: Pricing Comparison

How Much of Each Donation Does Our Cause Actually Receive?

We are preparing to start a fundraising campaign and accept online donations to assist with the sponsorship of a Syrian refugee family’s settlement.

I assumed we would just find a nice article online that compared the various fundraising tools or services, kick the tires on one or two, and away we go.

Not quite.

What We Found

There are many such services available online. Lots of them.

They all say that they are the best, used by the most fundraisers, have better rates than the “other guys” and forewarned everyone that the “other guys” have hidden fees, etc. etc. etc.

Not very helpful.

Most comparison articles we found only compared two services against each other or they didn’t focused on: What Does Each Service Cost? What are their fees, ALL of their fees, including the inescapable third party credit card processing fees.

In other words, just tell us — At the end of processing each donation, how much of the donation is left for the cause we are raising funds for?

So We Looked Ourselves & Wrote This Article to Help Others

We wanted a service that would generate a landing page where we could tell our story, add a photo or two, and have the Donate Now button right there on the page.

We didn’t want to host our landing page ourselves (our story & photos) and have to link to the donation portal or credit card form elsewhere (i.e. don’t want it spread over two pages), and/or didn’t want to obtain an SSL security certificate for our landing page so that the credit card data could be entered securely on our own page. We didn’t want to have to do any programming, credit card processing integration, HTML, CSS or JS coding, or testing to see if things worked. We just wanted it up and running quickly.

So the fundraising service would need to generate a simple landing page with our story/photos and a donation button, handle the credit card processing, transfer the net funds into our bank account on some frequency or upon request, and have a transaction extract function for bookkeeping.

We looked at pricing from the following services:

• CanadaHelps.org
• CrowdRise.com
• DepositAGift.com
• Fundraising.MyEvent.com
• FundRazr.com
• Generosity.com (new name, recently rebranded from “IndieGoGo Life”)
• GoFundMe.com
• GoGetFunding.com
• IndieGoGo.com
• YouCaring.com

Pricing Results

Low Fees

CanadaHelps.org, Generosity.com and YouCaring.com retain (charge) 2.9% or 3.0%, plus 30 cents per transaction, for credit card processing. Everything else gets passed on to your cause.

CanadaHelps.org is only available for Canadian Registered Charities. In our opinion, its pages look fairly cluttered and busy, you only have limited control over a portion of the landing page (to tell your story), and the credit card and donor info forms have a large number of input fields, most of which are mandatory fields. If you use their optional campaign sub-pages, it’s a bit better, but still a busy “corporate feel” to it and lots of questions the donor needs to answer. For our project, we don’t think donors will populate a long list of input fields, especially on mobile devices, and as a result we didn’t find it a simple, fast or distraction-free option for our fundraising. But it’s a nice low cost.

Generosity.com and YouCaring.com ask the donor how much they wish to donate, and then add an optional service fee amount under it. The user can easily change or remove this optional service fee, and it’s explained as helping to keep the service free for causes (no admin fee). If the user provides some optional amount then it’s our understanding that the cause does receive 100% of the donation. No pressure for the donor, but it’s there. So you need to consider if you’re ok with that being asked? Four of the services we looked at said that they asked the donor (the amount is optional, the user can zero it).

Medium Fees

CrowdRise.com, Fundraising.MyEvent.com, DepositAGift.com, GoGetFunding.com are in this middle pricing group in our opinion.

CrowdRise.com says it is 3% for regular fundraising, but for Non-Profits (which we are) it is either 5% if no monthly fee or 3% if you pay a USD$50 monthly fee. Donors are given the option to cover your fees. (I don’t understand why Non-Profits have a higher cost than regular fundraising.)

Fundraising.MyEvent.com says it is 5% plus 75 cents per transaction. It also costs $2.50 per EFT withdrawal request on funds that are over two weeks old, and requires 1–2 weeks to process a withdrawal request. Donors are given the option to cover your fees.

DepositAGift.com says it is 5.5% if you pay a USD$149 setup fee, or 6.5% if you pay a USD$49 setup fee, or 7.5% if no setup fee (breakdown is 3.5% for credit card processing plus 2%, 3% or 4% depending upon setup fee).

GoGetFunding.com says it is 6.9% plus 30 cents/transaction (breakdown is 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for credit card processing fee, plus their admin fee)

Higher Fees

We found many of these higher fee services to have lots of extra functionality. However, this article is mostly about comparing costs, not features.

GoFundMe.com, FundRazr.com, IndieGoGo.com are in this higher pricing group in our opinion.

GoFundMe.com and FundRazr.com say they charge 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for credit card processing, plus a 5% admin fee, for a total of 7.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

IndieGoGo.com says its is either (a) 3% plus 30 cents per transaction, or (b) 3–5% if using PayPal, for credit card processing. Plus 5% for an admin fee, making the total 8% plus 30 cents per transaction (or more if you select PayPal as your card processor). You also need to enter a fundraising goal, but if you don’t meet the goal by your campaign end date, then it appears that the funds are refunded back to the donors. That would also imply that no funds are available to the cause until after the campaign ends (if you make your goal).

Credit Card Processors

Some of the fundraising services are integrated with multiple credit card processing companies such as We Pay, Network for Good, PayPal, etc. In this case, they let you (the cause) select which credit card processing company to use to process your donations.

In looking at some customer reviews about some of the fundraising services, a couple of negative reviewers said that their only complaint was outages or lack of support from We Pay. You might not want to put too much weight on this unless you also see it in your research.

Online Fundraising Tips

During our pricing research, we found a few pages containing helpful suggestions or hints for online fundraising and thought we’d list them here in case you find them useful:

• Fundraising success tips (by Generosity.com)
• Personal and Charity Fundraising 101 (by DepositAGift.com on Crowdcrux.com)
• How to Create a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign (by YouCaring.com)
• Profitable Fundraisers (by YouCaring.com)
• Fundraising Strategy Template (by YouCaring.com)

What Did We Decide?

That’s easy — Check it out here!

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Disclaimer

This information was obtained from online public sources, was believed to be accurate on the day that it was found online, and was considered in the context of the type of fundraising we were looking to do. However, as with any information you obtain on the Internet, it’s always best to do your own research, weigh the pros and cons in the context of what you need, and draw your own conclusions. This article is provided as-is and without any warranty whatsoever, and may contain errors or inaccuracies; use at your own risk.