Fundraising: a universal problem with a global need.

Political campaigns, churches, universities, schools, and hospitals are plagued by the same universal problem: each needs money to succeed.

I have traveled to almost all 50 states within the United States of America and have spoken to and with tens of thousands of individuals over the greater part of the past decade and I can tell you: everyone is fundraising for something. They might not even realize it, but they are.

You’re not alone: fundraising is challenging.

Whether for a campaign, church, university, school or research hospital working to cure cancer, fundraising is demanding, time-consuming, frustrating and sometimes painful. Fundraising requires strategy, execution, patience and time—and for the most part if you wait until you need it, you’re too late.

Fundraising is universally needed, and it remains one of the most challenging aspects of any cause. Why? Because it isn’t easy and it doesn’t provide us with the instant gratification that society has grown to expect.

The art of fundraising.

To be a great fundraiser, not simply a recipient of good luck, one must really get to know people at a personal level, know their needs, their wants, and most importantly what drives them to give. And in a world where you can “know” someone for years, literally years, without ever actually meeting face-to-face, that is challenging.

Fundraising is a giant topic, so let’s focus on what should be the easiest and most relaxed aspect of fundraising—actually collecting the money.

You’ve spent months developing that mega-donor and weeks, days or hours targeting and retargeting donors online. You get the donor to the point where they have bought into your story and they are motivated to give. You have the donor in the mindset that giving to your cause is not only the right thing to do in this moment, it is the thing they are going to do.

…then they visit your donation page (whether on a mobile device or computer). What should have been a simple collection has now become an experience that very well may cause the donor to never donate again or even worse—may cause them to never complete the donation in the first place. Donors shouldn’t have to think twice about giving. Donors should be able to make a donation from wherever they are—Facebook, mobile phone, website, at an event, from an email—without leaving the context of what they are doing.

Closing the deal.

Many campaigns and causes miss the low hanging fruit while focusing on unrealistic expectations and dreams at the top of the money tree. Let me break it down for you: second to actually developing relationships (whether in person or digitally) collecting money is the most important aspect of fundraising. All of your schmoozing over coffee, breakfast, lunch and dinner and all that money spent on pixel tracking, Facebook targeting, and driving traffic to donate is worth $0.00 if you can’t convert your donors.

Collections don’t need to be a distraction for your fundraising process.

Anedot is your antidote for collecting donations.

In 2010, I set out on a journey to create a platform that was simple enough for everyone, but powerful enough for pros: better fundraising for all.

Now, six years later, we’re still on that same journey, but I have a lot more help and a growing team distributed across the United States in 4 different timezones.

Anedot is focused on fundraising.

I get asked a lot:

“What about Stripe? Square? PayPal? Braintree?”

…the list goes on… Let’s get it out the way: I actually like each of these companies, and if I didn’t live, breath, eat and sleep fundraising, I’d probably use one or multiple of them. But each are payment companies that are focused on commerce, Anedot is focused on fundraising.

Anedot is a single platform.

Anedot is a payment service provider similar to the aforementioned companies, but unlike them, Anedot is not just a payments company. Many companies claiming to be competitors of Anedot use one of these companies to handle their payments meaning that when you need support you may end up having to chase down one of multiple entities to receive the help you need.

Anedot provides all the tools you need to process donations through our platform without need for any additional gateway, third party processor, merchant account, or anything else. Your Anedot account is your fundraising account—why bother with anything else?

Anedot is a network, always improving the fundraising process.

Anedot is continually testing and retesting how to best convert donors and optimize fundraising results using data across accounts and users everywhere. When we improve our processes, we’re not simply making payments better, we’re advancing fundraising. Buying a t-shirt or cup of coffee is significantly different than collecting a donation.

Anedot is grand central station for your fundraising data.

Data has become a huge topic of late because it is important. Not only should you be able to have full control over your data, it should be easy to get all the data you need to do the things you need to do.

We believe you should always have access to your data and should always be able to move or push your data wherever makes best sense to you.

Anedot allows you to track donations from everywhere whether card, cash, check or in-kind donations. We’ve also built and continue to build integrations and methods that make it easy for you to push all that data to other platforms: whether for organizing or compliance.

There is a reason that a vast number of treasurers, compliance firms and accountants choose Anedot for their campaigns and accounts: we make it easy.

Payment Processing and Deception

“Payments” is complicated. There are 40+ card types, brands, BINs and each carries with it a different interchange category. Because of this complication (created by banks in response to government regulation), merchant providers are very clever about how they price accepting payments and in many cases deceive merchants.

We’ve all seen or heard it: “I can get rates as low as 1.5% for you!” Yea..yea… well after you add dues and assessments, license fees, pci fees, monthly fees or a whole laundry list of random fees you realize that “fact” was fiction.

The unfortunate thing is that people have become accustomed to the deceptive pricing practice that runs rampant in the payment industry. In fact, the number one question I am asked by new customers regarding pricing is:

What are the hidden costs?

Answer: There are no hidden fees.

Our Price

Anedot’s pricing is simple: 4% + 30¢. That includes processing and platform: everything.

Can you get a “cheaper” rate? Absolutely. But, what good is the gas without the race-car? We’ve learned from Craigslist: cheaper ≠ better.

Service

One more thing… Anedot has one of the best service teams in the country. Seriously. Ask any account, user or donor and you’ll hear the same thing: Anedot has excellent service. It is another thing that sets us a part. We have people available Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm (+1–225–250–1301) and also have a 24/7 support line available for donors. And, if you are in the United States, your support calls are automatically routed to the American support team, every single time. You can also reach us via email help@anedot.com or by chat on our website.

Conclusion

Our goal is to remove all the technical aspects and complications of fundraising (including payment processing) so that you can focus on what should be most important to you: fundraising.

Anedot isn’t for everyone, but for everyone, Anedot is better fundraising.