Online Donations for Nonprofits
Cultural institutions like museums, zoos, aquariums, and institutes for the arts require software to not only manage members and point-of-sales, but also for donations and fundraising.
In this guide, we’ll evaluate the different types of donation software for nonprofits, and provide you with the information you need to choose the best donation platform that meets all of your organizational needs.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Accepting Online Donations
When evaluating different donation software, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you using versatile fundraising channels for donations?
- Are you using different types of fundraising options such as peer-to-peer, mobile-giving, crowdfunding, or online donation pages?
- Do you want to simplify your institutions’ tech stack by consolidating all of your different platforms into a single system?
Modern institutions will require the most robust feature-set, as well as versatility to implement the different options.
Benefits of Modern Online Donation Platforms for Nonprofits
When you select a platform for online donations, your institution will realize the following benefits:
- Acceptance of donations, as well as tracking of donations
- Registrations of fundraising events
- Collection and organization of information from your donors
- Remove duplicate entry and mismanagement of spreadsheets
- Detailed reporting on fundraising efforts
- The ability to track metrics relative to donations
- Segmentation of members and donors to conduct smart donation marketing campaigns
Choosing the Best Donation Platforms for Nonprofits
Donation software will range in prices and feature-sets. We recommend finding something that integrates directly with your membership management system, and POS. This ensures that you are able to consolidate all data and information for your organization into a single place, with the ability to report on and extract this data. Other criteria to help you with your selection process include:
- Flexibility in your online donation platform for nonprofits. This includes the ability to accept and create contactless payments.
- Affordable pricing options. Platforms for accepting online donations for nonprofits can vary greatly in price. We recommend evaluating the different options, starting with ACME, which is one of the best value-for-performance options for nonprofits and cultural institutions.
- Ease of use. How often do you demo software or try a new platform and find that it is impossible to find anything? Or takes far too many clicks to get to where you want to go? Imagine having to do that on a daily basis. When choosing a nonprofit donation platform, make sure to pick one that won’t drive you insane using every single day.
- Integration with your nonprofit website. What’s the point of choosing a software system that you can’t use on your website? You’ll want to be able to add payment forms that enable your donors to pay via web and mobile.
- Integration with your POS and accounting back-end. All donations and revenue generated by your institution need to be tracked. That’s why it’s essential for your nonprofit donation software to integrate with your accounting and POS. We see more organizations opting for an all-in-one solution to manage all of these processes.
- Good tech support. Oftentimes, you’ll find yourself or your team running into technical difficulties. The last thing you want is for this to occur during a fundraising event, and you’re unable to get a hold of your tech support. Always choose a provider that has a rocking support team.
- Security. In this highly digital age, choosing a provider that prioritizes data security is a must. For example, at ACME, we’re not only PCI compliant, but we adhere to the strictest compliance requirements of the US government.
Why You Should Consider ACME for Online Donations
ACME has very unique and tailored donation capabilities built right into our platform. Our donation features include:
- Dedicated and customizable landing pages for each donor
- Additional capability for targeted messaging to potential donors
- Deep-linking capability for the donation landing page (get there in one click)
- The ability to have custom messaging for every use case and audience
- The ability to define the appeal, fund, campaign
- Streamlined workflow for a donation-only transaction to support an efficient and seamless transaction
- Here is a brief video highlighting ACME donation capabilities.
Revenue diversity is essential to the success of most institutions, if not all arts and cultural organizations. ACME understands the need to support revenue diversification by allowing for standalone e-commerce donation pages.
Through this feature, organizations can direct donors to a donation page that is custom-tailored, providing a straightforward and seamless transaction with enhanced messaging to drive the giving ask. At the same time, an organization can promote the option for a supporter to make a donation as part of a ticketing transaction as a means of additional revenue. With ACME, we continually look for opportunities to evolve our solutions to support your business needs.
Final Thoughts: Online Donations for Nonprofits
Conducting and managing fundraising events can be challenging without the right donation software in place. ACME offers a complete solution for your membership management, online ticketing, and donations needs. To learn more about ACME, simply click here to request a demo.