Online donations to non-profits have been steadily growing as people look for more convenient donation methods that offer more control over giving. According to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, in 2007, Americans donated $306 billion, three-percent of that was given online. That’s more $9 billion dollars donated online! If you’re working for a non-profit, are you getting a piece of that?
In 2008, Think Say Do was commissioned to design and develop an online donation system for The Wesleyan Church World Headquarters, based in Fishers, Indiana. In previous years, The Wesleyan Church had taken online donations via email. There was no real-time credit card validation, no automated fund transfers, and no instant receipting. This caused some big problems come December, as you might imagine. Donors scrambled to donate before the end of the tax year, only to find their cards rejected because of mistyping, or worse, no one in the office to actually run the cards.
Late in December 2007, while the entire office was out for the holidays, one lone employee had to actually visit the office to process cards so donations could be taken. Not an ideal situation for an organization with hundreds of thousands of constituents.
That’s where we came in. After assessing the situation, we began the process of studying legacy donation methods - how do people currently process donations? Come to find out, they use a piece of software called The Raiser’s Edge from Blackbaud Software. Many non-profits use this software to manage their constituent lists and to keep track of donations. But the software has antiquated methods for online donations and no web-based API. So, we wrote our own.
We first started by building a new online donation form, one that could easily take multiple gifts from all over the Wesleyan web sites (there are three donation-driven sites, each for a different department at the church). The new form backed into a custom online payment system, which works much like PayPal, but it’s all in-house. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) allowed constituents to easily add items as they browsed the site, for example, adding a missionary donation here and a special summer project there. Once they’d finished browsing, they could “checkout” and finish their donations, selecting recurring options, designations, and updating account information.
We also built a powerful, yet simple to use management console for Wesleyan HQ staff members. From the console, they can manage donors, view online giving histories, and export donations directly - get this - into The Raiser’s Edge! We wanted the entire system to operate smoothly, from end to end, for everyone involved, not just the constituents, but also the staff.
After weeks of reviewing Raiser’s Edge, we decided the best, most stable approach would be to tap the SQL Server database powering the software. We wrote a process that runs nightly that dumps data from key tables into a web application that then conforms the data to a MySQL Server database accessible to the Internet. The MySQL tables then are accessed by the Online Payment System (known as OPS) to allow constituents to retrieve their Wesleyan Account information. After a constituent gives, we flag their record to be updated in Raiser’s Edge pending human review. We also take all gifts made, and pending human review, automatically export the gifts into a Raiser’s Edge CSV format. A custom macro written in VB then allows the staff to import the CSV and automatically add the online giving history into Raiser’s Edge.
The system works incredibly well for them. We were delighted to do the project, and enjoyed working with the great folks over there.
Bottom Line: If you’re not taking online donations, you’re missing out on that $9 billion opportunity! We’d love to talk with you about implementing an Online Donation System for your organization.
Email us: projects at thinksaydo dot com or call us at 317-489-9184.
~ Collin Schneider, Founder / Systems Designer
10 months ago
