 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffiths, and today's webinar is Make It Easy to Give, Taking Online Donations. We've got a couple of great presenters here today. We have Chris Dumas and Alex Cahias. I'd like to first introduce – I have Chris introduce himself. So Chris, if you don't mind, I'm telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Yeah, so my name is Chris Dumas. I'm in the past have co-founded Donor Tools which is an online donor management tool, and currently consults and help nonprofits with their online donations and fundraising. Great. Thank you for presenting today. Alex, can you talk a little bit about yourself and Komodo? Sure. My name is Alex Cahias. I'm Product Manager at Komodo. We work to create trust online so that includes security-related products, compliance-related products. And we've established a great relationship with TechSoup which we'll be discussing a little bit later. Excellent. Thank you. So first, to quickly go through the agenda, we're going to start with talking about what should be considered before taking online donations, and then spending some time about the different options for taking donations through your website, how you make it secure, what's required when doing donations, constituent fundraising, we'll explain that further, online donations, and other strategies for raising money online, as well as how do you market and conduct outreach once you get your online channel set up. So what I'd like to do now is take a little poll of the audience and see where people are at. So if you wouldn't mind taking a second to click on which option is most applicable to you, are you taking online donations through your website? Yes, no, not sure. And then not sure can also be it doesn't quite work. I was not sure if I wanted to add that in there, but I know that there might be some folks kind of in limbo, and it's not a bad thing, so I'm glad that you're here to learn more. Give it another second for people to respond, and here we go. So the majority of folks are not currently taking online donations. So thank you for that. It's nice for us to, oh, can you guys see it out there? Send in a chat message if you are the presenters. Can you guys see the message? Okay, great. Well, for those of you who might not be able to see it, it has 36% of you yes, have a website take online donations, 62% aren't, and 2.2% of you are not sure. So what I'd like to do first is start by asking Chris what should be considered when thinking about taking online donations? Yeah, I'd love to take that question. So nonprofits have a lot of things to factor into this, right? You need to understand what is the online donation component you need to do? Is it just taking donations really quickly and simply? Are your demographics skewed towards younger people who are going to be doing that? And where does it need to go? So does it need to involve social media? Does it need to involve mobile applications, or is it just on your website? In addition to that, you're going to start looking at administration. So how does the data and the money flow, and making sure that you're compliant? And you're going to factor in things like cost of transactions with the cost of usability. There's some wonderful products, and some products that aren't very usable, and if they're not usable, you leave a lot of money on the table. So understanding how that factor is into it. So one of the things that I always tell people to do is sit down and write out what they really want to do. What's your spec sheet? Are we dealing with international transactions? Sit down and write it out before you go shopping and looking at what's going to really work well for your organization. Okay, great. Thanks for that overview. And just to show you know, there's a lot of content in this hour. We're going to go through a lot of stuff and not necessarily very deep into each avenue. So we'll be following up with lots of other resources for you to continue doing research on these topics. So if you have some questions, please post those to the chat, and we'll address those at the end. We've got 15 minutes at the end for Q&A. But now I'd like to continue with Chris and say if I do want to take, I've done this spec, and I know I want to take online donations via my website, what are the options? And I'd first like Chris to talk about third-party vendors. Yeah, so there's a lot of third-party vendors, I mean hundreds, I mean maybe even a thousand, right? But these are the main players at least in our space. And you're going to know that PayPal actually has three or four different products that it offers. And they're going to change in terms of cost and implementation. Google Checkout, so I don't know if anybody out there is a Google Grants recipient, but Google Checkout has a wonderful API which means it plugs into everything really nice. But it's free if you're a Google Grants recipient. There's a zero transaction fee. There's also Amazon Payments which does a pretty good job of using that simple pay button on your website. And there's two others, and these are probably really relevant and prominent in our space because they're actually nonprofits, and they're a donor advice fund. So they make sure that you're compliant and offer a lot of best practices, and those are both just give and network for good. And both of those offer free packages with a transactional fee. So all of these, when you're looking at them, there's going to be a fee involved, maybe a little bit of a monthly fee. Mostly they're a percentage between 1.5% to say 5%. You need to be looking at the emails and follow-up. So how do you send them a receipt for their transaction with your 501C3 tax ID number? How is that following into your CRM product or donor management product? And how are you sending your just-to-thank-you letters? And quite often, if you're taking that data from those transactions, you're going to want to be able to run a report and put it in a CSV file or a spreadsheet. Most of these products do that. And Alex will talk a little bit more about compliance and integration with some of the stuff that he's doing. When it comes to integration, a lot of times your website has like a donation form. Let me double click on 10. There you go. So a donation form is kind of like that point of sale, your e-commerce page. When people go to your website, they hit a big old donate button. This is where it should be taken. And donation forms need to be really easy to use. This is where you make money. So making sure that you're collecting the right information, suggesting the right giving levels. And there's some easy ways to do this with those third-party tools. So there's things like Network for Good, which offer a custom donate now package. And they offer a really great branded trustworthy portal, like on the left of your screen. And then something like WooFu and FormStack. Now these are products that aren't donation processors. They're not transaction processors. They're form builders. And what you can do with them is build up a donation form or an event registration form. And it ties into Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, and a lot of the third-party transaction processors. So these are good options if you're trying to build up something custom that has an email back to them. If your organization is on Twitter, you can automatically tweet them if you're collecting that Twitter ID in the form. So those are both really easy ways to get up and have a really usable, easy form. Very good. Thank you so much, Chris. Now Alex, if you could share with us if people wanted to have the donate page directly on their site, not through Paypal or another third-party vendor, what's the process, what do they need to be doing and thinking about? Sure, absolutely. So we'll be going over the last option here, which is more of a do-it-yourself type model. Basically what it's all about is control. You're going to have end-to-end control of the complete customer's experience, in this case your donors. And at the end of the day, you really are competing against a lot of different things that could take a share of a person's wallet. I don't mean that in a negative sense. I mean that you are fighting over share of how much money people have to donate in certain areas. So it's really important to optimize to the point where you're getting the most out of it and converting at a high level. And by conversion, I mean literally turning visitors into donors. So the do-yourself route gives you a little bit more options and flexibility to fully integrate the experience into your website. Granted it's a little bit more complex in setting up, but if you're doing the work of setting up a payment gateway anyway, these things will allow you to take complete control over it. Okay, so what are the pros of this? Basically you're giving more payment options. Not all of the vendors, including Paypal, will take all different credit card options. There's also a certain percentage of people who will not transact using Paypal. Even the thought of using Paypal, someone will get turned off to and may not choose to donate. That's one thing we want to avoid, right? So giving people options is a great thing. So oftentimes in the e-commerce world, which I'm most fluent in, people will provide different ways for you to pay. That may include Paypal. That may include Amazon payments, but also taking transactions directly on your website. It makes it feel very professional. And if you do it the right way, you can optimize the customer's experience to make the most out of it. Other things you can do, obviously recurring donations, I know a bunch of the third parties also do that. If you need to customize that, maybe you don't want it monthly. Maybe you want it on a certain schedule or when certain events happen, you have complete control over it because you're fully utilizing the payment gateway the way you want to. So it really comes down to your imagination of how you really want your donor program or your membership program to work. So what are the cons to that? Obviously it's a little bit more complex. It's going to cost a little bit more upfront, more investment to set up and run. So when you're factoring in your decisions and looking at all the different ways to take donations online, one thing you definitely have to consider if you're purely going to do this yourself is the investment upfront as well as maintaining it, right? So with Paypal, you don't really have to worry about your form breaking one day, not necessarily unless you're going your super-integrated route with them. But if you're hosting and managing your pages, your donation pages yourself, there is a chance that things could go wrong. And at the end of the day, you want to make sure you have very available and always working. So if people want to give you money, you're not saying no. It's also going to require some more skilled resources. You have some back-end development that may need to be done. Chris mentioned a couple of different things, integrating it into various customer relationship management software, but also being able to control what actually happens from an account management perspective too. So skilled resources in terms of you need someone who can design the pages, who understands usability, as well as someone who understands how payment gateways work, how to get them set up, and if something goes wrong, how to fix them. The other point I want to go over is the higher security requirements, the minute you start taking payments directly on your website. And what I mean by that, if you were to go to a donation page, when you go to donate is the URL of your website. So if I'm on Komodo.com and I want to make a donation, when I go to donate doesn't say Komodo.com. Some people use the third-party route which is great, kicks you out to a separate page, let's say on PayPal. They're a great example of it, and then it takes you back. But in that case, you're not hosting that page. So when you host it, you're immediately taking the responsibility. So I do want to go over a couple of options for that as well. So let's talk about what you would actually need to get the stuff set up. So if you're starting purely from scratch, and again, the object here is control. You want complete control over this user experience. In order to get set up, there's a couple of things you have to get out of the way. Anyway, which is a merchant account that's handled through a merchant bank, a merchant ID, which is basically your unique identification, a payment gateway, the people who are actually going to allow you to take credit card payments and also get those things authorized, and then there's web developer. You're definitely going to need a web developer for this. Some of the third-party tools are wonderful and usable because they allow you to get away with things without necessarily all the skilled labor that you might if you were doing a custom job here. But my recommendation is if you're going down the Stuart yourself route, you recognize that you want control. You want to put it in the hands of someone who's very skilled and can make the most of it. And then on top of that, you're going to need to give indicators of you having a secure donation experience. So what I want to talk about next is really not about security, it's really about trust. Trust is a touchy subject, especially when it comes to payments online, and especially when it comes to the nonprofit sector. We're all aware that there's fraud out there. Nobody does not know anything about fraud. Some people have even experienced it firsthand. So what I want to talk about is trust because at the end of the day, that's the currency that's going to drive donation pages and your nonprofit success. So how do you know that someone is trustworthy? There's a mental check that goes on. Maybe you don't even realize it, but there's several things you're looking at. Everything from the consistency of the website, how well does it look, how professional is it, your gut feeling of whether it's trustworthy, and also some of the other implied ones like seeing what's called trust marks. We all see this every day when we go to an e-commerce website. You go there, you see a little thing that says this is SSL secured, or this is secure and authentic, this has been scanned for vulnerabilities. All these are indicators. You may not notice them until me just bringing them up, but they do have an effect. So when I'm talking about taking control and this do-it-yourself model, what I'm also implying is that you get access to use these tools to their fullest. So things like trust marks that you see here on the screen right now, including several from Komodo, these are indicators to people who are about to make donations or even before they hit the donation page, that this is a secure and authentic website. There's two elements to this. You have SSL certificates. I don't want to confuse anyone by going into the technical detail of what an SSL certificate actually is, but it delivers two powerful things, and from them you get trust. You have authentication, and you have encryption. Authentication is very simple. You are who you say you are. Komodo is one of the excellent certificate authorities that is vetting people to make sure that the person on the other end that you're about to give your credit card to is who they say they are. That's very important. But what's also important is encryption. Not only do you know the other party on the other line, but you're also encrypting it so only they have access to it. And those two things combined is what creates trust, and it's an essential part to anything. So if you go to do-it-yourself route, you're hosting these pages yourself, you better believe you're going to need an SSL certificate, not only because everyone requires it, and in order to be compliant you must have that, but it's a sign of credibility. People have been trained to look for things like the gold padlock, security seals, things like that. Okay, so the next part, security seals, visual reassurance to help improve conversion rates. We're opening up the toolkit that you see every day in e-commerce. There's no reason why this doesn't apply when it comes to the nonprofit sector. These indicators help people get from not making donations to actually making donations. These are proven to work, and it's very effective. Let's just run over a couple of quick statistics about it. 78% of online shoppers say that a seal indicates that their information is secure. 88% of U.S. online shoppers say it's important for any e-commerce entity to include a trust mark of some kind. There's plenty of ways to build trust, but people are definitely looking for them. Okay, so let's explain a little of the elements of some of these trust marks. Just about all of them will have some form or another of interaction. This is a stat that comes directly from Komodo. We deal with this every day. So there's 10 million interactions happening with this stuff every month. People engage in it. We know that. We track that. And it's because people have the desire to address your security concerns. So again, when it comes to the donating online, it's no different than if you were in an e-commerce store. So you're addressing those concerns about security. You're also making sure that it can't be spooked. The stuff can't be copied because it comes from one central area. And just about all the trust marks you see out there do it. And SSL certificates, of course, are extremely important to compliance. And we're going to discuss PCI compliance in a few seconds. I'm going to give it a great example right now of how a donation page can be effectively put together in a do-it-yourself sort of way. These folks have set up Barack Obama's official donation page. Some of you may have even donated to it. It's the prime example because it's been the most successful online fundraising tool ever. So ever, ever, ever. It takes card payments directly on the website. It doesn't utilize other third-party tools. They've built a custom design for it. It gets integrated directly through them. It's also secured by Komodo. So if you do go to Barack Obama's donation page and you find it, you're going to see this little seal on the bottom right here, Komodo Authentic site. Why? Because even Barack Obama needs a little push sometimes to let people know that this website is for real and these donations are correct. So everybody needs this. It's not a level playing field unfortunately. Just because you guys are a nonprofit, you have a great story, and you're offering some great service, people don't necessarily know that upfront that you're trustworthy. So these seals help people get over that hurdle. And again, this great example, even Barack Obama's official website needs that help too. Okay, let's talk about what's required to take online donations. There's a couple things you're also opening yourself up to. I said earlier that you initially need to invest a little bit more upfront to get this thing effectively working. So PCI compliance. PCI stands for payment card industry. And compliance means that you better comply. An important note to make is that this is not a legal regulation, but it is required for you to take payments. So if you're doing this yourself, you have to make sure that you are PCI compliant. The good news though for those folks who use third parties or are considering third parties is that PCI compliance is going to be handled by PayPal for instance, or Amazon. They will take care of it, which takes you gently out of scope of some of the things you would have to do if you go down the do-it-yourself approach. Basically you have to be compliant if you're doing any of the following, storing, receiving, transmitting, credit card data. Okay, that's really anything, right? There's 12 requirements that need to be met. And if you need more information about it and you feel that you might go down the do-yourself route and host these pages yourself, you're going to want to stay up to date on what PCI compliance is and how you achieve it. I will be sharing some resources also with TechSoup to forward on to you guys about that as well. Basically you have to validate your compliance also quarterly. And there's two other elements you have to do. Perform a vulnerability scan from an approved scanning vendor, that's the acronym ASV, and you also have to complete an SAQ annually. The SAQ is a self-assessment questionnaire. Those two elements need to be done in order to validate your compliance. So you can say, hey Mr. Merchant Bank, hey Mr. Payment Provider, I am compliant, otherwise you may face things like fines. And then lastly I want to talk about what TechSoup is offering and providing. We have an excellent partnership that was set up with TechSoup where we provide heavily discounted and donated products that are essential for everyday trust and security online. That includes SSL certificates with the security fields that I've been discussing, as well as PCI vulnerability scanning for those who choose to go down the do-yourself route. For more information obviously we will be following up with additional documents that you guys can take a look at. And I guess that's it for me then. Great. Thanks Alex so much for that information, and Alex will be available for Q&A at the end. So feel free to send those questions in via the chat. And so now I'd like to turn it back over to Chris and find out, so let's say I have people in my community who have offered to help raise money on our behalf. What are the tools available to help with this process? Yeah, so let me jump back. Let's say you are using PayPal or Network for Good or one of these other things. A lot of times they tie into other tools. And these tools are spurred across many different applications. So to come back to distributed fundraising and people fundraising on your behalf is kind of like multi-level marketing. You go out and you talk to one of your donors or constituents and they are going to go ask their friends to donate money to your organization. So there are lots of tools that allow you to do this. Some of them are really great at doing both fundraising but also gathering new people into the organization and establishing new relationships. So there's a bunch of them. I'm going to talk about a couple today. So first up I've got, where's my mouse? It's First Giving. Now First Giving has been around in the space for quite some time. And what First Giving does is it's creating a very nice fundraising page for, well in this case me, and it's hosted on FirstGiving.com. Actually if you want to go to it on your web browser you can go FirstGiving.com-ChristouMos, and you'll see this very nice page in my picture. And you can guide your constituents to go create a page in Fundraise, and the money flows back to your organization and you kind of have some guide star compliance. and verification that it is going to the right organization. But it's really usable. So you talk about trying to create something that's simple to use. There's some great fees in hiring developers and a team and making sure you're compliant. First Giving handles that, and does a very good job at it. So First Giving has been around for a long time. State Classy is a startup, and they're brand spanking new. I think they're still in beta, but they're a public beta so you can access it. So if you are an early adopter, this might be an option for you. In fact they're getting featured in TechCrunch Disrupt, which is a big conference about. People are asking about price. So these are all transactional revenue based. So I think for First Giving 7.5%, State Classy I think is a 2%, and a little bit of a per transaction fee. State Classy, same thing you build your fundraising pages. You can embed video and photos, and it engages with your Facebook and Twitter accounts as a user. It's still hosted up on the First Giving site, or sorry State Classy site. So it's not branded and connected, but it's still there and out there on the social web. So they are a startup, and you need to test these out. They're great for events, but jump into it knowing that they are a startup. But the nice part about that is you normally can pick up a phone and call their CEO and he'll answer. So the other part of distributed fundraising is widgets. So let's say your nonprofit that saves puppies has a bunch of bloggers that love the cause, and they're all going to jump in and embed a widget into their blog. They can do that really easily using the chip-in. Widget Maker, and it integrates with PayPal. So you enter in your PayPal email address, and you can get this widget, and it can go on your website, it can go on blogs. It's pretty easy to do. You just copy a little bit of code and paste it, and it handles compliance. Another company, and this one really is different than First Giving and Stay Classy, because they're not transactional revenue-based for the most part. So they do both your event registration and your organization events, like you're doing your Gala, and you want to charge a $50 ticket. They'll handle that, but they'll also handle that friend asking friend's TeamRazor type model. So you can plug in your own Payment Gateway. So you can plug in Authorize.net or PayPal, or I think they have a list of 10 or so. So it's a little bit of a different business model. You might pay a monthly fee for access to those tools, but you're not paying any transactional revenue. Very good. So there was a question that came through. It's hard to keep track of all these widgets. I totally agree, and you will be receiving a copy of this PowerPoint afterwards. So don't feel overwhelmed. There are a lot of tools out there. We're only scratching the tip of the iceberg. There's so many out there, but this gives you an idea of what some of the options are. I'd like to now find out about online options. Can you tell me about the process and the tools that are available? No, myself again. So online options, there's tons and tons of tools. Somebody just wrote in the chat that there's all these things. I hope they get the slides. There's so many tools and all this stuff. Here's the main players in the online auction space. We'll start with Mission Fish. They do some e-mail transactions on online store. Same with bidding for goods. I mean they're both really put up there as an online store. You can take donations or in-kind donations. So let's say somebody gave you a case of wine and signed Magnum. You can take that and put it up and auction it off. Win Win Apps is another startup. They launched at the AFP conference. They are really neat because what they do is they do the online auction component. They do a little bit of an event registration component. But they also do – let's say you have a silent auction at your event and you're tying online options to your silent auctions and live auctions. They handle that. They are transactional fee-based. So you can either plug in your own and pay I think a 1% or you can use theirs and it's a 3%. So all of them are good options. You need to go play with the tools and make sure they're the right fit. They have the right feel, the right branding. And then you need to make sure that your constituents will use them. A lot of times a volunteer will think, hey, this is a great idea. Make sure that it gets used and kind of kick it around and play around with it. Very good. Now we've talked about the constituents raising money for us and online auctions as well as the buttons on our website. What are some other options that we haven't yet discussed? There are other methods. So as everybody at TechSoup knows, the world is changing so fast online. Google search or something called good search. There's a couple of products in the space but the idea is you can make money for an organization as you're searching the web. With searching and search-based fundraising campaigns, double-check that people are going to use it and make sure it's a good ask of your constituents that they're going to install it and do it. It does take some time and commitment to change browsing behavior. There are other things like micropayments. These have been kind of really trending topics because you can fundraise on Twitter. There's something called Twitter Pay which is pretty prominent in the space. And they have a retweet kind of invoice thing. So if somebody retweets a message, they'll send them a reminder to build them for X amount. There's a lot of them out there. Again, you need to make sure that that works with your constituents. If you're dealing with people who are retired 70+, and they're not really active Twitter users, probably not a good use of your resources to go all in on it. The other spot that's really changing is the mobile web. How are you handling all the stuff on your cell phone? And how does the online start meeting offline? Because now not only am I able to access your website on my iPhone, I'm able to go to your event that I'm accessing your website, and I'm maybe checking in on Foursquare. Well, there's some really terminal apps. What I'm saying by terminal apps is if you have an iPhone, you can download them and plug in your Authorize.net account. And you can start processing transactions there on the spot, kind of like if you had a credit card machine. This can save an organization tons of time and resources and data, Henry. And it makes life easy. So that's one of the things that's starting to change quite a bit. And if you are doing a lot of events or you're doing things on that mobile web, it's worth investigating a little bit more. Very good. Thank you. So now we're going to move on to talking about getting the word out because we know that if you put the button there, people aren't just going to run your website and start donating. So let's talk about how do you market and get the word out that you've got these pages up and that people can donate? Yeah, so whether you use one of the third-party widgets or campaigns or transaction providers like PayPal and Network for Good, or you built your own, you're going to have a donation form or some place to take those donations. You might actually have a couple based on your landing pages, right? So it's really important that you're – when we got this original slide deck, it's like, how do I fundraise with my email? How do I fundraise with social media? Well, the answer is a lot of it is, how do you guide traffic that's relevant? So I'm on your Facebook page and I think, you know what? I love the fact that they have this great video, a cute baby tiger. I really want to support baby tigers and help this cause. So I click on their link to support them through their Facebook page and it guides me to that donation form. As you go through your online marketing and e-commerce, you're going to continue to look at how that traffic is coming in from Twitter and any kind of viral or email campaigns. I want to talk a little bit about analytics, right? Alex touched on trust is really important. When you go make an online donation, you want to know that it's going to the right organization. It's not fraud. It's not, you know, a misspelling of the organization's name and a website somebody threw up and the money is going, you know, who the heck knows, right? You want to make sure it's going to the right space. So using analytics, you can test, you know, are people trusting my website? What happens if I change the color blue? Does that make people trust me more? Or does PayPal, having the option of PayPal, do more people click the PayPal button? What if I change to that PayPal button just to a generic donate button? What happens? And you need to be using analytics. And this is probably the second step once you get one of those donation forms installed, whether it's their party or do-it-yourself. Making sure it's efficient. If you can't measure it, you can't make it better. So you need to be measuring both how is traffic coming in, and then once it comes in, how do you measure the donations through the form? Do a lot of people who start on your donation form, do they abandon it? Are you asking too many questions? Are you asking for, you know, their favorite color ice cream? Are you not giving them enough reasons to donate? You can play around with things like your donation giving level. So a lot of form builders and donation widgets will allow you to say, here's some great giving levels, you know, $50 and $150. And then an option for recurring donations. But if you play around with those price points, does it affect how much money is coming in? So it's really, really, really important that you start playing around and paying attention to those donation analytics. It's what a lot of the e-commerce companies do. And us as nonprofits, if we're processing transactions online, we need to be paying attention to the exact same stuff. Thank you, Chris. So we have some resources to share, but I'm going to hold on that for a little bit. I'm going to jump to questions because there's about 20 or so that have stacked up here. And please do send your questions in now. I'm going to get started with a question that I'll give to Chris. This is from Kim. How much is reasonable to expect to pay for third-party vendors? And I know it probably depends, but can you give us kind of a rough overview of the cost that like Network for Good and PayPal charge? Yeah, so you're really going to be looking at between 2.5, well, all right. So PayPal has a nonprofit program. I think it's like 1.9%. And it depends on their product. There's other ones like First Giving, I think it's a 7.5%. So there's a really big range. Typically you're looking at 2-5%, you've got a pretty good deal. You better be seeing some really good feature sets if you're going to be paying 7.5%. The other part to that is if you're out shopping these things, look at the cost of usability, right? If somebody goes to your website, and sure, maybe you're only paying 2% for some transaction provider, but people don't trust it. It doesn't look trustworthy. It's not branded. You can't track the analytics. It's not worth it. It's worth the extra percent to go through and make sure you're getting as many donations online as possible. So look at cost of usability and the cost of handling the data, right? Does it get emailed to your office manager or your development staff? And are they having to hand enter these donations? Or is there some sort of automation into your donor management suite or customer relations? So I'm not sure if either of you can answer this, but I want to put it out there and I'll shoot it to Alex first. Can you discuss the state registration requirements for accepting donations? I know we all need our 501c3 to be able to take donations. I also know that there's some state registration as well. Alex, do you know that answer? As far as I can see from the business side, typically you need to have an entity set up, in this case you're a nonprofit entity. You need to file as a nonprofit entity or get classified as it. And then from there you either set up either in some cases a company or some sort of limited liability corporation to protect yourself. In the donation in the nonprofit world you have to file as a nonprofit organization. Each state is a little bit different. Typically when you register, if you want a little bit more flexibility you would register in Delaware. If you're in the United States you would register in Delaware. Just because the laws there tend to be more favorable for businesses and nonprofits or classified would also benefit from that as well. Great. Thank you. Let me give a bond to that a little bit too. So just recently there's a couple of law changes. Again, let me say I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an accountant. Just marketing. How do you get the money in? How do you comply? I think I put it on the resources page, but there is some state compliance stuff. One of the big perks of using something like Network for Good, they're registered with every state. So you are 100% compliant. I never ever have to deal with that at all. And the money passes through to you. Great. Thanks for adding that. And we will be following up with lots of more resources on the PCI compliance that Alex talked about. I'm afraid that's a little too deep for this conversation. And I realize while planning this webinar that we need a second webinar that will go in a little bit deeper on some of these topics. So watch for that in the upcoming months. There are quite a few questions about the ease of setting up a third-party site or getting that set up on your site, especially for small nonprofits that are working with only volunteers. So perhaps, Chris, you could take a minute and walk us the steps of perhaps I have a basic website. What do I need to do to get to a place where people can donate to me via one of those tools that you discussed. And perhaps just pick one that you know is the simplest to get started. Well, I'll use PayPal in this case because I think a lot of organizations use them. So you can log in to your PayPal account and have a button maker. And you can create a button, let's say for a $50 gift. And you can copy and paste that code into your website and call it a day. And it really is about two or three lines of geek code, HTML code, and it can go right into your website. If you're using a content management system, let's say like you're on WordPress or some other thing like Drupal, you may need somebody to open up the HTML box and paste it into there rather than the regular content portion. And then, again, each of these products have different options. So PayPal, for example, will allow you to customize a form with some other product. So you can make that full donation form on your website. And again, it tends to be technically an embedded iframe so that some of the compliance stuff is handled actually on PayPal side and you're still able to have the form on site. And then go back and copy and paste that code. One question that relates to this is these third-party vendors will push you to a different website to capture the credit card information. Is it sometimes difficult for people to get back to the original website that they were on? So for some of these, I think that if you set it up right, they'll come right back and it's pretty easy to do so. What I tell everybody to do is when you're shopping for these things, go look at other people's donation forms. Maybe I'll put a list up on my blog of some good ones. But go look at donation forms. See what you like. Make a donation to some of these organizations even though it's for a dollar, just to see what the user flow is like. And I've seen so many people just kind of copy and paste that PayPal code and then kind of never really go through the process themselves how a donor would see it. So handle that yourself and then making sure that the follow-up is there. So once there's a – you wouldn't want to just push it right back to your home page. Maybe you have a custom page that says, hey, thanks so much for your gift. We really appreciate it. Your gift supports X, Y, and Z. And it's a custom landing page. Now I talked about Google Analytics. You can also use that kind of like post gift thank you page inside of Google Analytics as your target for the tracking the success rate of the transaction. So how many people started at the beginning of the donation process and how many finished it? That's a really good point. I want to shoot this over to Alex. The question from Nora is what's the best for international transactions? For international transactions there's certain other providers. I mean personally I'm familiar with Worldpay. Worldpay can give you several options also whether you want to integrate it into your page or have it push someplace else. So there's a bunch of different options there, but in my experience I've used RBS Worldpay and it's worked out pretty well. Chris, what do you know about the third-party vendors and being able to take international donations? PayPal tends to be the most responsive to that. I dealt with a client the other day who's trying to do the Shekel or Shekli I guess, and PayPal was able to do it. So in terms of international transactions, probably PayPal will handle it. So for people taking small donations, what would be the best processing for many small donations? And I guess we can start with Alex. For micropayments, I think Chris would know better than I would in this case. So I'll never tell him. I think that I want more information before I fully say here's the solution for you. If it's truly micropayments, $2 to $5, there's a lot of options out there. And at that point you need to think about what's usability and what am I really trying to achieve? Is it the money portion of it or is it part of a more comprehensive plan to get people involved in my organization kind of like a tester gift so that I can follow up and add them to our mailing list and connect with them on a larger basis? Thanks for that. And thanks everyone for submitting these questions. They're really, really great. One about Convio or Quintera. So before I ask the full question, Chris, do you know much about either of those programs or applications? Yeah, so both of the Quintera is black. I'll just read the question and you can respond to the question. So this is from Audra, respond on profit in the market to find a team razor site like Convio or Quintera that would allow us to create our own webpage and have people sign up, fundraise, and grow their team. Can you recommend an affordable host? I would go look at First Giving, Stay Classy, and Give Use. As opposed to this tool. Okay, so if you could explain briefly what those two tools are used for. Yeah, so they tend to be used for larger organizations. They've got some great things for small organizations, but if you're looking for a quick and easy way, I think that those three options are an easy way to get in. And those are those friend asking friends. I'm going to go do a walk-a-thon, or a dog-a-thon, or a bike event. That's what those tools are used for primarily, and the other tools are now competing against. Great, and Nathan had a question about whether they should integrate with their accounting tool like QuickBooks. We talked earlier about it integrating with your CRM. So do you need to have it connect to your QuickBooks? Is this one for me or Alex? I guess for either. I'm not sure who's the best to answer. So let me jump on that. It's really important that online donations are connected to everything else you're doing. Your email newsletter, your regular kind of donor profiling, and kind of major gift prospecting, it's important that it's involved in it. So you want to give that data in to your CRM, or Dunder Management System, and your accounting. And there's lots and lots of options on how to do that. Some Dunder Management companies use a PayPal integration so that it's automatically reflected inside of your CRM, and then it links into your accounting system. So that's where you begin starting to want to talk into who's the TechSoup consultant, and Robert Weiner who's an expert in connecting those systems and making sure they're right for your organization. So I hope I answered that right. Great. And Alex, did you have anything you wanted to add? No, I think that just about covers it. Okay, and Chris mentioned Robert Weiner. We were lucky enough to do a webinar with him about a month ago, so I will be sure to include a link to that webinar in the post-event survey. It was really pretty great. It was what to consider when developing a donor database. So another question has to do with the widgets that you discussed earlier, Chris. What are the easiest online donation widgets to install in a blog? You had put in Chip-In. Were there others that you wanted to mention? Hey, you know what? What I always think is interesting is PayPal has some widgets, and nonprofits haven't really traditionally used them. I haven't seen them as being that prominent. PayPal does have fundraising widgets that are branded as theirs. So you can do that through PayPal. Chip-In is really easy. I mean, all of the sites that I talked about, they put simplicity first, making sure that nonprofits, they want to focus on their mission, right? We don't want to deal with technical stuff. We're not in the business of running web development firms. We're in the business of solving a social mission, right? So the real goal is make it really easy for our staff to go out and do it. And most of the tools I talked about today will allow you to do that. So Alex, you had talked about checking on the reliability of the trust marks on sites, and being able to check on the reliability of those sites. Now, do you know much about checking on the reliability of third-party vendors? Typically, the third-party vendors do a pretty good job with some of those hosted pages that they use. So when it shoots you out to a different domain to do your checkout, they typically do include some things like trust marks like I talked about before. So if you look at a couple of donation pages, I'm sure you'll see it. Some third-party vendors actually include it automatically in a footer, which is all great practices. Obviously you don't get the ability to move those things around or test different ones. But for baseline things, they get accomplished pretty well. So they do use them. You just have to look for it when you're signing up and what kind of packages you get included. Great. Thank you. So a question from Second Life that has to do with the mobile donations that you mentioned earlier, Crystal. Of course that would come from Second Life. Of course. We've got the super techies in Second Life. What mobile donation tools are most effective for SMS donations? You know, SMS donations could be its own webinar. I would go have people look at mobile giving. They're kind of an SMS service. SMS is kind of expensive to get into. And you need to figure out how to do it right. What's the strategy? How is it connected to everything else that I'm doing? Do I have the user base to support it just to break even out my initial capital expense of setting up the service? So you could start with mobile giving. There's a bunch of players in the field. If it's something that you're really looking at, drop me an email and I'll send you a little list of organizations that do it. Okay, great. And it's a slight bit off topic, but we did mention it earlier so I wanted to ask that question. And last year we did two mobile giving webinars. So I'll include both those links as well in the file message. This question was somewhat answered earlier, but I wanted to ask Alex to talk about the price range for the nonprofit should budget for development, fees, and ongoing support. So just kind of a general idea of what people can be looking for as far as cost when it comes to do it yourself. Sure, I mean that's a great question and definitely something to be considered. When you're setting up everything from scratch, you're looking at about you probably set aside about $500 for just getting your payment gateway and your relationship with the merchant banks and everything set up. Typically it ranges between $250 to $500 to get that squared away and also factor in some time there too. It may take a week or two or a little bit more to get that set up. As far as the any development work that needs to be done, you may have people already on staff that have those skills, but I mean personally I just think of the budget anywhere between $1500 to $2000 to make sure that I have enough set aside so that once I set it up it's operating, it's running great. I have some money to do some testing, outsource any other development work that I want to get done, other integration if I want to integrate it like you said into other third-party stuff as well, or even fun things like integrating it with Twitter and Facebook. All that stuff also requires development time to do. Not that it's difficult, but I would budget around that much for it. But again, it's all about how much you're going to make in return from that. So what Chris said in the beginning of the presentation is very appropriate defining exactly what you need to achieve for your particular donor base and what you're going to need to do will really define which way you're going to go with it. So personally I would probably allot that much money. I don't think you'll end up spending all of it, but you'll have enough to fall back on if anything goes wrong. You'll have people that are fix it can pay to have people fix it. Excellent. Thank you, Alex. And thanks, Chris. Both of you, this is really great information. I know a lot of information, and again, I apologize for not being able to go in deeper, but we will have another one in a few months that goes in deeper into at least one of these topics. But I want to let you know that we've got a page filled resources in the PowerPoint which you received earlier today. So if you want to open that up you can start looking at some of these links, but I'll also be sending these links in the follow-up email that you'll receive in a couple of hours. If you have additional questions that weren't answered, you can post those to our fundraising forum. Becky will be sending out that short URL via the chat. And if you are new to TechSoup, we've got more than just webinars. We've got discussion forums, articles, blogs, discounted software of course, and we post upcoming events. So check out more of what we have to offer on TechSoup.org. Next week, actually in two weeks from today is our next webinar, Successful Event Promotion with Social Media. I'll be interviewing Janet Faust. I'm very excited. She's a quick leader in the area. And also I'd like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. Again, thanks everyone for attending. And thank you Alex and Chris for the great presentation and answering all those questions. And thanks to Becky for answering the chat questions. Have a great day everyone. If you have any questions, you feel free to email me or call me and take a minute to fill out our post event survey that will pop up once the webinar closes. Have a wonderful day. Thanks Chris and Alex. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.