 Okay. Hello everybody. Welcome to Processing Payments for Good. My name is Kyla Hunt, and I am with TechSoup. And it looks like Alexia's picture has gotten turned off, but I will be sending cut out to everybody so you will be seeing her smiling face. And with us today is Alexia Marcus from Dharma. And also with us today is Megan Southern from the Northern Jaguar Project. Alexia is going to be talking with us a little bit about merchant services in general and about Dharma Merchant Services specifically. And Megan Southern is then going to talk a little bit about her organization which I think will be a nice little visual break talking about the Northern Jaguar Project. And then she is going to be talking a little bit about how her organization has worked with different merchant services providers including Dharma. And we will be having questions throughout the session. If you have any questions, go ahead, type those into the chat pane at any time. And I will be taking a couple of questions after Alexia speaks, and then we will be handling the rest of the questions after Megan talks. And really quickly before we get started, I did want to go ahead and ask this question which is how familiar are you with credit card processing? And of course your options here are very familiar, somewhat familiar, and not at all familiar. Go ahead and let us know so we will know what skill level we are mostly speaking to. And as they come in, I am going to leave it open for another 10 seconds. I will be closing it in 4, 3, 2, 1. All right, so it looks like about 6 of you are very familiar. So that is 9.5%. The vast majority of you are somewhat familiar, so that is 73%. And 17.5 of you are not at all familiar. So this will be a brand new topic for you. And luckily Alexia has provided a really, really great summary about merchant services provides. So with that, I am going to go ahead and give it over to Alexia to get us started. So Alexia, go ahead and unmute yourself and take it away. Alexia Thanks so much, Kyla. And I just want to start by saying how grateful I am for this opportunity to talk about how and when to accept credit cards. And really my intention is to demystify the process for those of you, the majority of you who are somewhat familiar to answer any remaining questions that you have and just hopefully add some clarity for those of you who have no experience at all to really provide a great introduction. And for those of you who are very familiar, be able to share a little bit about our program that we have set up with TechSoup and see if there is a possibility to maybe enhance the program that you already have. So I will start out by describing a little bit about Dharma Merchant Services. It was started five years ago by the father-daughter team Jeff and Alexia Marku. That is my dad and I right there. And Jeff has had about 20 years of experience in the industry of Merchant Services. And through that time he really got to see that there was a big need for more ethics in the industry. I will talk a little bit more about this, but because of the complex nature of the pricing around credit card processing and also the fact that banks have outsourced the sales and marketing of Merchant accounts, you are really forced to deal with a middleman and that creates some opportunity for some hidden rates and fees and some excessive charges. And unfortunately, that has kind of become the standard in the industry. So we decided we could provide a better alternative. We could provide a company that fully disclosed all rates and fees. And also specifically set out to serve those who serve. So folks like yourselves who are really trying to make a difference in the world and create that partnership of support for mission-driven organizations. And a way that we realized we could really underscore that not only just with great service and full disclosure and low pricing, but that we could use our business to support the nonprofit community. And we do that by donating 10% of our annual gross profits on every account that we sign up. And when we work with a nonprofit, we allow that 10% to go back to the nonprofit organization itself. So in essence, it's like a rebate on the fees. And it comes back to the organization in the form of a donation. So I'm going to advance to the next slide and just talk a little bit more about the motivation and the current state of the industry. Some of you who are very familiar with Merchant Services or even somewhat familiar might have already experienced some of the egregious rates that are out there at a serious level. There's hidden fees. We often see cancellation charges in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars. We see merchants and nonprofits get looped into these equipment leases that end up costing a lot more than the equipment is actually worth. And just to be a little lighthearted about it, essentially these are sleazeballs getting rich off small merchants and nonprofits. And there's the famous youth car salesman there. And I'm delighted to say that fortunately this is not the case with TechSoup providers. So those of you who are members of TechSoup have the benefit of TechSoup really taking care of vetting the companies that are available through the TechSoup program to offer their services. So no worries if you're working with Sage Payment Systems or now Dharma who is now the second preferred provider for TechSoup. TechSoup is a wonderful job of protecting you against that. However, it really is the state of the industry. And so we see a real need to educate, to inform, and essentially to rescue nonprofits who are being taken advantage of by the industry the way it typically works. So I'd like to go on and talk about just in general what our merchant service is. Again, for those of you who are unfamiliar or maybe those of you who are familiar but just never really got an explanation of what this all means, I'll share that merchant services is an industry term that involves setting up the accounts and the equipment in order to accept credit cards. So that could look like the basic merchant account which is what funds you for your transactions. And I'm going to walk through a scenario of exactly how that works. And also the gateway accounts, if you are processing online, you need a gateway. And the terminals, if you're processing in person, you would swipe your credit card through a terminal. And we always explain that a gateway is like a terminal for online. So just like when you go into a store and you swipe your credit card through a machine, that machine takes the information, encrypts it, and sends it out securely over the payment network. And it comes back with an approval or a decline. And at the end of the day, it sends out the transactions for processing. A gateway does exactly the same thing. And it's what you need whenever you process over the Internet. For example, if you take donations from your website or if you sell fundraising tickets from your website. And we also process gift and loyalty cards. So if you wanted to set up a gift card program, that falls under the umbrella of merchant services and also check processing both in person and online. So if you were receiving a large amount of checks for your donations, you didn't want to have to take them to the bank and wait for them to clear. There are services and products that you can sign up for through merchant services where you can handle all of that faster, automated, electronic. So again, you're not mailing those checks to the bank. So I'd like to get into how the process works. Again, just to provide a nice baseline. So for example, on Monday if you received $500 in donations, that day your donor's cards are charged. And the transactions are all collected either in that credit card terminal or in your payment gateway. And at the end of the day, they are sent out for processing. And then two business days later, that full $500 is directly deposited into your checking account. Now I'll stop and say that that's how Dharma Merchant Services does it. There are other providers that do what's called net funding where they will subtract the fees for the processing out of that $500 and give you the net difference. So for example, if the fees were $20 to process that $500, you would only receive a $480 deposit. We obviously don't like doing it that way because it makes it very difficult to reconcile your transactions against your deposits. So what we do is called gross funding where we'll deposit that full $500. And it's all handled automatically. It's directly deposited into your checking account. And that is standard. All the processing is automated. Now if we're processing in February, in the first week of March you would see all the fees for the February processing automatically withdrawn from your checking account. And then you'll receive a statement that details February's processing and fees. Now again, this is based on a gross funding model. So if your fees had been taken out all along, you would only see the static monthly fees, maybe some additional fees that weren't included in that daily withdrawal. But with us you would see all the fees that were accrued over the course of the prior month. And then I'd like to move on to one of the two main questions with our how and when topic is when should you take credit cards? And really the way we look at it is whenever it increases donations and whenever it increases your sales. Reason being it will provide convenient 24x7 self-service. If you've got a website, someone can go on and donate whenever they like. It's a very quick and easy process. And donors get points and miles. I said especially American Express because they're really favored for their rewards program. But it's something that we've seen as a very strong trend in the industry, and probably a lot of you already know this. But there's that sense of I'd like to get something else back for my donation. And if my credit card is giving me points and miles that makes me all the more inclined to go ahead and do that donation. Now secondly when it increases sales, an important point here is that you're not limiting who you can sell to based on their cash on hand. Just this morning, literally about 20 minutes ago, I had a conversation with a nonprofit organization who actually found us through TechSoup and they were doing a fundraiser by selling raffle tickets to a gala dinner at a Walmart. And let me know that she was floored by how many folks did not have $5 to buy some raffle tickets. And this is a trend that we're seeing increasingly especially as debit cards are more prevalent that a lot of people just no longer carry cash. And so it's really important to offer an alternative form of payment especially if you're out in the field and catching people when they might not be for instance going to a farmer's market where they know they have to have cash. If you just catch them kind of on the fly, you want to make sure you can take credit cards. So then the important point really comes down to well how should you take credit cards? Because we all know that there's overhead when it comes to credit cards. And obviously you can take checks and get cash for as much processing as you'd like to do by all means go for it because we don't like to avoid the fees. But if you're finding that it would behoove your organization to take credit cards, it's really important to consider how to do that so that you're maximizing the benefit and minimizing the cost even operationally. So the way I broke it down is that there's really two main ways to approach taking credit cards. One is to work with a merchant service provider like Dharma or like Sage Payment Solutions. They are the other tech suite provider or some of you are already doing. And that's where you can receive lower rates and fees, have more flexibility, and yet are paying monthly costs as compared to the other two major alternatives which is PayPal or Square. So you would look at PayPal for online processing and a relatively new player in the market is Square which would be for in-person processing. Now with those alternatives you are paying higher rates and fees and there is less flexibility around how you can work with those solutions but there is no monthly cost. And just to be specific that's the basic PayPal only, not a PayPal account where you have a virtual terminal in your key and transactions. So that's how I broke it down. And I'd like to talk through each of those three points on each side and really show how the comparison shakes out. So first looking at the lower rates and fees. Every merchant service provider out there is covering the same costs because they are set by Visa MasterCard. So no one merchant service provider has any kind of preferential treatment over another. And that's how we can all be competitive. And the way the interchange costs are set by Visa MasterCard is there is always a rate and there is always a per item. And the cost varies by the credit card type. So for instance if you are swiping a credit card and it is a debit card the rate is .36 and I should just specify a technicality that that is actually a regulated debit card which is issued by a large bank that has $10 billion of more in assets under management. So that's like your Bank of America and your Chase and Citibank and Wells Fargo, some of these larger banks which comprises about 75% of debit card usage. So on average you are going to see a rate of about .36. And again these are Dharma's rates. So rates vary by merchant service provider because it varies based on the margin that they set over cost. But for example these are our rates on the TechSoup program. So you can see debit is very low. And then on the higher end of the spectrum it goes up to 2.56% and 20 cents for a business card. And that's where Visa MasterCard set the cost to be higher because as it goes folks spend more money on cards that are not under their name. It's like it's someone else's money. So you'll spend more in a business card than you would in a personal card. And Visa MasterCard know that so that they set the cost a little bit higher. Now our margin is the same regardless of the card type. That's the way we feel is the most fair way to price. So no matter what the credit card type is you're always paying the same margin over cost. And just to explain how it works in the e-commerce environment you'll see that the rates are slightly higher. Visa MasterCard know that it's more risky to take transactions online so the costs are higher. So it ranges from .41% and 37 cents on debit to .61% and 25 cents on a business card. So that's how the pricing model works with merchant service providers. Now alternatively with PayPal and Square they have a one rate fits all model. So for instance with Square it's 2.75% swiped. No transaction fee but as you can see the 2.75 is a lot higher especially when we're looking at debit card usage. And just to throw out there if the average transaction is less than $70 a conservative estimate of debit card usage is about 50%. So if you're selling or taking donations under $70 about 50% of folks are going to use a debit card. So that's where you can see that the benefit of these lower rates really kicks in because you want that lower debit card rate. And alternatively with Square if you key in a transaction it's 3.5% and a 15 cent transaction key. So as you can see there's higher rates but that's where we're going to compare to the monthly fees and we'll talk about transaction volume after that. So just to cover PayPal a lot of you probably already know it's 2.2% for nonprofits and a 30 cent transaction fee. So again a little bit higher than debit. Well a lot higher than debit still less than the business rates but overall it's going to result in a higher overall processing rate. So the next of the three points to consider was flexibility. So merchant services can definitely provide more flexibility than Square or PayPal. So for instance if you are processing with a credit card terminal you can use your existing equipment and it doesn't rely on a smartphone or iPhone to do processing like Square does. For online processing if you're working with a merchant service provider you can link your online processing to donor database or third party software. You can set up recurring donations. And again just talking about basic PayPal because we're talking about the whole no monthly fee situation with PayPal whereas as soon as you need that virtual terminal and some of these additional features you're paying a monthly fee. You can also link your merchant service provider to a shopping cart. You can set up customer receipt pages and receipt management. I really disguise the limit. And another point that Megan is actually going to talk a little bit about how it was important for them is the donor or the client stays on your website. So you really are able to produce a fully equipped e-commerce solution. So if that's important to your donors that they feel more trust and feel that there's more security around staying on your site then that's something that's included here as an important aspect of the flexibility. So the last point was about monthly fees. And so this is where you really need to consider how much volume you're doing because you need to do enough volume to cover these monthly fees. So with merchant service provider you're going to have a merchant account fee, a monthly fee right there to have the account open. If you're processing online you're going to have a gateway account fee. That's another monthly fee. If you're processing online, here I showed a picture of a smart phone where we can do smart phone processing. We can also do wireless terminal processing which you're going to pay a wireless fee with the merchant service provider as opposed to square which does not have a monthly fee. And lastly what's kind of become the bane of the merchant services industry is payment card industry or PCI compliance fee. And this is something that has been mandated by Visa MasterCard for merchant service providers but is not currently applying to PayPal or Square. So that's another monthly fee that you have to cover. With Dharma, just to give you an estimate of what it is, it's $6.95. We've seen monthly PCI compliance fees go all the way up to $25. So it could be a significant cost to cover, so just something to consider. So I'll just sum up what the deciding factors are for choosing either to go with a merchant service provider or PayPal or Square. So it really comes down to the volume of processing. So what's the frequency? Are you processing infrequently? Maybe most months with little or no processing. That's where you're not going to be able to receive the benefit of the lower rates because the monthly fees are going to offset that because of the low processing. So that's where you're really going to want to look at PayPal or Square. Also, the need to key in any sales. For example, if you have a campaign that sends out mailers and you get back these donor cards that you need to key in, you're definitely going to be better off with a merchant service provider because PayPal will then tack on those monthly fees. If you don't have any need to do that and you just wanted to have like a donate now button on your website, we think PayPal Basic is a great option. And then lastly, if you have a lot of need for flexibility or a full website integration, that's where you're going to need to work with a merchant service provider who has the ability to offer those services. And then lastly, I'm just going to cover the Dharma Merchant Services TechSoup Program. As you get from the point of admission of Dharma, it's a cornerstone of what we do to support the nonprofit community. So it's a dream come true to be available option on TechSoup and to serve their members. So we have a program that has discounted rates and fees. We do not charge a monthly minimum on processing which is common in the industry. We never charge a cancellation fee which again is very common in the industry. So even if you're doing a one-time event where you might be raising significant volume and donations or doing processing, it's something you can set up with us for a one-time event and then close the account when you don't need it so you don't face a cancellation fee. We've waived our set-up fees so it really doesn't cost anything to get started. We offer discounted credit card terminals and all of the training and support on all of our services is included with all the pricing on the TechSoup Program. So I'll display my contact information here so anyone is welcome to reach out to me directly and I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you so much, Alexei. That was a lot of really great information. We've had some really great questions coming in. So I'm going to just ask just a couple of them before we get into Megan's section and then any of the other questions I will handle at the end as time allows. So Cherie asked at the very beginning where she said that she was very interested in hearing information about using cell phones with swipe cards. I didn't know if you had any information on that. Sure, so that's where Square offers the option for the infrequent and low volume processing. And then we absolutely have an option to process with cell phones as well. Right now our solution is limited to the iPhone and we are working on finding a provider for smartphones in general like androids and blackberries. Okay, great. Thank you. And I know Betty had asked, she was saying regarding the 10% to nonprofit, she was wondering if that came back to your own nonprofit or to a nonprofit of their choice. I believe one of my staff, Allison, lives from TechSoup to your own nonprofit. Is that right? Well, if that's our diesel, we assume that the nonprofit would like to have that 10% going back to them. But actually we always let any account holder choose where it goes. So for instance all of our for-profit clients choose where their donations go. So certainly if a nonprofit wanted to donate to another nonprofit, we would absolutely support that. Okay, great. And then Susan had a couple of really good questions. The first one was, how does an organization qualify for visa charity rates MCC 8398? Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, we always recommend that to our underwriters. It really comes down to an underwriting decision. There are definitions around the 8398 category and it really is based on charitable and social service organizations. And I actually have a whole list of all of the, they're called MCC codes. And I'd be happy to send that to anyone who is interested. But 8398 is classified as a non-political fundraising organization. Organizations engaged in soliciting contributions and social service organizations engaged in social welfare services. So that would include advocacy groups, community organizations, and health agencies. So yeah. That's great. That's really, really helpful. And again if anybody wants that information or wants to follow up with Alexia about that, her email is on the screen right now and I will be sending it out to everybody after the fact. And then I'm going to handle one more question before we go into Megan's section and then all the other questions we'll handle at the end. So this is also from Susan. She was wondering, are there any legal ways to add a surcharge to cover the cost of accepting credit cards? Oh, I'm so glad that question came up. So obviously visa and mastercard are pretty insistent about not passing the surcharges on to donors. It's actually written into the regulations around accepting credit cards. So the way around that that we've seen is you can offer a cash or check discount for a product and service, but you can't add a surcharge. Now we've seen processing and handling fees around transactions, but when it comes to straight donations it would be a matter of trying to increase the donation amount, but it's not legally possible to pass on the surcharges directly. Okay. Thanks for that really concise answer. That's really, really helpful. Any of the other questions that we have, and we do have a lot of them, we'll handle at the end. And so Alexia, those questions, a lot of them will probably be for you. So at the end I will let you know when to unmute yourself again. So thank you so much. That was really great. You're welcome. Kyla, and I just wanted to offer, if we don't have time for questions, I'm happy to respond to everyone else's questions offline. Okay. So just want to offer that. Sounds great. Yeah. Yeah, if for some reason everybody, if we don't get to your question you can directly email the presenters, or I will be sending them the questions that we didn't get to, so they might be just following up with you directly. So with that I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Megan. And again Megan Southerness from the Northern Jaguar Project. She's going to start off talking a little bit about her actual organization which I know this topic that we're talking about today is a lot of numbers and it's kind of nice I think to have a little bit of a break and look at these beautiful pictures. And I know Megan is just getting over a cold, so just bear that in mind. So Megan, take it away. Thanks Kyla. So the Northern Jaguar Project is one of Darma's clients. And we have been for a few years. I'm going to start out and just give you a background of who briefly, of who we are as an organization. In 2003 a small group of conservationists from the Southwestern United States in Mexico formed the Northern Jaguar Project to revitalize the Jaguar population and work with ranchers in schools to promote conservation. We have a 50,000 acre protected core reserve that we've purchased which is shown here and is approximately 125 miles south of the US-Mexico border. Jaguars once roamed widely extending as far north into Arizona where I live and New Mexico. And today it is believed that only 10,000 wild jaguars remain worldwide making them endangered throughout their entire range. This photograph was taken by one of our motion triggered cameras on our protected reserve just a few weeks ago. The reason we are focusing on this ecologically rich, extremely remote and amazingly rugged habitat is because it is the northernmost location where female jaguars can still be found. And obviously a breeding population means that there will be cubs as well as can be seen here. By preserving this habitat we are providing an umbrella of protection for the wide range of species that are found in this area from migratory birds to butterflies. There are four large cats found here in total including mountain lions, ocelots, and the stunning photograph here of a bobcat. Again, this is the Northern Jaguar Reserve. This crucial safe zone has become the heart of a much larger project to identify and promote safe passage corridors for jaguars to return to former habitat here in their northern range. So for those of you who are a lot of you on the polls and you are somewhat familiar with credit cards so what may interest you more than anything else are the options for where you work and who you work with as a merchant service provider. We are a small organization and use a small local bank here in Tucson. And when we were first interested in accepting credit cards a long time ago our board didn't know the first thing about where to start the process. Our bank had an agreement that kind of directed us and referred us to Wells Fargo's merchant services. So we used Wells Fargo for years but we always had a really hard time with it. One, because they are a huge bank. Two, because our interactions with them were rarely helpful and always frustrating. And three, because the monthly fees that they charged were not only steep but continued to rise steadily. So we started to question whether it financially made sense for us to continue accepting credit cards at all which is not a question you want to be asking when you are a nonprofit that depends on donor support. So we had to find a better solution and started exploring different options. This was several years ago and every choice that we found mirrored Wells Fargo. There were huge mega companies with very high monthly rates especially for us since we don't really bring in that much income through credit cards in the larger scheme of things. So we were redesigning our website and thought to ask our website developer who works with small nonprofits who he could recommend for a reference. He suggested using PayPal since I believe the rates they are charged are based on quantity and they are rather than set monthly fees and it is really easy to set up. Yet again we hesitated because we wanted to keep people on our site like Alexia mentioned. We already had an account with Authorize.net which is the payment gateway that we liked. And we thought our supporters who tend to be older and not super techno savvy would be hesitant to donate if they thought the money was first going through PayPal instead of directly toward us. Oops, I think I advanced one slide more. It was through a bit of luck that after many frustrating months and countless dead ends in our search that we eventually found Dharma Merchant Services. If I remember correct we saw them listed in the national green pages and immediately realized that there was potential and possibility to match what we were looking for or what we were dreaming. That could be the solution. Up until that point we hadn't realized that there were credit card processing companies that were into sustainability and social responsibility. We were drawn to them as a small business as opposed to an international bank. And because they give those that 10% of their profits to charity like was mentioned in this case right back to us. We liked their mission and that they have a list on their website of how they are being green from where they banked to using public transportation and prioritizing sustainable energy. So perhaps most important was that they came from a place of understanding and support of our organization's mission and purpose. Suddenly we were interacting with real people who were extremely excited about our work, helpful, responsive, and also really very kind. It was refreshing to have a consistent dialogue and personal relationship with Alexia instead of whoever happened to take our call in the Wells Fargo customer service department. So we signed up and went through a very easy application process and saw our rates decline immediately to something that was reasonable instead of excessive. We accept credit cards online through our website which you can see here. The bottom is cut off but where it says donation allocation people can click if they want it to go to a particular fund. There's also the option for monthly contributions here which I am a huge fan of and it's such a great way to receive regular support through recurring donations. And then people are directed toward a second page. Oops, I'm figuring out the slides. Sorry about that. A second page where they enter all of their credit card information. So we also accept credit cards through our donors sending back envelopes in the mail. And we take credit cards at events though we are not super techno savvy ourselves so we just use those same envelopes, take their credit card information, and then come back and enter it online through Authorize.net which is shown here. And you can log directly into Authorize.net which is linked to our website to process those transactions. This is where we process the recurring monthly donors. You can search for transactions or sometimes very rarely give refunds if need be. Everything runs super smoothly and because of this we don't actually interact with Alexia and Dharma all that often because we haven't ever had any problems. So with that we are very pleased knowing that we use a merchant service provider that's oriented toward nonprofits. It just changes the way of doing business to one that feels better and knowing that they are behind making this process so efficient for our organization and that if we need to call on them that they will answer our questions quickly and honestly and with respect. So that's all I had to say but I see some questions I could answer but I will let Kyla take it from there. Kyla Thank you so much Megan. That was really helpful. I was actually wondering, I know you mentioned at the very beginning of your section that just kind of getting into and learning about credit card processing in general was really overwhelming. Was there any resources other than just going to the banks and going to the merchant services providers that you found helpful? Kyla That we found helpful? Kyla Yeah, like was there anywhere that you like, I don't know, I just didn't know if there were any websites or any resources that you found particularly helpful in actually learning about credit card processing. Kyla Honestly, TechSoup is the most helpful application, the forums, and information that can be found on the TechSoup website. It sounded like a plant but it totally wasn't everybody. Kyla There's a good place to learn everything. Even though we were TechSoup members back then, we didn't think of that right away because we've used TechSoup mostly for product donations, but once we did stumble on that eventually there's a wealth of information there. Kyla Great, thank you. I am going to be sending out just so everybody knows. I'll leave a couple of articles from TechSoup about credit card processing in the follow-up email. So I'm going to ask just a couple of questions that I think are directly to you, Megan, and then I'm going to just kind of go back and handle some of the questions that we still have outstanding. We do have a lot of questions that have come in and those questions whether or not it's Megan or Alexia who feels like they can answer the question, either one of you can. So Megan, Melanie asks, and feel free to answer this or not, but how much have you brought in with rebates from Dharma? Megan That's a very good question. The way that Dharma works is that if they give back 10% of their profits based on your income to you. So for us our volume is not super high. I would have to look it up, but it's less than $20,000 a year through credit cards. So in two years I think we've gotten $50 back. And Dharma has a program where once a year they distribute the checks once a year annually. And if a nonprofit hasn't raised enough money to accumulate $50 after two years then they'll automatically kind of balance it out to that amount. So I guess that seems to translate that the minimum you would make would be $50 every two years or $25 a year and more than that if you have a greater volume of transactions. Alexia can correct me if I'm wrong. Alexia No, that was great Megan. And just to clarify, we do try to make the donations when the donation amount is $50 or more that helps keep our administration cost down and also it keeps the processing cost down on the donation checks. But as Megan said, we do take any unallocated funds which is surprisingly a significant amount just because not everyone takes advantage of the donation program, meaning they never choose a beneficiary. We take those unallocated funds and we use those to round up nonprofits who have had a rolling balance for two years or more. Okay, great. Thank you for that clarification. And we do have another question that either Megan or Alexia, feel free to answer this. Pam wanted just some clarification. She said she's confused about why the Northern Jack Wire project needs a direct relationship with the Gateway provider because she thought that merchant services providers handles that relationship. So I didn't know if either of you clarified that a little bit. That's confusing when you're just starting out with isn't authorized.net the merchant service provider? That's something that is important to figure out. And my understanding is that the Gateway provider like Alexia said at the beginning is how you connect to the merchant services provider online. So you use the Gateway provider to do your processor online transactions but Darma or the merchant service provider is kind of facilitating that process is how I would sum it up as kind of on the novice end of it. Okay, great. We've had a couple of questions. We had another from Trisha that was almost exactly the same asking if she could get an explanation between authorized.net and Darma. Do you have anything to add to that Alexia? No, I just want to say actually Megan did a beautiful job with that and really think of authorized.net as the equipment that you're using to process the credit cards. Yes, as the merchant service provider we absolutely do handle all the setup for you. So we take care of linking the merchant account with the Gateway and we even walk you through activating it and running your first test transactions both through the Gateway as Megan showed in a screenshot where you can key right into authorized.net and also from your website. So thank you. That's great. That's great. There's a virtual terminal where you can key a transaction there so we walk you through how to do that. So we make sure you know how to do that and that also proves it's working successfully. And then we also walk you through processing from your website so we can run a test transaction there and make sure your website is talking to the Gateway properly. So in terms of all the pieces involved you can think of it as layers. So the website is what faces your donor. The Gateway sits behind that and the merchant account sits behind the Gateway. And it's what finally takes all the transactions, sends them off to the bank, and then funds you for those transactions. So the merchant account is really the only, think of it like an unsecured line of credit. It's what actually gives you the money for the credit card transaction where if I made $100 transaction I have until whenever I want to pay off my credit card but you would like those funds without having to wait for me to do that so that the actual money for the $100 transaction comes from the merchant account goes directly into your checking account. Great, thank you. And while we're on the topic of Authorize.net I do have a couple of other questions surrounding that. Betty was wondering if there's a charge from Authorize.net? There is. It's about $20 a month, a little bit of change more than that that we pay and it automatically is deducted from our checking account each month. Okay, and Gail was wondering where the credit card numbers are stored through your website. So is it on your site or is it Authorize.net? That's a great question. If people go to our website and fill out the donation form to process their credit card that way, then Authorize.net is kind of a security feature that hides the credit card information from us as well. So it's stored, I don't know if it's on Authorize.net or in Dharma but I assume it's in Authorize.net. And that information is not accessible to us as the nonprofit. There is a way to go back in and automatically select to rebuild each transaction but they're not going to share the full credit card information with you just for security reasons. Okay, thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I do want to take some time and kind of go back and look at some of the questions that were asked earlier so when Alexia was talking. But Megan if you have any answers for these as well feel free to chime in. We did have a couple of questions that came in wondering if Dharma connects or integrates with programs like QuickBooks. Oh, that's a great question. And before I answer that because it's a quick answer, I want to also acknowledge Megan's choice of TechSoup as a great resource for learning about merchant services. But to throw out another one, it's called Merchant Maverick. And the website is I think it's merchantmaverick.com or you can just Google Merchant Maverick. They do an independent review of most merchant service providers out there and they rate them based on their own interactions. They actually call in and pose as a customer and provide that independent third-party review. So I just wanted to put that out there as well. Thank you so much for that Alexia. I'll look up that link and I'll go ahead and send that out with all the additional links that we'll be sending out after the webinar. Great. Thanks for doing that Kyla. And then with regard to QuickBooks, QuickBooks also owns a merchant services company called Intuit. And so they have an exclusive agreement with their own merchant services company as to who can provide merchant services when processing directly through QuickBooks. So if you want to be able to log into QuickBooks, enter a transaction and charge a person's credit card directly from QuickBooks, you can only work with Intuit merchant services. Now we've done a lot of statement comparisons against Intuit and whereas we can always offer a savings, we're not able to work with QuickBooks. So there it's a trade-off between the operational cost of having to re-key a transaction into QuickBooks if you process it another way, or the efficiency of being able to process right within QuickBooks but paying a slightly higher rate for that. Now I will say Authorize.net does have the ability to export transactions in a format that QuickBooks can read. So you don't necessarily have to re-key those transactions manually, but it would be a manual step to extract the data and upload it into QuickBooks. Great, thank you so much. This question was asked pretty early, wanting to know just the advantages and disadvantages for those of us who want to do both online donations and accepting payments at an event. So I didn't know if you wanted to talk a little bit about that. Oh sure, it's a good point to understand that Visa and MasterCard require two separate and merchant accounts for online processing versus in-person processing. And as you might have noticed on the rate explanation, the rates are actually lower for in-person processing versus online processing. So in a typical scenario, for instance I was just talking with this merchant who runs a bingo hall and that's how they raise funds for the organization. They have a credit card terminal in the bingo hall and they swipe transactions there. That's an in-person merchant account. They also take donations on their website and that's going to be an e-commerce merchant account. Now there's multiple ways to go about that though. That's a typical scenario. As Megan showed and still has the screen displayed, she can also go in to Authorize.net and key in a credit card transaction. So if the volume for the in-person event is going to be fairly low, you don't have to set up a separate account. You could key it into this virtual terminal from Authorize.net or you could also look at something like Square with a smart phone. So this is where we kind of always have the conversation about what's the volume, what do you need, and we just come up with the most cost-effective solution. Even if it means using PayPal for the online or using Square for the in-person, it's important to consider what's the volume going through those accounts. Because if it makes more sense to consolidate it and just use the Authorize.net virtual terminal, we can suggest that. So for example, if folks are filling out donor cards at an event and you just want to give them the cards, let's say at their dinner table and you don't necessarily want to process the transaction right then or there and walk around with a smart phone and swipe their cards, that's where you can have the benefit of just keying those transactions into an Authorize.net virtual terminal. I would also throw in that for us when we're at an event like having a donor just fill out a piece of paper that we come back and do enter, key into the virtual terminal works for us because they're donations and we wouldn't otherwise be receiving that income and that support. But we're not usually selling items, which I think might make it more complicated for some people if they're actually selling a t-shirt or have something that's like going out where you would want maybe the security of knowing the credit card is going to work. Although our approach is usually pretty trusting that people who want to support us aren't going to just give us bad credit card information. Good point, Megan. Thank you. And I know a lot of what we've been talking about is using terminals. And we did have a question from Stacey who says that they currently do not use any terminals and their organization has to call in all credit card purchases to obtain approval numbers. So how would you work with that situation? Sure. That's a service that we offer as well. We call it ARU or Automated Response Unit where you're just calling prompts on a telephone. There we've recommended that actually before Square came out for very low volume, very infrequent processing. Most of the time we see about a dollar per call charge for processing that way. So again, very good for low volume. There's usually not a monthly fee or an equipment fee, but it's rare that that's the best solution for an organization especially since Square has come out and is offering that low volume, no monthly fee type of situation. Okay, thank you for that. And just so everybody knows, we do only have about 4 minutes left. So there are going to be some questions that we probably don't get to, but again you can feel free to email the presenters. I'll be sending out their email addresses. And we will strive to get all of your questions answered after the fact because we do save the questions. So Melanie was wondering where Dharma is located and how many nonprofits do you currently serve? Oh, thanks for asking. That's great. We are based in San Francisco. We have support offices in Schomburg, Illinois as well. You know 40% of our client base which is right around 2000 right now is nonprofit. So that's 800 organizations that we are working with. Okay, thank you. And Paul was wondering, he says, our organization only processes credit cards once a year during our annual benefit event. Would they incur monthly charges the other 11 months? Oh yeah, that's a great question. Thanks Paul. If you don't need the account and you only need it in the other month, if you only need it for the annual event, what we recommend is opening the account before you need it, like giving us some time to set it up and test it, and then just close the account after the annual event. We work with the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Denver that way. They do an annual raffle for a house actually. And as soon as the raffle is over they close the account and then there are no monthly fees at all. The account is just closed. And it's pretty easy to reopen. Our whole application process takes about two business days. And especially for a nonprofit organization there's no social security number needed. There's no signature of a personal guarantee. So it's really just a matter of one quick signature. We can send you a pre-filled application. We can usually have the account open in one to two days. Okay, great. I'm going to go ahead and just ask one more question. And this is from May, and she was wondering how long is the transition process if they want to switch to Dharma? Oh yeah, thank you. That's a great question. Well what we always do if anyone is already processing is we do a statement comparison. We just want to make absolutely sure that the way the unique organization is processing would be benefited by our program. So we do a statement comparison. We usually have that turned around in about two days. And then we walk the organization through our application together over the phone. That takes about 10 minutes. And then we email it out. And then it needs to come back with signatures, 501C, and a copy of a pre-pray voided check. And then we usually have the approval up to two business days after that. With regard to the transition post-approval, it does depend a little bit on how folks are already processing. So if there's third-party software involved, we want to get them included. So we set up a transition schedule where we can have all the right support folks involved and run test transactions to make sure everything is working successfully. If it's a matter of reprogramming the terminal, we can do that right over the phone. Or switching up the gateway account, we can also do that right over the phone. So we try to make it as painless and efficient as possible. Great. Thank you so much, Alexia. And thank you both, Alexia and Megan, for this really, really informative session. I know I learned a lot. So it's been really great. I also want to take a moment and just thank everybody on the back end here at TechSoup who's also been helping out. So thank you to Alex, Allison, and Becky who have been helping out with answering questions. Just a little bit about who TechSoup is. We are a nonprofit like a lot of you out there. And we do try to provide technology resources and just the technology so your organization can operate at your full potential. And a little bit about those resources that I just mentioned. If you go to our current site, TechSoup.org, you can go ahead and visit our Learning Center to find some articles. You can go ahead and read our blog which always has some really, really great posts. You can go ahead. Don't forget to subscribe to our TechSoup newsletter. So buy the cup and new product alerts. And finally, I do want to just take one moment and thank ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk is one of our webinar platform donor partners. And that is the platform we have been having this webinar on. So thank you again to ReadyTalk and of course again, a big thank you to both Alexia and Megan for this really great session. If for some reason we didn't get to your question, you can feel free to email either me at khunt at TechSoup.org or you can email the presenters directly. And I will go ahead and be sending out the recording of the session along with all the links and contact information of everybody involved. So thank you everybody. And I really hope that you have a really great day. Thanks. Thank you. Please stand by.