Donating Online Shouldn’t Be That Hard
This is a guest post from Steve Kirsch, Founder and CEO, oneID
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to give size-able donations to political and charitable causes. And, because of that, I regularly get email requests to make donations to great causes I believe in and want to support.
But I don’t most of the time. Like most everybody else, my life can behectic and I don’t generally have time to stop what I’m doing to fill out all the “paperwork” necessary to make the donation. So, more often than not, I skipped it in the moment. And,often times,I forgot about it completely. But, that bugged me. I knew there had to be a way to overcome this and make it easier for people on-the-go to give.
Steve Kirsch
As someone who lives and breathes technology, I have seen the mind-boggling progress it has made to make our lives easier and more convenient. But I did not understand why most nonprofits still make me complete a form to give them money.
I’m kind of like a dog with a bone, once I start gnawing on something—in this case an idea—I don’t let it go. I wanted to know why nonprofits don’t take advantage of online giving. I wanted to know what was preventing them from making it simple for me (and others) to give. Here’s what I learned:
Most organizations don’t save donor payment information because they can’t or don’t know how to save it securely. This make sense to me as I know they’re in the business of helping others, not secure data storage.They’d also need to be PCI compliant and that is a complex and expensive process (I know since oneIDis PCI compliant). Not exactly something most nonprofits would want to do.
The majority of giving isn’t online. Right now, only 7-10% of all donations happen online. So, it makes sense that nonprofits are focused on offline giving and not as focused on improving their giving technology. (I think this is a cyclical issue, if they don’t focus there, they won’t increase that number.)
And even if they have a decent online experience, it generally doesn’t extend to the mobile experience where up to 50% of all email is read.
So, what conclusion did I come to? Organizations aren’t making it as easy as they could for the more tech-savvy to give.
Being a problem solver, and having recently developed oneID technology that makes it secure and easy for people to share their personal information, I realized that I could make more of a difference than just giving dollars…I could use oneID to help nonprofits significantly grow online donations.
That was just a few months ago. So where are we now? We recently rolled out QuickDonate—an online donations solution that enables 1-click donations across all devices.
Nonprofits can integrate it easily by plugging into existing platforms, payment processors, and CRM solutions. Just a line of code or so and they’re up and running.
Early roll outs are showing remarkable results, with nearly 70 percent opt-in rates. We are just getting started, and I’m keen to get it rolled out so nonprofits across the country can start to significantly increase their donations.
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