We help a lot of charities set up online donation systems. A common question is “should we use CanadaHelps.org or set up our own donation system?”. It's a good question. Let's take a basic look at some of the options.
CanadaHelps.org
With CanadaHelps.org, you essentially just drop an icon and link on to your own website. All registered Canadian charities are automatically setup on CanadaHelps.org. Link directly to their donation page from your website and you have online donation abilities. CanadaHelps receives the payment via credit card or PayPal, generates a receipt for the donor, and sends the money (minus a percentage) and donation information to you.
Pro: Easy-peasy. Professional, least amount of work needed.
Con: The downside is that none of this process is integrated with your off-line methods of receiving donations and there is no integration of the donor information with any other systems.
Who: This is probably the best suggestion for small organizations and small budgets.
Run your own Donations
A do-it yourself system is usually taking an add-on module for your CMS website, something like CiviCRM (www.civicrm.org) or a shopping cart. This requires that you have an arrangement with a transaction house like Moneris or Paypal (which takes a percentage).
Pro: Integrates online and offline donation and makes receipt generation and donor reports are all part of the same workflow.
Bonus: And you may get, almost for free, the ability to have people register for events and memberships, as well as mailing list management, with all the data handled in one integrated database.
Con: Setup costs and effort. However, once the system is up and running, the per donation costs may be similar.
Who: A good solution for larger organizations and budgets where there is ability and interest in managing the process more.
Professional Donation Systems
You can also go with external professional systems. This costs you more of the donation, but you may be getting more service – for example, marketing tools and systems. They are a whole other discussion.
Reconsider your Donation System as You Grow
There are more aspects to consider, but they start getting specific to your organization. This is a first pass of the issues. And in summary, if you are small, use CanadaHelps.org. At some point as you grow, you should outgrow it too.
