January 19, 2018
We know that raising money is hard and every dollar counts for your organization. We ran some stats on a hidden feature, and you won’t believe what we found. It quite possibly could be the simplest way you have ever discovered to instantly increase your giving. We’re not kidding. This one hidden feature is guaranteed to increase your giving and it only takes 30 seconds to add. It’s a little option tucked away that prompts donors to increase their donation by a small amount to cover the processing fees. You can enable this option with just one click. You might be thinking it sounds too good to be true. But read on to see for yourself.Many donors are cognizant that there are operating costs associated with running an organization and processing transactions online. When we were developing our GivingFuel software we had the belief that if organizations were to offer their donors the ability to cover the processing cost, they would. We just weren’t sure how many donors would jump at the opportunity to increase their donation to further help the organization. We recently decided to run an experiment to find out how successful this feature was for organizations offering it.We performed a study of 75,836 donors and found when given the opportunity to cover the processing fee, nearly one in two donors elected to do so. That is nearly 50% of donors who were willing to increase their donation in order to allow more of their donation to go directly to the cause.
This small increase can make all the difference for organizations who run with slim margins. It also communicates to donors that you are aware of these costs and are doing what is possible to help offset them to allow more donations to go directly to the cause.If you happen to be using GivingFuel, you are in luck because this function can easily be turned on behind the scenes of any donation page. You can control the verbiage and even set the specific processing fee amount for people to cover. That is often 3-5% of the found money.
The best part, it only takes one click of a box from your donors. No friction, no hassle, no awkwardly asking. If you wish, you can even set it to be chosen by default, in which case there is no additional action necessary from your donor which can result in thousands of dollars of additional funding! Test it out and let us know how successful it is for your organization.