Start accepting donations online

Times have changed and people are looking for easier ways to make donations. Gone are the days of mailing in checks. Consider setting up your website so that folks can pay online instead of filling out some form and mailing it in. Now I do agree there are still some people who are not comfortable paying online and still like the traditional method - so do both. There are many tools or options out there for you. Here are a few:

Volusion: I talked about Volusion briefly last week. While it is an e-commerce tool, it does give you the capability to accept donations or round your purchase up for your donation.

PayPal: This is one of the cheapest options out there. It's very easy to sign up for a PayPal account. They also walk you through the steps of setting up your donation button. They then provide the code that you just paste into your website. Their fees are very minimal.

Network for Good: If you are a non-profit organization, you can use this pretty much for free. It costs nothing to set-up your account with them. What is neat about this is although there is a fee, they give you an option to put on the form where the donor can opt to pay the fee that is used to process the card. It's a neat option. www.networkforgood.org/npo

Kimbia: This is a bit more upscale version and a very versatile tool. You set up your account with them and then you can start customizing and building your own forms. So you could set-up a donation form with whatever fields you want. Then because the tool is somewhat of a widget, you can copy and paste the code anywhere - websites and etc. and a person could donate right there. Definitely worth checking out. http://www.kimbia.com/