Cool Tool Alert: Kimbia

In an earlier post, I mentioned using Kimbia for your donations and fundraising, here's why:

It's versatile and you can plug it in anywhere!

Kimbia for lack of a better word is a mobile widget. You log into your Kimbia account and create campaigns and forms. You are able to customize and create as many fields as you need for your forms. Kimbia can also be styled using CSS so you can really give it the look and feel it needs to match your website. Once it's created you are given the code you need to paste into your website. The super cool feature about this code is that you can paste it anywhere. Think about networking websites or even personal websites. You can allow others to paste this code, let's say in their personal website and people who are visiting could make donations. A way to market this could be "show your support for our organization by adding this widget to your website." Really the options are endless. Also, another brillient thing is that if no funds are exchanged, there is no fee to use it. So if you just need to create an RSVP for a party, you can create a form in Kimbia and send it out to folks. And since there is no money collected, there's no charge to use it! Kimbia keeps track of the form results as well.

Kimbia is NOT an e-commerce tool per say. It doesn't have a shopping cart or shipping. However, I was trying to think of creative ways to use it. You could use it to pay for memberships since there is no shipping involved. So I would imagine that if you had an item that just had a flat rate, you could find a way to use this.

Again, a tool worth checking out.

Here are the bullet points:

• No start-up or set-up charge
• If you use the tool and no funds are exchanged, it is completely FREE.
• Kimbia charges only 5% which is the processing. Very reasonable seeing all the great stuff you get with this tool.
• This is not an e-commerce tool. I only wish!

While you may think this is a more expensive option, then lets say PayPal, well you are right. But this is more than just a payment processing tool. It's a fundraising tool - processing payments is just part of it. So if you are a heavy fundraising based organization, this tool really is for you. Also, consider that PayPal doesn't give you a lot of options for collecting information or payment, but Kimbia does. Kimbia allows you to create whatever fields you want and as many as you want. You've heard the old saying "You get what you pay for".

I found this point on their FAQ:

Does Kimbia provide me with other capabilities beyond creating online donation forms?
Yes we do. The same functionality that enables you to easily create customized donation forms also enables you create registration forms for any kind of event (e.g., races, golf tournaments, galas, etc.) Race operators and organizers have found our forms especially useful because they can accept and manage registrations for large races directly on their own websites, versus re-directing registration over to a third-party site. Additionally, the forms that Kimbia enables you to create and place throughout the Web can be used as distributed content channels for your organization. Beyond providing an immediate transaction opportunity, your donation forms can include videos, surveys, message boards, petitions or other content that you want to communicate to constituents. Providing such content helps build and maintain interest in your organization or associated causes and increase donor engagement.

Check out their FAQ for more details.