Fund Projects, Initiatives and Causes With Donations
Use Membee to diversify your organization’s revenue streams with new donation-based revenues targeted to specific programs and initiatives. By utilizing Membee’s Events functionality you can easily create a donation page for your organization’s website complete with payment processing, granular financial reporting, and powerful communication capabilities with previous donors.
Use Membee to diversify your organization’s revenue streams with new donation-based revenues targeted to specific programs and initiatives. By utilizing Membee’s Events functionality you can easily create a donation page for your organization’s website complete with payment processing, granular financial reporting, and powerful communication capabilities with previous donors.
Rather than diverting precious membership revenues to fund specific projects, initiatives, and causes, many organizations are gathering donations instead. Did you know that you can use Membee Events to make it easy for your members and non-members to donate to a favorite cause? Collect donations for all types of funds such as:
- Scholarships or Bursaries
- Building Funds
- Political Action Committees
- Charities your organization wishes to support
- Direct donations to fund your operation
Minimize administrative workload by utilizing any of Membee’s supported payment gateways to process the financial side of the donations.
Set Up Your Donation Event in Membee
In our example, we’re using a “donation” event in Membee to gather funds for three distinct and separate projects. In our example, a “Build the Future” fund, the “Keep the Bees” initiative, and a “Support NewBees” project. We want to make it as easy as possible for the donor (remember this can be a member or non-member) to contribute to 1, 2, or all 3 projects at one time.
Each of the projects is setup as an event item in the “donation” event in Membee.
Since each project is a separate event item, this allows us to:
- Have a detailed description for each project outlining why it is deserves support
- Use a descriptive and compelling image for each project
- Set a suggested donation amount for each project
One of the most common obstacles to donations is not financial but an uncertainty as to what donation amount is “appropriate”. Use Membee’s Suggested Price feature within the event item to suggest an amount to the donor. Note, the donor can override this suggestion if they like.
Set Up Your Website to Accept Donations
Making it as easy as possible for donors to participate is important so many Membee client organizations dedicate a top level menu choice on their website to donations. This is easy to do since Membee automatically generates a unique URL for each event you create.
So, a prominent “Donate” menu choice contains the URL for your donation event.
It is also common to place a “donate now” button in your website’s sidebar so the option to donate is visible on all pages. Once again, the URL behind your “donate now” button is the URL for your Membee donation event.
Whether you add a menu choice, a donate button or both, the donor is redirected to your Membee donation event.
Donors can now donate easily to several (hopefully to all!) of your projects from one page and check out just once using their credit card.
(Click the image to enlarge)
Easily Report All Donations or For a Specific Project
Quickly report contributions to your donation-driven projects using Membee’s built-in Events and Financial reports. You can even apply a specific GL Account to the Event or Item automatically as the contributions are made.
In the example below, we’re gathering and reporting on donations made in January just for the “Keep the Bees” project.
Previous Donors Are The Most Likely Future Donors!
Donors who have previously donated to a particular cause are the most likely to want to donate again. Use Membee’s Integrated Email feature to quickly send off an email request to previous donors for new donations.
Get Them When They Renew!
Use the just announced Additional Items for eBilling feature to give members the option to add a donation to their membership renewal. Check out the Effective Upselling to Members When They Renew post for more details on how easy this is.
This is Great! How do I Get Started?
To see how to set up an event to collect donations Click Here. (Remember to have your Membee username and password ready to access the article).