New features to make recurring monthly donations even easier

Many of our good causes are having success building campaigns around monthly giving. We have some new features available to them that can make the accepting and managing of recurring monthly donations easier and more donor-friendly.

These new features are available to any of our clients using Authorize.net as their payment gateway. We have enhanced our integration with the Automated Recurring Billing™ (ARB) service available from Authorize.net that many of our good causes use to set up and manage automatic recurring donations. The ARB service is great because nonprofits don't have to store credit card information to process recurring payments. Our new features make using this service even easier.

New recurring donation features include...

• Automated set up of recurring billing subscriptions from our donation forms. Our system will automatically set up the donor for recurring monthly donations - configuring the billing duration, interval and start date. No need to convert a single transaction to recurring. No human interaction needed. 
• More customization of the email thank you messages for each recurring transaction. The email messages that Authorize.net sends out for recurring transactions are not as customized and donor-friendly as we have liked so we can now handle the email confirmations. Authorize.net can now alert our system for each recurring transaction. We can then fire off a customized email thank you from the nonprofit to the donor in lieu of what Authorize.net might send. 
• Better email alerts for our clients. Our system can now send detailed transaction alerts to our clients for the recurring transactions, both the successful ones and the ones that fail. If your donor's card has expired you'll be alerted via email so you can take action to update their recurring donation profile.    
• One-stop shop donation reporting. With our tighter integration with Authorize.net, we can now record all the recurring donations in our database. This gives our clients one place to download all their transactions, their 4aGoodCause reporting web site.   

We'll be installing these new features (free of charge) for all our clients that are using the ARB service from Authorize.net. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Making your donations more social - an easy way for donors to share your web site after a donation

I wanted to share a new feature of our online donation pages we're making standard for our clients. The purpose of this new feature is to make it easy for an online donor to spread the word about the good work our clients are doing. Someone that has just completed an online donation has just demonstrated their belief and support in your cause. To help boost traffic on your web site and to help you connect to new donors, ask this person to share your web site on Facebook, Twitter and other social web sites where they congregate with family and friends. Ask the donor to introduce your nonprofit to their social network. To make that easy, we're adding the AddtoAny social bookmarketing tool to our donation receipt pages.

I'll demonstrate how this can work in the below video. 

I also like the sharing tool AddThis, and use it on my blog and web site, but AddtoAny makes more sense to use on our donation confirmation page because it allows us to customize the url that is shared. We can then set the nonprofit's home page as the url to share instead of the donation confirmation page, which is not a good entry point.

If you'd like to add this feature to your donation page, get in touch with us at support@4agoodcause.com.

Updated (7/14/2011) - AddThis now has some new features that make it easy to custom set the url being shared. Now we're also using this tool on pages if the client has an AddThis account, because of the nice statistics reporting it offers.

4aGoodCause is now on Facebook

4aGoodCause is now on Facebook. Connect and become a fan at http://www.facebook.com/pages/4aGoodCause/156939384353831.

We'd love to hear from our clients. Feel free to write on our wall, send us feedback on how we are doing or post a link to your Facebook page. Thanks.

Average online donation size increases 25% in 2010 to $142 for 4aGoodCause charities

After crunching some numbers earlier this week, I'm happy to report a fantastic 2010 for the nonprofits using 4aGoodCause. Despite a national trend in recent years  reported by some of our competitors, of declining average online donation size (around $80), our clients continued to maintain a high per-donation-average of $142 in 2010, up 25% from 2009. Overall online donations through 4aGoodCause were up 66% from 2009. Our $142 average only reflects online donations and does not include other methods our clients use for fundraising such as online event sales or products sales, which can have even higher averages sale amounts.

To our family of good causes - keep up the good work!