Costs of Fund Raising Online are Dropping

To the Editor:

The Chronicle’s recent article on online holiday fund raising, “Making Sure That the Clicks Stick” (January 27), suggests that the cost of obtaining and processing online donations is a potential drawback, since many non-profits are not sure just how cost-effective online donations are. The success that the Make-A-Wish Foundation has had with its new giving page shows that such fund raising can be very cost-effective.

After extensive research and planning, our new giving page was launched on December 2. Our goal was to create a user-friendly page while maintaining the look and feel of the rest of our site. We based the contents of the form on successful direct-marketing appeals, and the service provider we selected, CharityWeb, allowed us to customize the page to meet our specifications. We were not sure what to expect but were very pleasantly surprised to have received roughly $90,000 in online holiday donations — without expending any resources on promoting the new site.

One reason for such good results is the lowering of fees charged by service providers. As recently as 1998, organizations could expect to pay $15,000 to set up a credit-card-processing service similar to the one we implemented. As technology has improved and more competition has moved into the marketplace, the fees have come down dramatically. Although some providers still charge more than others for virtually the same services, this is one area where organizations can save money if they do their research.

The success of our donation page is saving us money in other areas. We are pushing Web-site donations because we have found that donors find it more efficient to make contributions online than to send checks through the mail. And the processing system established by CharityWeb for online donations is more cost-effective than the mechanism used to handle traditional contributions.

Although organizations like ours will need more time and experience to determine just how cost-effective online donations are, this was an encouraging and exciting holiday season for many non-profits as we collectively witnessed the power of the Internet to create a new frontier in fund raising.

Paula Van Ness
President
Make-A-Wish Foundation
Phoenix