Why Pay a Fee to Fundraise Online?

On our site it’s free to start your fundraiser and we only charge the small fee of 4% on the total funds raised. This is automatically deducted through your chosen payment service provider (PayPal or Stripe) as each donation comes in so you can be confident that the money in your account is all yours – there are no bills to worry about.

 

Sometimes we get asked the excellent question of why one should pay this fee when they can get donors to donate directly.

 

This is a question that we love to elaborate on so we put together this blog post on why we our fee is more than worth it:

 

 

Optimized Fundraising Pages

 

Our fundraising pages are engineered and optimized to encourage more donations from more people. By ‘optimized’ we mean that we’ve tested our fundraising pages with different elements such as changing colors, button sizes, text, etc to see exactly what generates more donations. And although some of these changes may seem minor and even trivial, they can have a dramatic effect on whether someone chooses to donate or not.

 

For example, when we changed the wording ‘Back This Project’ with the sub-heading of  ‘and learn more about the rewards’ on donation buttons to  ‘Donate Now’ with the sub-heading of ‘Just $1 Minimum Donation’. This immediately led to an average of 6% more donations. That’s you raising 6% more just because of the wording on our pages.

 

Great Fundraising Features

 

We have a ton of features that help you spread the word, engage with donors and manage your campaign.

 

For example, your campaign is easily shareable via the prominent share buttons on your page and through your personal dashboard. Furthermore, once a donation is made donors will see a pop-up encouraging them to be even more awesome and share your page on social networks or via email. The cumulative effect of this can be huge.

 

Donors also have the opportunity to subscribe to emails related to your campaign, they can embed a widget of your fundraiser into their own website or blog, they get a mention on the ‘Progress’ tab if they share your campaign, and more. All of this ensures that your supporters remain engaged, involved and help to further build your network of donors.

 

In terms of managing your campaign, you can recruit the help of anyone you wish to be part of your campaign team, with each having their own role to do. You can  download all the details of those that have donated, interact with donors in your comments section and provide updates. If that isn’t enough to get you excited, we even have the option for you to send out automated thank you emails that you can tailor yourself. Or what about a personal message of thanks when they donate? All these tools and more are there to help make your campaign a real interactive, social event.

The prominent fundraising timer is also a great feature. Timed campaigns create urgency amongst donors and they’re able to see the immediate impact they’ve made as your fundraising thermometer increases. On the other hand, if you’d like to collect donations on an ongoing basis without a timer you can enable that too.

 

That touches on just a handful of our features and in our successful fundraiser section you can see how others have taken advantage of this to meet or exceed their goals!

 

 

The Ability to Go Viral

 

Thanks to social networks, it’s possible for remarkable causes to quickly spread across the Internet and receive a ton of attention and donations from complete strangers. The crowdfunding structure of our website allows people to discover worthy causes and spread the word unlike a closed-ended fundraising website (although you still to have the option to run a private campaign). Furthermore, rest-assured that if your campaign does go viral we can handle the traffic and be our personal fundraising coaches will be there to help you manage any media interest.

 

And unlike a PayPal donate button that few people would share, our meticulously crafted fundraising pages make it easy for others to spread the word – our statistical tests prove that too.

 

 

A little more on our fee

 

Our website fee is 4% and PayPal and Stripe charge an average of 2.9% + 0.30 cents for US fundraisers (lower if you have a non-profit account or already receive a high volume of payments into your account). That brings our total fee to a competitive 6.9%.

 

It’s worth noting that our fee is lower than almost all of our competitors. Our largest competitor charges a staggering 12% (that’s excluding wire transfer fees) if you don’t meet your fundraising target. The average fundraising website fee is 7.9%. If you want to compare us to other crowdfunding sites click on this link and go to the sub-heading ‘what makes GoGetFunding different?’

 

The revenue we generate helps us host and maintain our website, invest in developing better fundraising features, provide (great!) customer support and make a profit.

 

I hope that helps to explain our charges but don’t just take our word for it, we’re regularly told by fundraisers that our fee was more than worth it. Here are a few recent reviews that really make us smile:

 

Carmen Roth – Raised $6,654 for a handicap accessible vehicle

 

 

Angella – Raised $10,778 for tuition fees

 

 

G. Paul – Raised $631 for lawyer fees

 

 

Jasmine Long – Raised $7,500 for IVF medical treatment

 

 

Gurpreet Sharma – Raised $2,555 for business costs 

 

 

Laura Arlington – Raised $1,400 for a new book launch    

 

 

Suzanne Finn – Raised $1,164 for a volunteer trip

 

 

Ready to raise more money from more people online? Start your fundraiser now!

 

Visit GoGetFunding & Start Your Own Campaign >