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Ask HN: How to hold an online fundraiser?

3 points by sounddust ↗ HN
I'd like to hold an online fundraiser in which I provide gift incentives of no cash value (virtual goods, extra features, etc) on my site in exchange for a user's donation to a non-profit organization.

I initially planned to just accept payments/subscriptions directly on my site through my existing PayPal infrastructure, and donate all of it to the organization at the end of the fundraising period. But I learned that attempting to do so would immediately cause PayPal to freeze the account and demand paperwork that we are authorized to accept payments on behalf of a 501C (which we aren't).

Instead, I'm thinking that it would be nice if there were certain non-profit organizations (or an authorized third-party site that collects money on their behalf) in which I redirect a user to the donation URL, and the site sends me a notification when the user has successfully donated (via a POST to a URL of my choice), allowing me to confirm and process the reward. (Similar to how PayPal works, but with the non-profit directly handling the processing).

So my question is: Does anything like this exist? If not, any ideas for getting something like this started?

5 comments

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patio11
A buddy of mine is giving out free copies of his software at the moment to anyone who gives money to Haiti. He is doing it on the honor system. I think that is likely to be sufficient, depending on who your customer is.

Failing that, see the Paypal documentation about Return URLs. The one set up with the button has priority over the global one specified per Paypal account. Thus, if you know the email address associated with e.g. the Red Cross' Paypal account, you can craft Paypal URLs which cause people to go to Paypal, send money directly to the Red Cross, and then come back to a page under your control. This is only minimally secure but, again, what are you worried about security for here anyhow.

sounddust
I would gladly give out the rewards on the honor system, but the volume of incoming requests would be too much to process manually; it has to be an automated process.

Interesting point about the Paypal return URL. I'm concerned that this is a less-than-optimal solution, but something I could look into if I can't find something more solid.

patio11
it has to be an automated process.

You and I would get along very well. :)

I just donated money to (+): Red Cross [ ] Catholic Charities [ ] UNICEF [ ] Other [ ]

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sounddust
I see what you're saying, but I think that if you scale this to a large number of users (especially if the free "thing" is publicly visible), then you're going to have a lot of people abusing it and/or making a mockery of it. After all, this is the internet, and nearly every community has a subsection of immature/abusive people.

To really make it special and encourage people to give, there has to be an element of rarity (or real value).

I'm certain that the above approach is valid and would raise money, but I don't think it's going to maximize the amount of money collected for the organization. I'd estimate that a complete solution could bring in at least two times as many donations, and maximizing donations is the goal here (otherwise I could just do something simple like putting a banner on the front page).

Regarding the honor system and scalability: I don't think that there would be much abuse if people had to contact me personally to say that they donated money, but people would be less honest in clicking a button (I imagine lots of people would click it because they planned to give in the future and then forget to do so, for example).

Or maybe I'm just entirely lacking faith in the kindness of others and should be more trusting :)

edwardmccaughan
coincidently, I've just hit a similar problem and looking for a solution (mine is a swear jar webapp which automagicly donates to charity when you press it)

so far things I'm thinking:

1-use the paypal api to directly donate from the user's paypal account into a charities paypal account. (easy, but requires the charity to accept paypal)

2-there are a few sites with apis --http://www.globalgiving.org/api-contest/ looks like you can give the api a charity id and some credit card details and it'll handle the donation --justgiving.com and missionfish.com have private/beta api's that were let loose at charityhack.org, but aren't publicly availible yet

anyone seen anything else similar or better?