Online Payment Processing for Nonprofits

Want your nonprofit to be able to accept online donations and payments? We’ve got you covered.

Online payment services let users pay and accept money for products, services, and donations. To accept online payments safely, you’ll need a system that can transmit the transaction-related details of your customers or donors in a secure and encrypted way. Otherwise, you risk leaking their banking or credit card information.

There are many online payment processing systems available -- like Stripe, PayPal, and Facebook Fundraising -- but how do you know which one will work best for your organization?

You should consider a few criteria:

  1. Is this system secure?
  2. What are the processing fees?
  3. What is the payout time? (i.e. the time it takes from someone submitting a donation online to the money being available in your bank account)
  4. How well does this system integrate with the rest of the tools / systems you use?

Security & PCI Compliance

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council is a council of industry experts and stakeholders that sets standards to protect payment account data security. Most of the major payment processing systems implement the PCI standards and help organizations remain compliant.

MonkeyPod integrates with Stripe, one of the world’s leading payment processors, to process online payments for clients. Stripe is fully PCI compliant.

Processing Fees

It is tempting to compare processing fees and immediately jump at the cheapest option. But there are other important costs to consider. Facebook Fundraising, for example, covers processing fees for nonprofits. But they don’t share information about your donors unless those donors opt-in to receive emails from your organization. That means potentially hundreds or thousands of donors that you have no way of contacting in the future.

Stripe’s processing fees are about average for the industry -- 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction -- and the same as PayPal. And with MonkeyPod, your donors can opt to cover those fees, which the majority do when asked. Most importantly, MonkeyPod collects important information about your donors so you can stay in contact. Smart nonprofits understand the importance of building trust and relationships with donors in order to increase their gift size and frequency.

Payout Time

Payout time refers to the amount of time from when someone makes a donation on your fundraising page to when that money is available in your bank account. Payout times shouldn’t be long. After all, it’s your money!

Stripe’s payout times are some of the fastest in the industry. Payouts are made daily, on a 2 day delay. That means if someone donates to your organization on Monday, those funds are in your bank account by Wednesday. PayPal and other payment processors have comparable payout times. Facebook Fundraising, though, takes 2-6 weeks for payouts, meaning you must wait and track that information over a much longer period. For nonprofits that operate on thin margins or are susceptible to emergencies like Covid, managing cash flow is critical. MonkeyPod’s integration with Stripe allows you to get access to your donations quickly and easily.

Integration With Other Tools / Systems

Online payments create information across multiple systems in your organization. An online donation may be received through your fundraising pages. But then it needs to be reflected in your CRM, so that your development team knows who donated and when. That donation also needs to be accounted for in your books for accounting and management purposes.

Using tools like Facebook Fundraising can be tempting for visibility. But it doesn’t integrate easily with other systems, forcing you to spend time reconciling inconsistent and out of date information. Similarly, PayPal, which can more easily integrate with other systems, requires the purchase of a database that supports it out-of-the-box. Or you’ll need to hire a software developer to build and maintain all of that infrastructure for you.

MonkeyPod fixes that problem for you. MonkeyPod uses Stripe to process and automatically transfer online payments to / from your bank account. And because MonkeyPod is a holistic, fully-integrated system, everything stays in sync, with no duplicate data entry. Your online payments are automatically recorded in your books and CRM. You know who donated, who else in your database is connected to the donor and how, whether someone else played a role in the solicitation, and much, much more.