Frequently Asked Questions

Fundraising is a critical component for most nonprofits in order to fund the work they are doing and provide financial stability for the future. Much of that fundraising can be done online by:

1. Finding donors via SEO or paid advertising

2. Engaging them with email, social media, and website content

3. Using tools like Donately to turn users into donors via forms and fundraising pagesTo get started, look at online tools and digital agencies that focus on fundraising or consider adding a digital fundraising expert to your team.

Peer-to-peer fundraising is when donors raise funds from their peers on your behalf. Tools like donately give you all the specific functionality you need to allow donors to create pages, add details, and share it with their friends and family.

Every organization needs different functionality so there is no single tool that fits everyone's needs. Donately is one solid solution that is simple to use, customizable, yet very affordable. Simple tools like Fundly, iDonate, MobileCause, Fundraise Up, GiveButter, Better World, GiveWP, and Donorbox offer basic functionality but typically lack the core functionality many organizations need to scale. More enterprise tools like Classy, Blackbaud, and Luminate offer a full suite of business tools and complex integrations but are more costly.

Donately is a great fit for organizations that need a simple yet powerful tool for online fundraising. It provides the critical daily functionality for online fundraising and peer-to-peer, while keeping costs low. Plus, Donately's integrations make it a great tool for getting all of your marketing and CRM tools synced up together.

There are a few ways platforms charge for their services: monthly/yearly fees and transaction fees. Every platform has its own combination of those two types of fees and customers need to review both when making their decision. Many tools also claim to be 'free' by asking donors to pay fees but those fees can often be as high as 10%. Long story short, there is no single organization that can claim to be the lowest fees for all organizations, so you'll need to do your homework. Donately's fees are built to scale with organizations and provides a clear, open, and honest pricing structure for everyone.

There are a lot of elements to consider (from driving traffic to online conversions and reporting) when running successful campaigns. We've written a few articles in our blog to help, so start with a few articles like "Online Fundraising: 10 Ideas with Examples + Bonus Tips"

Setting up campaign pages is very simple on Donately. Add details like your campaign goal, title, description, and featured image, and we'll spin up a page that earmarks your giving and gives you reporting on your progress.

Donately has both fundraisers and campaigns. Setting up campaign pages is simple and used to create pages for different specific programs, events, and initiatives. Fundraisers are pages that donors make on your behalf, which is a great way to expand your fundraising through the efforts of people who support your cause.

Donately makes creating online forms as simple as possible. You can choose your fields, form steps, design styles, and much more with the form builder, giving you the power to create the perfect form for your donors.

When it comes to peer-to-peer fundraising, there are a handful of platforms to choose from. Donately offers powerful functionality for peer fundraising similar to expensive alternatives like Classy.

Donately makes it easy to set up recurring giving. By default, recurring giving is included in all forms and campaign pages unless you turn it off. With a team plan, you also have access to advanced settings like start dates, end dates, frequency, and much more.

Our fees are affordable and transparent. Our Startup tier is designed for smaller organizations that want to start raising money online. This tier has no fixed monthly cost with a Donately fee of 4% per donation. Our Team tier is aimed at growing nonprofits who want to improve their overall online giving experience for donors. This tier has two pricing options: $588 per year ($49 per month), with a 2% platform fee, or $69 per month, with a 2% platform fee. The monthly plan has no commitments, and you're able to cancel at any time. Our Enterprise Tier is typically used by organizations raising over $250,000 online each year. You can connect with us so to design a pricing package with a flexible platform fee that meets your needs. The fees above do not include payment processing fees charged by our payments partners, Stripe or PayPal. However, both platforms have no fixed monthly fees, set-up fees, gateway fees, or contracts and also offer discounts for nonprofits.

Yes, you can! When designing your donation form in our Form Builder, you'll have a multitude of options to choose from in asking your donors to pay platform and/or processing fees, including standard rates, custom rates, a flat fee, and a flat percentage.

You can navigate where to edit the donation receipt from your Account Settings in the Donately Dashboard. Scroll to the bottom of your Account Settings to view the blank email template that you can customize with text. You can also update your account logo/image from this section.

In the Donately Dashboard, under the CRM tab, you have the ability to customize and export your donation and donor data. You will find an "export" button in the upper right corner of the dashboard and after filtering the data you want to export, you will click that button. Exporting from Donately will deliver a CSV of the data requested to the email of the admin who requests it from the dashboard via email within 5 minutes after it was requested.

To reset your password as an account user, follow this link
‍To reset your password as a donor, follow this link

Donations can be made from a list of 135+ countries and currencies that are accepted by our payment processeor partner, Stripe.

You do not need to have a Stripe account if you connect to a PayPal account. A connection to Stripe and/or PayPal is necessary in order to process transactions.

Yes, you can only use PayPal if you don't want to create or connect to a Stripe account. You can find out how to set up PayPal to link to Donately in this article here.

Yes and no. Donately is built for organizations and businesses doing consistent online fundraising. That said, lots of individuals are doing their own fundraising for causes and personal needs and Donately is a great tool for that. If you want a simple page that helps you drive traffic to a specific personal need such as medical expenses or a family emergency, then GoFundMe is a great tool. If you want to do consistent fundraising, build forms and pages into your website, and want more customization, then Donately is the way to go.

Yes! You can activate mobile wallet as an acceptable form of payment as long as you have a connected Stripe account

"Yes, we do! When a supporter gives through a Peer-to-Peer fundraising page, the donation can be counted in one of two ways:
1 - If the supporter gives through the Campaign page itself, the donation will be earmarked to that Campaign only.
2 - If the supporter gives through a Peer-to-Peer Fundraisers' page, the donation will be attributed to both the supporter's page and your Campaign."

Not at all! We have many communities, businesses, schools, and individuals who all utilize the Donately platform to fundraise for their cause without having a registered 501c3 status.

Fundraising is a critical component for most nonprofits in order to fund the work they are doing and provide financial stability for the future. Much of that fundraising can be done online by:

1. Finding donors via SEO or paid advertising

2. Engaging them with email, social media, and website content

3. Using tools like Donately to turn users into donors via forms and fundraising pagesTo get started, look at online tools and digital agencies that focus on fundraising or consider adding a digital fundraising expert to your team.