Online Fundraising  

Your web and e-mail traffic are more opportunities to ask for funding for your project as well as donations for your overall program.

The web gives you a way to reach outside of your immediate target community to locate supporters for your mission and your project, but people can't donate if you don't ask them and give them an easy way to do it. Once you commit to using the web, be sure to include a secure and easy way to allow donors to contribute to the project.

It's not particularly difficult to get yourself set up to take donations via the web, but you have some choices to make at the outset. The first question to ask yourself is whether you are going to have a merchant account set up in your name to accept credit card donations. If you take donations into that account, you'll be given advice by your bank on the security issues involved. These include having a security certificate so that the transaction is encrypted and making sure that any credit card information that you write, print or email is also encrypted.

If you don't have or plan to have a credit card merchant account, you can use such tools as paypal, network solution's Donate Now function or other donation site to collect it for you. You'll set up a customized donation page on their site that you link to from a button on every page of your web site. If you decide to take credit cards directly.

As Bineshi points out in the clip, you'll need to repeatedly promote your donation capability to drive traffic to your site.

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Bineshi Albert: the highs and lows of online fundraising