Testing Payment Forms

Stripe

Stripe offers a donate card (see below) or a donate button option which directs to their website. They also offer a form that can be embedded in a website. To get the embedded form, we would have to write some code using Stripe's Elements and Checkout Sessions API. We can ask Townsquare if this is something they can help us with, but it will involve them accessing our Stripe account.

The donate card/button allows people to make a one-time donation. We can set up a monthly donation card or button, but donors will only be able to donate a set amount, they won't be able to choose their own amount to give, so it is quite restrictive. It looks like we previously used Stripe for the GiveWell campaign, and donors had the option to give $10, $25, $50, $75, or $100 a month. The embedded form might give us more flexibility with this, but it will probably have to be written into the code.

There are no monthly or set-up fees with Stripe, we just pay processing fees when we receive a donation. Domestic cards have a fee of 2.9% (or 2.2% if we are receiving the nonprofit discount) as well as a fixed fee of $0.30 per donation. An additional fee of 0.5% is added for manually entered cards. Instant bank payments have a fee of 2.6% as well as a fixed fee of $0.30 per donation, Klarna payments have a fee of 5.99% as well as a fixed fee of $0.30 per donation, and ACH direct debits have a fee of 0.8% with a $5 cap.

With what we have received through Zeffy since we started using it, we have saved $2,429.94 if we apply Stripe's (nonprofit) fee structure for domestic cards (including the 0.5% for manually entered cards since this is the method that most of our donors use).

Stripe allows a payment link to be sent via text so donors can make payments securely through their phone.