Tech for Good: Boosting Nonprofit Success With Digital Payments and Subscription Models

When it comes to payments, no one gets a hall pass. Not even a nonprofit gets one. In fact, the world of charitable giving offers a microcosm of the challenges and opportunities for platforms seeking to bring payments fully into the digital age.

“At the end of the day,” Sara Craven, general manager of Visa’s solutions Authorize.net  and Verifi told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in the latest PYMNTS SMBTV installment. “The consumer experience has to be flawless. There is no room for error.”

Even charities aren’t exempt. They are, after all, big businesses on their own, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent data putting nonprofits at 10.2% of all employment in the U.S. And just like the for-profit businesses that they transact with, consumers don’t usually care where the payment is being processed, as long as things are secure and predictable — and everyone can see, right alongside the digital receipt of their transaction, including who they’ve purchased from, when and exactly what they are getting.

As Craven noted in a conversation on where tech is taking us on PYMNTS SMB TV program, payments, in general, need to be simple. The rise of mobile wallets suggests that data pop up instantly, and a consumer can initiate a charge, all with a few clicks. Get it wrong, and consumers can vote with their feet.

That’s especially true, said Ronald Pruitt, the president and founder of 4aGoodCause, when it comes to charitable giving. As an online donation platform, 4aGoodCause helps nonprofits by providing the software that enables monthly giving via the subscription model. Donors can automatically give each month to the charity of their choice.

But, “Subscriptions are always a risk,” he told Webster. A donor can choose to cancel their subscription at any time. Sometimes a payment interruption comes when a card expires.

The continuum of enrollment and keeping donors enrolled (and donating) is critical, as most of the charities that work with 4aGoodCause are small nonprofits and are led by their founders or have fewer than 10 employees. They don’t have the resources to handle the complexities of payments, so they’ve partnered with Pruitt’s platform, gaining enterprise-level tools to help keep their nonprofits thriving.

Embedded Finance for Donors

4aGoodCause, for its part, has worked with Authorize.net to outsource the routing of transaction data and embed flexible payment options for nonprofits to allow donors to pay with their preferred method. 4aGoodCause leverages Authorize.net’s Advanced Fraud Detection Suite to help identify and prevent potentially fraudulent transactions.

The information collected and recorded by 4aGoodCause includes donor-level data, spanning the payment and card-level insight, that increases the lifetime value of the nonprofit relationship underpinned by the platform. The donor gets a financial record that lets them help manage their recurring subscriptions.

“We have a full subscription dashboard for the nonprofits,” Pruitt said, “where they can see the lifetime value of the donor.”

Keeping Donor Momentum

Mobile wallets, Pruitt said, have reached an inflection point, where more of 4aGoodCause’s eCommerce came from those payment options than via consumers inputting their details manually.

“I’m telling our nonprofits,” he said, “that they’ve got to look at their donation forms and make sure they are taking mobile wallets.” He noted that the joint efforts with Authorize.net’s eCheck, and Account Updater allow the transaction and checkout processes to be more forgiving, help boost conversion rates across the platform, and help to lift nonprofits’ donation volumes. The account updater settings also alert the nonprofit to reach out — before transactions fail.

“The donor [may not have intended] that payment problem,” he said, “so it’s your job to hold their hand and pull them back on track. That keeps the giving going.”

With embedded payments and better security in the mix, said Pruitt and Craven, there’s the opportunity to, as they put it, know your customer — to cater to their payment preferences, to know that they are who they say they are, and to keep the recurring subscription model robust. There’s also the opportunity to “nudge” subscribers to participate in one-time fundraising events or consider an extra one-time gift.

Looking ahead into 2025, Craven noted that AI will be a mainstay as new functionalities and features will lead to what she termed “more intuitive payments,” including voice-activated donations.

“Data and analytics are going to become even more of a key focus … [for the payments industry],” she said.