
Accept donations on your site instantly - ajaymehta
https://open.tilt.com/donations
======
sarciszewski
2.9% + $0.30 hardly qualifies as "lowest fees". Interchange Pricing Plus on a
Authorize.net reseller charges 0.10% + $0.30 for comparison.

I'm pretty sure 2.9% + $0.30 is standard.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
That's very standard, yes. It's pretty much what everyone charges, it's so
standard even Authorize.net charges that for merchant payment processing.

The interchange pricing plus fee is just that isn't it, a fee plus the
interchange fee? Comparing a partial fee to a full fee doesn't seem fair, or
I'm missing something.

So yes, 2.9% + 30c is pretty standard. Don't really know of any exception
(apart from native digital currencies. Bitpay does Saas payment processing at
0% fees for example).

~~~
buro9
PayPal: 1.4% + 30p (GBP)

The fees are not standard, they are more than DOUBLE what PayPal charge
registered non-profits.

[https://www.paypal.com/uk/charity/](https://www.paypal.com/uk/charity/)

I run a UK CASC (Community Amateur Sports Club) which is registered as a non-
profit with HMRC and whose articles of association with Companies House
require us to be structured in such a way that we are a non-profit
(obligations to invest all profits in the promotion of sport).

Even as this type of entity we are eligible and receive the PayPal charity
rates.

The donations by Tilt may work for groups that are not actually legal non-
profit entities, but for any group that is a non-profit the fees are
excessively high.

The reality is, our donations and contributions are usually fairly
predictable. So we work to maximise how much we get from that revenue, by
choosing the lowest fees and claiming back Gift Aid (CASCs can do this).

PayPal works really well for us, and with the fees being half what competitors
offer I'm not even looking to change.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I was referring to basic payment processing, where the standard is 2.9% + 30c,
not special rates for non-profits (which are sometimes as low as 0%).

There is no real standard fee for non-profits, it varies between the normal
fee, a discount fee (as you have) or no fee at all.

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emodendroket
Neat. Anything to reduce friction; a lot of people in the nonprofit world
don't seem to grasp the importance of making it easy to donate the way that
for-profits seem to grasp it.

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jcr
On two of the non-profits I've worked on, we had trouble with donation fraud.
At the time, a few years ago, it was a huge problem. Donation fraud happened
to a sizable percentage of non-profits and charity organizations, and it
particularly harmed the small, all-volunteer groups which lacked the
resources/skills to deal with it. Basically, criminals would target charities
with bogus donations as a way to test their stolen credit cards. As you might
imagine with all the charge-backs and uncertainty, this caused a lot of
problems and headaches for the charities.

I'm sure you probably can't give much detail on your risk management and fraud
detection measures, but has the donation fraud problem been more or less
solved?

~~~
untilHellbanned
It's obvious, but fraud has definitely been an issue with all the simple
Bitcoin donation buttons/GUIs that have popped up in the last year or so.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
No it hasn't. Bitcoin is a push system of payment, creditcards are a pull
system of payment. Bitcoin payments use cryptography on a non-proprietary
ledger secured by proof of work of hundreds of millions of dollars of
computing power (meaning once the payment is done, there is no central party
to reverse it like say Paypal could reverse payments on their proprietary
Paypal ledger, and unless you have a computer from the 22nd century, you won't
be able to reverse the transaction).

In other words, it's an entirely different system of payments. No clue what
type of fraud you're referring to, but the fraud explained in the post you
replied to does not apply to bitcoin.

If due to lack of punctuation you mean something different, i.e. that CC fraud
is so rampant that everyone is switching to bitcoin donations and that they've
been popping up everywhere because of that, I doubt that that's been the key
driving factor, although it surely is part of the equation.

In any case I don't really know what you meant to say :-/

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alainmeier
Cool idea! I think there are a few things on the usability side that you could
do to make it even better:

* Lock the body when you open the modal by setting overflow: hidden. That will prevent people from scrolling around accidentally while filling out the form.

* This is related to the first point, but you should probably position: fixed the modal

* Make the label for the monthly donation clickable - people shouldn't have to find the little check box!

* Lighten the .iframe-subheader-text as it can be pretty low contrast when the background is white

* Add some subtle animations to the open and closing of the modal. It feels very jarring right now.

~~~
maxmcd
Lock the body of a site by default? I can see when I'm scrolling.

Position fixed? What about when the modal content is longer than than the
scroll area?

There are animations for me on mobile. :)

~~~
alainmeier
If you make the black overlay container position fixed and the window itself
normal, you can have the modal scroll within the context of the black overlay.
Facebook uses this same method and it's significantly nicer!

~~~
maxmcd
Ah, of course, understood.

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berelig
I assume "Make this a monthly donation" can be cancelled via a link that you
send to the donator's email? Maybe that should be mentioned to assure the user
they can easily cancel monthly payments.

~~~
mlebel
Yep! There's a link at the bottom of every email receipt for recurring billing
donations to cancel the recurring charge.

I totally agree that adding some text to the effect of "you may cancel at any
time" would be perfect -- we'll get that in there!

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jessaustin
I've handled the fundraising site for an alumni organization for several
years. One thing we find essential is displaying "progress" by plugging into
our templates the amount raised so far by each different campaign. On the API
page [https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec/#get-
campaig...](https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec/#get-campaign)
this appears to be a simple ajax call. And you don't have to touch paypal.
Well done!

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stevesearer
One of the non-profits I work with receives a significant portion of donations
via ACH so something like this would not be considered regardless of how
simple it is to use or how elegant the design may be.

Are there any plans to accept donations via ACH in the future?

~~~
jjb123
Yes, there are - though credit card giving is the preferred online giving
method (by far), PayPal, ACH, and bitcoin will be implemented (probably in
that order) soon.

Tilt.com is still where we spend about 90% of our resources, but our suite of
enterprise tools for professional crowdfunding and fundraising (open.tilt.com)
has been a big area of growth since we started launching the tools this year
-- and additional payment methods have been a frequent request on all products
there.

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mahouse
The central part of that service is a modal dialog... which does not look very
good: [https://i.imgur.com/iaxmLis.png](https://i.imgur.com/iaxmLis.png)

(I have scrolled a bit with my mouse wheel to reach that state)

~~~
jjb123
Unlike most modals, you can customize the look and feel to your heart's
content. You can also implement as an iframe to give you further control over
the user experience (including adding other info fields) for donors.

~~~
mahouse
A better job should have been done for the modal that is trying to sell you
the product itself, I guess.

~~~
stronglikedan
The modal design is purely subjective. I think they did a fine job. It's great
for the purpose, because it's uncluttered, has clear prompts, and has useful
placeholders. IMHO, anything else would just be fluff that gets in the way of
the UX.

~~~
mahouse
Do you think the secondary scrollbar (which is not even vertically centered),
the Times New Roman and the cut off text is fine?

~~~
stronglikedan
I missed those the first time around, because my gaze was focused on the form
and it's container. You're right, that should be addressed. I would imagine
addressing the scroll bar issue would resolve the cut off text as well. It
looks like something that wasn't a priority for roll-out, because it doesn't
really affect UX so much, but I do think it's something that needs to be fixed
in the next release.

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goeric
Congrats, Tilt team! This is absolutely needed. The previous product I worked
on was used by a lot of non-profits for crowdfunding and it just shows how
necessary something like this is.

~~~
knighthacker
Thank you very much. The need is certainly there, and we are happy to address
it.

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madoublet
Cool idea, but it would be nice if it automated Paypal, Amazon, Bitcoin and/or
Google as well. I think that asking for a Credit Card can be a barrier to
getting donations.

~~~
jjb123
Paypal will be added soon, but adding PayPal (and Amazon + other payment
options) limits the ability for us to enable recurring donations for the
org/cause/charity, which has become a significant capital raise mechanism for
non profits in the last few years. That checkbox is one of the most well
received features that is right out of the box.

~~~
walden42
I thought paypal does recurring donations? Anyhow, for bitcoin, look into
Coinbase's recurring payment options. I don't think it should be a problem.

~~~
emodendroket
I'd guess that for all but a very small subset of nonprofits there is pretty
much zero interest in Bitcoin because pretty much no one would like to donate
to them using it.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
There's actually been loads of both small and prominent organisations
accepting bitcoin. Save the Children, American Red Cross, EFF, Greenpeace, Hal
Finney's ALS fund, Mozilla, Wikipedia etc etc.

If you look at the Humble Bundle for example, Linux users consistently
outdonate windows users in voluntary transactions every single time. Bitcoin
is a bit like that, too, both because of the type of crowd and because people
are eager to spend and use bitcoin and to support charitable organisations
that participate in the bitcoin ecosystem.

Lastly, it's an interesting angle because payment processing costs 0% for
charities, yet the payout is in dollars, euros or a bunch of other currencies
including bitcoin (just like for any other business btw if you use Bitpay)

It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the
moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as
there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.

~~~
emodendroket
> It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the
> moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as
> there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.

But that's not really the question; the question is if there are enough to
justify the development effort and, especially, to justify prioritizing that
over other options like PayPal.

~~~
jafaku
The development effort of integrating Bitcoin is nearly zero with payment
processors like Bitpay/Coinbase.

~~~
emodendroket
Maybe so, but near-zero is not zero, especially when you have to offer support
for a commercial product.

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cdcarter
Monthly donations are a great feature, but one of the things we see often (I'm
a non-profit development (that's our neologism for fundraising) manager) is
the desire to have payment installations. That is, not necessarily a standard
monthly donation, but $1k over ten payments (monthly and then ending) or $1k
over four payments (quarterly and then ending). Is support for pledges like
these in the works?

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wolfgke
Claim on this website: "Accept donations on your site instantly, from all
cards and countries".

Truth is: in Germany the prefered way for paying on the internet is
Lastschrift (direct debit). Paying with credit card is not very popular and
credit cards aren't that common in Germany.

To put it harshly in other words: the statement on the website above is simply
fraudulent. I can't pay with my EC card by direct debit.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It is accurate that you can pay from all cards and countries if you take their
meaning to be logoed cards (Mastercard, Visa, Discover, American Express,
etc). Nearly all debit cards in the US support one of those standard payment
systems, so you can use them everywhere regardless of whether a specific store
supports debit cards. It sounds like Lastschrift isn't logoed with one of
those, so a store can only support Lastschrift if they _specifically_ support
Lastschrift by connecting with one of those payment processors. As such, it
isn't supported by most US or worldwide websites unless those sites have taken
specific steps to support it. Several countries have setups like that where
there is a specific proprietary payment system that is only supported within
their country and thus not supported in most websites outside of their
country. We can hardly fault them for that.

------
known
Two-step authentication must for credit cards in India

[http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/twostep-
authentica...](http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/twostep-
authentication-must-for-credit-cards-rbi/article6345330.ece)

------
arbuge
What exactly is the benefit of this vs. PayPal's Donate Now button?

It may be more than 2 lines of code but I don't really care anyway since I'm
just cutting & pasting it from PayPal's site...

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secure
Does this work outside the US?

~~~
pax
you can only collect money with an US or Canada bank account but you can
donate/send money with any bank card

> Currently, if you want to collect funds from a tilt, you need to have a
> valid US or Canadian bank account.

------
untilHellbanned
wet blanket alert: a modal form with credit card inputs has been done many
times before. What is instant or new about this? Kudos for yet another
checkout, payment button code snippet?

~~~
jjb123
Hi there. Thanks for the comment, and it's a valid question if you've never
tried to implement current options for donations -- I'd be happy to address
each example you're talking about when you say "what's new about this" (eg,
stripe checkout, great for payments checkout - but isn't copy and paste,
requires server code, isn't customizable, doesn't enable recurring donations,
doesn't provide automated tax-deductible receipts, doesn't allow for adding
additional fields for addl info collection...).

It turns out that accepting payments vs accepting donations for a cause,
charity, political campaign, personal project, etc actually ends up having a
different set of needs. And with online giving growing at the rate we see it
to growing, a simple / powerful way for any site to collect donations,
optimized for conversion on any device, with two lines of code is something we
think our customers will find useful.

~~~
untilHellbanned
hi jjb123, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes I can see how payments vs.
donations are different. I didn't mean to say what you did isn't useful. I'm a
developer too so I can appreciate what it took to make your thing a reality. I
guess I'm just saying you don't make the difference clear to the user. The
only difference I see with Stripe's is Tilt's monthly donation checkbox. I
guess investigating further, you differentiate with Stripe in making your
modal for the non-developer. Still a layperson will have to inject two lines
of code, but then they don't have to do all the customization by writing more
code and can instead use Tilt's GUI.

TL;DR; It would be good to make it more clear to the end user what's new about
this. Perhaps a better title for this HN post is "Accept donations on your
site without writing code". The word "instantly" obviously never can be true
and seems like overhype.

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ams6110
WePay.com used to have a Donate button that as I recall was pretty much
exactly this. They dropped that, along with their invoicing services, a little
over a year ago. Any reasons you think this will get better traction?

