You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2011.
Here’s a tip when linking to your organization on The Seattle Foundation’s website:
As you get the word out to your supporters about GiveBIG, we definitely encourage you to use your organization’s direct URL in donor letters, emails, Facebook posts, etc. This will help drive your fans and supporters to your organization’s specific donation page on GiveBIG day, June 23. You can find your URL by searching for your organization on www.seattlefoundation.org, and when on your nonprofit profile page, looking in the address bar. Anything that is after the “aspx” is not necessary for your supporters to find your page, and you can simplify your URL by deleting anything after that. So, your “clean” URL will look something like this: http://www.seattlefoundation.org/npos/Pages/YOURORGANIZATION.aspx. And if your organization’s name is “Save the Planet,” then your “clean” URL will look like this: http://www.seattlefoundation.org/npos/Pages/SavethePlanet.aspx.
Several questions have come up recently—from both nonprofits and fundholders alike—wanting to know if gifts from donor advised funds at The Seattle Foundation are counted toward the amount eligible for stretch dollars on GiveBIG Day, June 23. And unfortunately, the answer is no. Our donors/fundholders made a gift to The Seattle Foundation to establish their funds and they received an immediate tax deduction for their charitable contribution to us. Grants that are recommended by our fundholders from their funds still go through a review and approval process. Given the nature of GiveBIG, we can’t maintain this level of review and approval for the influx of donations we’re expecting will come in through our website. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t encourage your supporters who are also fundholders at The Seattle Foundation to make a donation to you through our website on June 23 via credit card. And, of course, we will encourage our fundholders to make credit card donations through our website that day. We have shared information with our fundholders about GiveBIG and have explained to them that gifts made from their funds on that day will not be eligible for the stretch dollars. But if you receive any questions on this topic, please let them know that they can contact us directly and we’d be happy to help them.
Welcome to our GiveBIG blog for nonprofits. We hope that you will find this to be a useful tool in sharing ideas with us and your peers, gaining new information to maximize giving to your organization on June 23, and getting excited about the big day! Also if you haven’t already, please “Like” us on Facebook and RSVP for the GiveBIG event to receive reminders and updates.
Our webinar for nonprofits was on Tuesday, April 26, and we got a ton of great questions from participants. Thanks so much for your participation. If you haven’t gotten a chance to see the webinar yet, it’s available in its entirety on the GiveBIG Nonprofit Resources page. You can also download just the slides from the presentation.
We’ve also posted on our website responses to all the questions asked during the webinar, so be sure to check those out. But for this first blog post, we wanted to really focus on two major themes that people had the most questions about during the webinar.
1. What is the deal with Click & Pledge? Is Click & Pledge the only way to make a donation on June 23?
This issue might require revisiting the whole history behind Click & Pledge. But before we do that, the bottomline is: you don’t have to have an individual Click & Pledge account to participate in GiveBIG and receive donations. But you do have to have a nonprofit profile on www.seattlefoundation.org in order to participate on June 23.
When we launched the new Seattle Foundation website in September 2010, we invited nonprofit organizations to set up a profile on our website and sign up to receive online donations through our site. In order to process these online donations, the Foundation chose Click & Pledge (which we’ll refer to as C&P) and their merchant banking partner TransFirst to help with the processing of these online donations. We chose C&P for a number of reasons, including: 1) C&P allows us to set up an “umbrella” account where we can manage online donations for a number of different organizations or initiatives–none of the other online donation services we were looking into offered that option; and 2) By signing up to have a profile our site, C&P waives any monthly or setup fees for nonprofits. So even if C&P charges a 4.5% fee + .25 per transaction on all transactions that go through our website, the cost works out to be either lower or comparable with other online services.
So, if you are a nonprofit organization with a profile on our website and you can receive online credit card donations through it, then your organization has a C&P account—because C&P is the only way that you can receive online donations through our website. If you have not signed up for a C&P account and currently cannot receive online credit card donations through our site, then don’t worry—you will still be able to receive donations on June 23 (because of the “umbrella” account feature of C&P mentioned above). The difference if you don’t have your own C&P account is that the Foundation will manage the disbursement of those donations for you.
So, long story short: the only way we can track the donations made through our website on that day in order to be able to calculate how much of the stretch pool your organization will receive is to use our already existing online donations provider, Click & Pledge. (For more on Click & Pledge and TransFirst, you can also read the merchant account questions on our website.)
This question brings up the second major theme that came up during the webinar:
2. What is the deal with the “match”? How will that all work?
So first of all, this is a phrase that you’ll hear a lot from here on out: “stretch pool.” This refers to the pool of money we are working hard to raise, so that we can stretch the amount of money that you receive through donations on June 23. The Seattle Foundation has already contributed $250,000 to that pool and we are calling on local businesses to make contributions to it as well so that we have at least $500,000 in stretch funds. We are calling it a “stretch pool” rather than a match because we are not matching donations dollar for dollar. For a number of community foundations who have done similar charitable giving events in other cities around the country, we’ve been able to learn from them on this one—for some, when they first did this type of event, they did it as a one-to-one match and they were so successful in getting people to give on that day that within half an hour, they had received more donations through their site than the total amount of the matching pool—so the matching funds were gone in half an hour and all subsequent donations weren’t matched. So, rather than matching dollar for dollar, your share of the stretch pool will be a percentage of donations your nonprofit receives of the total online contributions made through www.seattlefoundation.org on June 23.
For those of you wondering, “so how much will my organization receive from the stretch pool on June 23?” we don’t know the answer to that question yet because we don’t know how much the stretch pool will end up being and we don’t know how much will be raised on June 23. But here are a few scenarios based on what we think the match pool and amount raised will be:
Let’s call our first nonprofit example Save the Planet. By June 23, the Foundation has raised a stretch pool of $500,000. Save the Planet receives $40,000 in donations through TSF’s website on GiveBIG day, while GiveBIG as a whole raises $1 million for nonprofits. In this scenario, Save the Planet has received 4% of the total donations made on June 23 and would receive 4% of the stretch pool, which would be $20,000.
Here’s another example for a nonprofit we’ll call For the Children. In this scenario, TSF has raised $400,000 for the stretch pool. For the Children receives $7,000 in donations through the TSF website and GiveBIG as a whole raises $2 million for nonprofits. For the Children has received 0.7% of the total donations and would receive 0.7% of the stretch pool, which would be $1,400.
Here are these two scenarios plus one more in chart format, based on varying levels of stretch pool and donation totals (FYI, within the next couple of weeks, we’ll be confirming the total amount of stretch dollars):
| Total Stretch Pool | Total Donations Raised on June 23 |
Donations the NPO Received | Percentage of Total Donations Raised | Stretch Dollars Received |
TOTAL RAISED (Donations + Stretch) |
|
| NPO Scenario 1 |
$500,000 | $1,000,000 | $40,000 | 4% | $20,000 |
$60,000.00 |
| NPO Scenario 2 |
$400,000 | $2,000,000 | $7,000 | 0.35% | $1,400 |
$8,400.00 |
| NPO Scenario 3 |
$450,000 | $5,500,000 | $3,000 | 0.05% | $245.45 |
$3,245.45 |
As you can see, it really depends on the total amount you receive compared to the total amount raised on that day for all nonprofits. Something to look forward to following on June 23!
