[CIMC-working] Accepting online donations

[Ian Bicking]

We talked a little about accepting PayPal donations at the last
meeting.  Anyway, a little information:

For a personal PayPal account there's no fee for receiving funds.  A
premier account is 0.7%-2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.  The only
reasonable way to deal with PayPal is to have the money deposited into a
bank account -- they don't write checks, and all the other ways of
getting the money don't make sense for us.  PayPal keeps your balance,
and periodically money is transfered.  There have been some questions
about PayPal's practices, and claims that PayPal has unfairly frozen
accounts or removed money from accounts.  For this reason we'd want to
be careful about the account the money was deposited into.

The premier account seems to give us better customer service, and easier
acceptance of credit card payments.

There are some other options.  For instance, the Amazon Honor System: 
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/home.html/102-6967655-6412139

In essence, you get voluntary payments -- anyone can get a refund within
30 days.  This eases the issues of fraud from both ends, and is fine for
donations.  You have to have an account with Amazon to donate (similar
to PayPal, where donors also have set up an account).  Sounds nice
enough, but they take 15% + $0.15 per transaction.  That kind of sucks
compared to PayPal.  I wish we could avoid some of the PayPal issues by
allowing automatic refunds, and still get their good rate.

Another option is egrants.org:  
  http://www.egrants.org/tools/donatenow.cfm

It has a $100 setup fee (Amazon and PayPal are free), and 6% per
donation.  I believe they actually send a check to us, and don't deposit
into a bank... not sure.  It has an option to give anonymously -- I'm
not sure how anonymous it can really be, since credit card transactions
have to be recorded for security reasons.  Probably just anonymous to
us.  They only work with non-profits, and we'd have to qualify in some
fashion.  Donations are tax deductible as a result.  Since we aren't
directly non-profit, this might not be open to us.  There's a number of
other organizations that accept payments for modest fees, but have
similar requirements.  


As far as anonymity, I don't believe there's any decent way to do that. 
That is to say, it's not going to be hard for some agency to track who
donates to us.  For online credit card payments that's simply the way
things are -- the best we can do is point this out to people when they
donate.

For both Amazon and PayPal, an individual has to sign up for the
account, and in essence represent us.  I assume that would be Don, as
our treasurer.


This should be on the agenda for next meeting.  It's probably the
easiest way to increase our funds.


-- 
Ian Bicking <ianb@colorstudy.com>