Crowdfunding for Nonprofits: All You Need to Know

Nonprofits embrace crowdfunding for its global reach, cost-effectiveness, and ability to foster community engagement. 

Online crowdfunding platforms for nonprofits provide access to a diverse audience, flexibility in funding goals, and valuable data insights that allow for product market fit testing, community development, interest generation and impact.

Whether you are a nonprofit company, startup, community project owner or an entrepreneur looking to start a crowdfunding platform for nonprofits, in this article you will find some of the leading marketplaces that will help you raise money or get inspiration. 

GoodHub

GoodHub is a crowdfunding platform that helps non-profit organizations and fundraisers raise money for causes that matter. The platform offers comprehensive sets of tools for charities and fundraisers.

All that a charity organization has to do is register on the platform. Registration is free. After that, the organization gets its page with a unique URL and lots of space to post their content, images, and even videos. There are free themes and images for the page, so the non-profit organization can create unique content, including visuals.

From the page, donors will be able to make a one-off donation or set up regular gifts including adding Gift Aid. 

With a click of a button, fundraisers can create their own page to raise funds on behalf of a specific non-profit. Visitors can see how much funds were raised, browse projects funded by the non-profit, or buy tickets online for an event or raffle organized by the non-profit. 

Fundraisers can pick their favorite charities and raise funds on their behalf. 

GoodHub doesn’t charge a subscription fee or payment for creating a page or launching a campaign. Instead, there is an option for supporters to add a small sum to cover the platform’s expenses. 

GoodHub charges a payment processing fee of 1.4% + 20p. If the charity chooses to add Gift Aid, the platform takes 5% from the Gift Aid sum added by donors. 

CauseVox

CauseVox is a fundraising platform for nonprofits that allows them to raise funds in multiple ways, depending on their aims and fundraising strategy. CauseVox offers the following options to choose from:

• Peer-to-peer for individuals and teams
• Crowdfunding for projects
• Donations for individuals and projects

Along with these options, one can set up to donate in installments, a ticketing functionality to sell tickets to events, a connection to CRM to track donors and manage their history, and an opportunity to integrate CauseVox with over 50 other products to enhance the functionality.

CauseVox offers three pricing plans: Basic, Standard, and Plus.

The Basic plan is free, and with it, one can benefit from simple self-service fundraising. Only a payment processing fee is charged, and the sum is determined by the payment processing service (2.2% – 2.9% + $0.30). Within the plan, one can create an unlimited number of donation forms and an unlimited number of peer-to-peer pages.

The Standard plan costs $155 if one pays per year, or $200 if the payments are made month by month. It offers everything from the Basic plan plus unlimited pages for team fundraising, unlimited event ticketing, donation data exports, support, and onboarding. 

Finally, the Plus plan costs $275 if paid per year, or $315 if paid month by month. It includes all that the Basic and the Standard plans have, plus API access and advanced integrations, custom email branding, global batch exports, and priority support.

For the Plus and Standard plan, a 7-day trial is available.

Thus, one gets only a very basic set of features for free, and a comprehensive set of tools for fundraising is available at a pretty high price. Additionally, some activities are charged separately. So, creating one ticket would cost $1 + 2%. 

CauseVox is available for any organization or individual, not only for non-profits, and the platform is accessible from all around the world.

Fundrazr

Fundrazr is a crowdfunding platform that enables fundraising for:

• Professionals (non-profit, movements, schools, sports teams, etc.) in such sectors as human services, animal welfare, environment, social justice, religious charities, and emergency relief
• Personal needs (yourself, friends, and community) to get help with medical expenses, pets, accidents, memorials, birthdays and weddings.

The platform doesn’t charge a fee for registration and launching a campaign. However, it charges a standard 5% platform fee and a payment processing fee of around 2.9% + $0.30). Discounts are available for large campaigns and are negotiated individually.

Fundrazr promises its users fast money collection via Stripe, PayPal, GooglePay, ApplePay, or a bank card. The platform also provides support to fundraisers by offering automated onboarding, personalized tips on campaign improvement, live campaign analytics, and a storytelling toolset, among other tools and functionalities. The platform has an integration interface with various CRMs and other common non-profit tools, and thus, if one used a CRM system or software previously, one can continue using it by enhancing it with Fundrazr. 

Fundly

Fundly allows to raise funds for a cause for non-profit organizations and individuals. The tools differ for both cases. Individuals can start raising funds for free with Facebook or through their emails while non-profit organizations get a comprehensive toolset for raising funding via a fundraising campaign launched on the website. 

The platform doesn’t charge anything for registering and running a campaign, all the fundraisers pay is a payment processing fee (2.9% + 30 cents). 

Fundly offers the following features for those willing to raise funds:

• Creation of campaign pages with videos, images, content, and all the settings such as the goal amount, the time frame, etc. Visitors and supporters also can leave comments on the page. The pages can be connected with Facebook profiles to boost the reach.
• Pre-made email templates, an embeddable campaign card, donate and fundraiser buttons, and donation form templates are also provided.
• Integrations with all the organizations needed to raise funds: SignUp Genius, VolunteerEasy, Stripe, Square, Mailchimp, and some others.

Fundly allows raising funds for nonprofits, charities, community groups and teams, churches, religious organizations, and similar. 

How to create a crowdfunding platform for nonprofits

If you are thinking about launching an investment platform for nonprofits to help them raise funds, starting with a white-label crowdfunding software from LenderKit can be a way to go.

LenderKit software comes with a rich set of features including backer onboarding, account creation, campaign management, payment distributions, integrations connectivity for online money processing and user verification. 

If you would like to learn more about the software and how it can help you launch your own crowdfunding platform for nonprofits, reach out to us to discuss your requirements.