As a missionary with Youth for Christ, I have to raise my own salary for income so that I can do ministry. I have at numerous times wanted a better way to do fundraising, and so when sites like Kickstarter and Indigogo came out, I was excited. But the fact of the matter is that these simply would not fit well for how I wanted to do fundraising.
That’s all changed now with Matt McKee’s newest project Giiive, an online crowdsourcing tool for missionary and ministry fundraising.
Giiive
First a little bit of philosophy. The three ‘I’s stand for individual, inspiration, and influencer. You can read more about this on their partner with us page. The hope is to do just what I had suggested above, give better fundraising for long and short term missions.
Here are some FAQs:
- You need to be an official non-profit. You cannot set anything up without an EIN tax code that labels you a non-profit.
- Individuals do not manage the money, the organization does. Thus, this is a great solution for youth groups!
- This is not just a one time process, but instead they allow for regiving for long term missionaries like myself.
- They only charge 5%, which simply covers the credit card processing fee.
- It has real-time goal reporting for anyone that wants to go see how you are doing. Show that to a church!
- You can be specific about what you are fundraising for and what people are giving towards.
It should be noted that this site is in beta (they call it Genesis instead, everything has to have a beginning!) So why not go check them out and see if this is a solution for your ministry to do mission trips better!
It’s time to Giiive.
Brent says
5% is an outrageously high processing fee, credit card processing is under 2%, and if you find a good company to work with it can often be under 1%.
Just for comparison, square is 2.75% per transaction. Maybe I’m missing something but it doesn’t seem like they offer that much more than an online payment system with goal tracking.
Matt McKee says
Brent,
Great comment. You are correct that the 5% covers more than the processing fee. It also covers all technology cost and the overhead to run a company that is pouring a ton of money into bringing more attention to non-profits. The key is that the processing fee is included in the 5%. If you look at a site like GoFundMe they charge 5% of all raised plus a 4.75% processing fee. So for non-profits it cost 9.75% to raise money on their site. In comparison we are saving non-profits a ton of money.
As far as processing beyond the giiive platform we can almost beat any rate that a church or non-profit currently has while giving them great technology like text giving, iPad giving, and social giving.