Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way to fundraise among nonprofits – it’s an effective way to reach a wide audience, raising both awareness and critical funds. These types of campaigns focus on meeting a fundraising goal for a specific cause or need within a set timeframe. GoFundMe is a well-known crowdfunding tool, especially for…
Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way to fundraise among nonprofits – it’s an effective way to reach a wide audience, raising both awareness and critical funds. These types of campaigns focus on meeting a fundraising goal for a specific cause or need within a set timeframe.
GoFundMe is a well-known crowdfunding tool, especially for individuals. Anyone can use GoFundMe to raise funds for just about anything, from medical expenses to tuition to support for a charity. GoFundMe has also added tools specifically for nonprofits.
But is GoFundMe right for your organization?
We encourage you to consider what crowdfunding and fundraising features you need before deciding on the best fundraising platform. There are several tools and fundraising sites like GoFundMe (or even better) that you may find are a better fit!
In this article, we’ll share our top alternatives to GoFundMe, including:
First, let’s review the features you should consider while comparing GoFundMe competitors.
When you’re looking for a crowdfunding platform similar to GoFundMe and something which is right for your nonprofit, there are a few essential characteristics to keep in mind.
For nonprofits, every cent matters so that as many funds as possible can go directly to your mission and beneficiaries. Your best GoFundMe alternative must be affordable for your nonprofit. You do not want half of your raised funds to go to maintaining the platform.
Make sure you take a look at the fees for each fundraising platform you research – some require contracts in addition to per-donation platform fees as high as five percent and transaction fees. But others offer their services without contracts and with lower platform fees. When looking for alternatives, you need to know your budget and thoroughly research how much of the donation will actually go to your bank account.
Pro tip: Search for alternatives that allow you to ask donors to cover processing fees as part of their gift. This ensures the complete donation amount goes to your nonprofit. Donorbox donation forms allow your donors to cover the processing fees. And our research says 53.4% of total donations (for nonprofits that enabled this option) were covered by donors.
You’re busy raising funds and building your programs, so you don’t have time to set up and customize a fundraising campaign, right? Not necessarily! The GoFundMe alternative you’re looking for can be simple to use and easy to set up, not requiring a lot of time and documentation.
With the right tools, this is possible. Some fundraising platforms offer easy-to-use dashboards that walk you through creating your campaign in minutes. These alternatives should help you with checkboxes and dropdowns to quickly get started with a crowdfunding campaign in minutes.
Perhaps even more importantly, you should also consider the donor experience. Donation forms be to-the-point, simple to use, and offer multiple ways to give.
You also need to ensure that your chosen crowdfunding platform allows you to create beautiful and engaging donation pages. Branding your page is vital for success! The GoFundMe alternative you choose must have these options – you should be able to change colors, add images and videos, customize the donation form, and make the page look as attractive as possible; and also in line with your nonprofit brand.
Your page should also have the space to share stories that showcase your impact and a powerful call to action to further encourage supporters to give. The best alternatives must give you this freedom of customization.
Pro tip: Be sure to not only write your story but tell it through impactful visuals. For example, this crowdfunding campaign here can easily intrigue visitors and donors to learn more about the campaign and stay longer on the page with a heartwarming video they’ve added to it. This increases the chances of raising more funds.
Look for crowdfunding campaigns that allow you to easily share updates, both on the campaign page as well as via email and social media. These updates, which may include thank you messages, impact stories, and deadline reminders, will keep your donors engaged. Make sure your GoFundMe alternative has a feature to add updates directly to the fundraising page.
Another feature of great crowdfunding platforms is the ability to add a goal tracker to your campaign that shows real-time donation updates.
Check the example here – it has an updates tab on its crowdfunding page as well as a goal tracker to keep track of received donations and to create a sense of urgency among donors to inspire more donations.
By showing that people are supporting your mission, you are offering social proof that yours is a cause worthy of donations. Ensure that your crowdfunding campaign pages feature social sharing buttons, making it easy for your supporters to share it with their social network. When checking out alternatives, do look for this important option. These days, everyone is on social media, from millennials to baby boomers. When it comes to making a donation, people like to see who else is doing that.
Another way to offer social proof is through a donor wall, where donations can be made public and donors can leave messages. This is a great feature that you must look for in your best GoFundMe alternative.
This example from New York Urban League has social media buttons on its page. Visitors can click on them to share the fundraising campaign and spread the message about it, thus bringing in more donations. Right beside the updates tab, there’s a donor wall that lists down donations, donors’ names, and any messages from them. This is also a great way to acknowledge your donors and their gifts and encourage them to make donations in the future.
Now that we’ve covered what to look for in a crowdfunding platform, here are our favorite fundraising sites that are similar to GoFundMe, but may offer a better fit for your needs.
Donorbox is a simple-to-use and low-cost yet incredibly effective fundraising platform. Within 15 minutes, your completely customized campaign should be up and running! This crowdfunding solution is ideal for all nonprofits including churches.
Through Donorbox’s crowdfunding tools, you can create a branded page that allows you to share your story with words, images, and videos. You can post campaign updates and even use the crowdfunding platform to send personalized emails to supporters and subscribers (people can subscribe to your campaign before they even donate).
Your Donorbox crowdfunding page can also feature a goal meter and a donor wall to show donations in real-time. And social sharing buttons enable others to share their campaigns with their networks, helping you build that all-important social proof.
Your page will be mobile-optimized and the recurring donation form will be a simple and fast one to facilitate the donation process. You can easily customize the donation form with suggested donation amounts, additional questions, tribute donations, etc. It’s also very easy to manage your supporters and their donations at the backend with Donorbox’s simple donor management system.
It’s free to get started with Donorbox! All you pay is a 1.5 percent Donorbox platform fee per transaction – which you can ask donors to cover – plus a small payment processing fee from Stripe/PayPal. Learn about our pricing here.
Those looking for a customizable, low-cost crowdfunding platform that makes it easy for nonprofits to show their impact, and for donors to show their support. Nonprofits can also use Donorbox to raise money with other simple-to-use fundraising features such as Peer-to-Peer, Text-to-Give, Memberships, Events, Recurring Donation Forms, and more.
With Fundly, you can create a visual, mobile-optimized page with blog-like updates and commenting capabilities.
Fundly takes social proofing seriously with a Facebook integration that allows you to automatically broadcast campaign activities. You can also connect your Gmail, Yahoo, Survey Monkey, or Constant Contact accounts to send custom emails.
This GoFundMe alternative also offers a free app that makes it possible to manage your campaign anytime, anywhere as well as a quick start guide.
With Fundly, it’s free to create and share your campaign, but they do charge a transaction fee of 4.9% in addition to a small credit card payment processing fee. There are automatic discounts for large campaigns. Know in detail here.
Nonprofits looking to raise money by fully integrating their crowdfunding campaign with Facebook and connecting with apps like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
Donate Kindly offers a simple donation form that you can customize by using your brand colors. The giving fields are also all changeable so that you can meet your organization’s giving requirements.
After building the form, you can easily embed it on a crowdfunding campaign page built by your organization. You can also create separate forms for each of your individual campaigns.
Please note that this crowdfunding site keeps it very simple for organizations and may not offer you a lot of useful features and customization options for your crowdfunding campaign.
Instead of charging a platform fee, Donate Kindly asks each donor for tips. A standard credit card processing fee still applies. Check it here.
Nonprofits new to online fundraising and in need of a simple, no-frills crowdfunding solution to raise money.
FundRazr is a company focused on crowdfunding for nonprofits as well as individuals, sports teams, school projects, and more. This fundraising site offers well-designed, branded fundraising pages that you can set up in minutes, and enables you to add photos, videos, and more to engage donors.
You can also utilize wish lists and perks. With wish lists, you create a registry of sorts to show items you need, allowing donors to donate directly to a specific thing. And with perks, you offer prizes to those who give at specified levels.
FundRazr offers several pricing packages. If you are willing to ask your donors to tip FundRazr, they offer a plan with $0 in platform fees, plus the standard credit card processing fee. If you don’t want to ask for tips, you will be charged a 5% platform fee per donation. Learn about their free, standard, and pro plans here.
Nonprofits with specific wish list items to fulfill or those looking for an easy way to organize perks in exchange for donations.
Looking for a way to snowball your fundraising efforts through crowdfunding? Snowball is a great option! (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.)
Snowball gives you the opportunity to raise money with multiple types of fundraising campaigns at once. Their intuitive platform helps you build a customized, mobile-friendly donation page with a goal thermometer, unlimited giving levels, social sharing buttons, and more, which you can use for your crowdfunding campaigns.
Snowball’s Essential plan is free (with the exception of credit card processing fees) and includes the basic tools you’ll need to get started. Paid plans begin at $549 per year and go up to $999 per year. Know more on their website. There might be an additional payment processing fee.
Nonprofits who are more focused on fundraising through auctions and events, but still want crowdfunding as an option.
With the Givebutter fundraising site, you can create a visually interesting page with text, images, and videos. You can also add a goal bar showing real-time donations, and featuring a countdown to your fundraising deadline. Additionally, you can integrate Canva to create graphics and campaign updates within the platform.
Givebutter also has a robust, easy-to-use donor management tool that makes it even easier for you to track online and offline gifts, thank your donors, and more.
It is free to sign up for Givebutter and all of their tools. A 3% platform fee (plus payment processing fees) will be applied to each donation made through fundraising pages, or you can ask donors to tip Givebutter. Learn more here.
Nonprofits looking for a platform that makes design easy, as well as a quality donor management system.
With RallyUp, you can ask your crowdfunding donors to give in more ways than one. Within your RallyUp form, they can give flat donations, recurring donations, and choose from preset donation amounts.
In addition, RallyUp offers the ability to add donation perks – prizes that you give away at different donation levels – and also allows you to place limited availability quantities on these perks to encourage a sense of urgency.
RallyUp is free to use but their advance pricing applies a 7.5 percent platform fee per donation, plus standard payment processing fees. You can, however, ask (or even require) donors to cover all or a portion of this amount. Know more here.
Nonprofits wanting to offer prizes as incentives for donating as well as raffles for events.
Crowdfunding is a proven fundraising method – it builds awareness for your organization while also raising critical funds for your mission, typically within a fairly short period of time.
But which crowdfunding platform is right for you? GoFundMe is a popular choice, but it may not be the ideal solution for your nonprofit. Your ideal GoFundMe alternative shouldn’t have to be packed with a hundred features but it must have the necessary ones. It is advisable to look for fundraising tools that offer you more than just crowdfunding. That way, your work gets easier. But at the same time, be careful about checking the transaction fee, platform fee, signup costs, and the how-tos of the tools.
Use our crowdfunding tips and list of suggested GoFundMe alternatives above to help you pick the platform that is right for you. If Donorbox is your pick, click here to sign up now for a free account.
Along with Crowdfunding, Donorbox also helps nonprofits with a plethora of other amazing features that include Recurring Donation Forms, Customizable Donation Pages, Peer-to-Peer fundraising, Text-to-Give, Memberships, Events, Donor Management, QuickDonate, and more. If your nonprofit is willing to scale its fundraising efforts, Donorbox Premium is here to help – get expert fundraising coaching, a dedicated account manager, high-performance tools, and priority support.
Looking for more fundraising tips and tools of the trade? Visit our Nonprofit Blog!
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Kara S
