The Northern Ohio Railway Museum is a non profit 501(c)3 trolley museum located in northeastern Ohio. We are seeking information and feedback from other organizations on how they handle on line donations. This is an area we are long overdue to get into.

There are multiple platforms out there that handle this kind of service. We are interested in secure on line donating that is easy to use for the donor (and us). Before we begin talking to any of them, we want to learn as much as we can. We are a small organization so I would expect our on line volume to be at the smaller end of the scale. I am interested in how the donating experience works for the organization as well as the donor. Are the donations tracked so we know who to credit for their generosity. What percentages or flat fee's are charged by these donor vending companies. You can imagine the questions can go on and on. Actually at this point I don't know what I don't know! So we wish to learn from our sister museums.

I also understand that this can be a sensitive subject and one may not want to carry on this conversion in a public forum. In that case, please PM me and we can converse via this platform, e-mail or phone. Whatever is most convenient for you. Of course anything discussed will be kept confidential.

I look forward to hearing from the rail community on this. Thank You.

Steve Heister
Treasurer
Northern Ohio Railway Museum

I would look into PayPal.

If you already use square or stripe for online gifts or ticketing, they may be a good option as well (ideally you can add on a donation when making an online order).

We use Paypal. Fee is about 2%. We are notified immediately when a contribution is made and given contact information. After our request it takes a day or two to make a normal transfer to our bank account. The ease in receiving and processing a contribution is worth the fee, but for larger contributions we sometimes suggest the donor use a check. Donors don't have to have a Paypal account and can pay by credit card.

Will this make it easier for me to renew my membership in your organization?

What C-Z and Dick said.

A PayPal button on your website is a good way to get quick donations. We'll include memberships in our store when/if we get one up online.

Slightly related - we also evaluated PayPal for donations to our church here in Denmark.

Benefit - handles mulitple currencies and is international, and is easy to add to any website

Negative - the transaction fee, and minimum monthly fee in Denmark.

In the end, we did not, because there are local Danish options that are nearly free, but only for Danish kroner.