Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a few notes about an exciting new feature from Fundraise Up – one of the online donation platforms I like to work with and recommend to clients.

If you've ever been tempted to run a fundraising campaign where donors are (nominally) funding the purchase of items you need for your programming – like "buying meals for a family for a month" or "funding medical supplies for a rescue team", this makes the giving experience much more interactive.

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Selecting "donation gifts" from a catalog

Most online donation forms follow a similar format.

A range of gift amounts, and a one-time vs. monthly option.

A few additional fields, then the checkout, and then you're done.

The key detail for today's email: as the donor, you've "purchased" one thing.

Even if there was language on the donation page about "a gift of X amount funds this" or "a gift of Y amount funds that", you just get to select a single donation amount and checkout.

But for many nonprofits, presenting donors with an experience that feels more like an ecommerce store is appealing, and can raise more money.

What does this mean?

The key missing step that separates the typical online giving form and an ecommerce store is the absence of a shopping cart.

In a typical ecommerce store, you can browse a product catalog and add multiple items to a shopping cart. Then you checkout for the total amount of those items.

When would this make sense in a nonprofit context?

Presenting donors with a catalog of items to "purchase" as a donation makes sense with your organization has several distinct donation opportunities and you want supporters to discover and combine them.

Here are some examples:

• A humanitarian organization with multiple program areas — clean water, nutrition, medical care, emergency shelter — where supporters can fund more than one at once.
• A food bank where supporters can fund specific programs, such as funding children's meals or supporting holiday gift drives.
• An animal welfare organization where supporters purchase supplies, perhaps for a specific animal with certain needs.

In the past when clients have asked me for something like this I've either leaned on a true ecommerce solution (like tacking on a Squarespace product catalog to an existing Squarespace site), or built a complicated web form that simulates some of the shopping cart type experience, without true cart functionality. Neither of these are ideal.

This is why I was so excited to see Fundraise Up launch their new Gift Cart functionality!

The Fundraise Up Gift Cart Approach

​Fundraise Up's Gift Cart allows you to set up a catalog of donation "products", each with an image, title, description, price, as if you were setting up an ecommerce store.

Then you use a single embed code to add the entire catalog, shopping cart, and checkout experience to your website. The entire user experience — from browsing gifts, adding to the cart, and checking out — happens right on your website.

I'm currently testing this out for my dog adoption friends at Camp Cocker Rescue, and here are a few previews of the user experience:

When you click on a "product" card, it opens in an overlay, with more details:

As you add items to your cart, a floating cart widget updates, and you can click to view your cart (still part of the embedded widget):

And finally, clicking into the checkout takes you to a full screen experience:

I love how this gets donors more involved in the details of their donation, and offers choices!

My only complaint – and perhaps this is on the roadmap? – is the absence of quantity selectors. Particularly in a situation like the dog rescue wishlist above, or the food pantry example, I can see donors choosing to add several of the same product to their cart, resulting in a larger overall donation. I'll check in with the Fundraise Up team to see if that's coming.

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Is this something you could use on your website?

And does your donation provider offer something similar? I'd love to hear about other platforms that provide similar functionality.

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