Are you a small or just starting up non-profit or charity? Looking to save but want to be set for scale and growth?

CHECK OUT my FAVORITE (BASE) system of MOSTLY FREE, (or as close to it as possible) solutions for your donations, donor acknowledgements, website, accounting, email campaigns and automations. This complete BASE set up fills all the holes in charity management so you can get back to changing the world.

DONATION PROCESSOR

PAYPAL (but if you can STRIPE)

You need to be able to collect online payments. The cheapest way to do this IS PayPal. They offer 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction. You can also embed buttons on your website for shirt fundraisers or donation forms.

Now, if you have your 501(c)3 designation, I would like to point you to STRIPE. Stripe does advertise a larger amount of fee (2.9% + $.30 per transaction) however, non-profits who reach out are offered the same as PayPal AND their payment forms are embedded onto your site so your donors are not being redirected away from your page which is a gigantic NO-NO.

Both options are free to sign up, you will just need your non profit bank account, contact person and an email to use as admin access.

$ FREE $

DONOR MANAGEMENT

GOOGLE DRIVE

Google drive has some amazing capabilities. When connected to forms, emails and other communications, you can automate and function completely for free using your google drive. NOW, while google drive is FREE, you can rack up a large amount of data and run into a storage issue so keep that in mind.

Ok, but how do we manage donors? Send acknowledgements?

I would recommend connecting your forms and emails to google drive, dumping into sheets that are used as “holds”. From there, you can use Zapier (which we will talk about soon) to filter into an “Active Donor Sheet”, “Event Tickets” etc. Because Google Drive is such a blank canvas you can literally do whatever you want to organize for your charity or non profit. Create a folder for donors, volunteers, staff, etc. Be precise and set standards and make sure people follow them. Don’t forget to use “shortcut folders/documents” also. Those little guys are super helpful in leaving data in the correct place but saving time and creating connections between folders.

Here is a great guide on how to create donor acknowledgement letters or donation Thank Yous using a Google Chrome Extension. It functions like a mail merge where you select a template and your recipients and process. Super easy, and oh yeah.. FREE

And here is one too for email Thank Yous using a similar method but using your FREE Gmail. Now, there are other ways to manage your emails for free or cheap but this is a great solution keeping your data in the google system.

While these can be a bit labor intensive, using other online tools such as zapier will help automate some of this for you. The more though you are able to spend on a donor management software will alleviate some of this manual work.

$ FREE $

WEBSITE + DOMAIN

SQUARESPACE

Be billed in one place and manage it all in one place. You can purchase your domain/url from Squarespace. Most are just $20 a year. Then you are billed for your website hosting in the same place too. PLUS! HTTPS is included REMEMBER HOW WE TALKED ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT THAT IS?

One of my favorite features of Squarespace is how it quickly integrates to Google Drive, Stripe and Zapier. Remember all those tips above where we mentioned google docs? Stripe? Well all of those integrations are a simple + easy toggle on with Squarespace. Squarespace would literally be the hub of your charity and all of your management of donors, volunteers, donations, communications etc all come from this integrated and automated hub. Its just that awesome and SUPER easy to use.

Make sure to subscribe at the BUSINESS Level. This unlocks “Donations”, “domain” email which is super important for helping your trust factor + custom code injection which you will absolutely need.

$ 18/mo (annually)$

WANT TO SAVE EVEN MORE? Build a site with me and you can get 20% off with my Circle Membership

ACCOUNTING

QUICKBOOKS

Industry standard and MUST for managing your non-profit is a good accounting software. Quickbooks offers so many amazing integrations with the other programs we have listed that are FREE so its a no brainer that you need it. It’s important to pay into good software to make sure you are compliant and legally sound while running your charity.

Their base level is called “Plus” and is a fully online or cloud based program

$ 40/mo (3 months)$

EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

SQUARESPACE CAMPAIGNS

Sending out mass emails to your donors, volunteers and others is super important. Staying connected, telling them what is happening and how you are making an impact with their generous contribution is a MUST.

Now, since you are going to be on Squarespace because you will heed my advice from above, I can tell you all about Squarespace email campaigns. Currently, for just $5 month, you can send up to 500 emails/ 3 campaigns! That is easily the cheapest in the industry. The best part is that Squarespace Campaign email collection is an easy toggle on to add visitors, donors and volunteers to your lists via forms and donations.

You can even set up automations for special event ticket purchases or donations. Set up email mail merge fields correctly and these automatic emails can even serve as your electronic donation acknowledgment. Freeing up more time for you!

$ 5/mo $

INTEGRATIONS

ZAPIER

Oh Zapier! I adore you. If you have not heard of Zapier, let me introduce you to your new best friend.

Zapier is your connector program. Its just like those conditional questions on the SAT, if this happens then do this. It works SEAMLESSLY with Squarespace, Google Docs, Gmail, Quickbooks + Stripe (PayPal). See what I did there? I set you up with all of the FREE options that work best together and ensured that they all work with Zapier, maximizing your time and automations.

So here’s how it works. Say you have a form on Squarespace that is collecting volunteer leads. You can set up this form to send to your email, collect/dump into a Google Drive Sheet for a fail safe, be added to your Squarespace Email Campaign list specifically for volunteers (which you could automate a welcome sequence), AND send a Zap to ZAPIER to add an event on your Google Calendar to call them the next day. YOU will literally not lift a finger while the programs automate and integrate around you.

Zapier is FREE until you process 100 items through your zaps or you create more than 5. One trick is to link more than one action to each other which cuts down on how many Zaps you create and make sure to use the programs internal integrations with Squarespace to not eat up your zap items.

$ FREE$

Let me do the math for you:

for UNDER $65 a month,
you can have a fully functioning, connected, automated DIGITAL MACHINE
that frees up more time so you can get back to changing the world.

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