Primary Drive

A payment provider plugin to accept donations on charity’s websites

The project

Charities are not well served by payment providers, so CharityCheckout decided to build a payment provider specifically for charities, one that encapsulated all the functionality necessary for taking card details, subscription management, calculating tax relief, and all the other complexities of a modern management system, and to turn it into a simple turnkey system that could be used by all charities from the smallest to the largest, and could be plugged in to the charity's existing websites in a matter of minutes. A further stipulation was that the payment process should not appear to be a third party system, potentially alienating donors; it should be re-brandable to look just like the charity's website.

Solutions

The CharityCheckout solution broke down into three major sections. The first was the brochureware website, designed to appeal to charities and charitable organizations, and to deliver all the information necessary for such an organization to be sufficiently interested in the product to get in touch. It was decided that the front page should offer a few key bullet points providing the most important snippets of information, and a video making it very easy for interested charities to find out more. For those who got beyond the video or would prefer not to view video content there was to be a colourful and informative "find out more” section and an FAQ section covering any remaining information that might be of interest but is not crucial for most sales.

The second important part of the charity check out system was to be a backend management portal, available to all charities that signed up to use CharityCheckOut. This portal would allow charities to manage subscriptions, donors, and keep track of dispersal payments. This would also give them the tools to rebrand the payment process to fit their own brand colour scheme, and to use their logo. The third part of the process was of course the payment system itself. For this we would implement the simplest of user interfaces, ensuring that no donation was ever abandoned out of confusion or frustration.

Results

CharityCheckout signed up a number of charities shortly after launch. The feedback from these charities convinced them to rethink their revenue model, eventually deciding on a subscription model rather than a per-process fee. This required a simple change to the payment module we had built. They re-launched the website, which was very positively received, and are now in the process of publicising their new model and continuing to grow their client base.

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