Payment Processing Empowerment for Fundraisers

By: Sisu Berhane and Kristin Schutz, Pracedo. 

As a Salesforce.org Impact Partner Pracedo has worked with a variety of nonprofit organisations across Europe. Each organisation is unique in its mission and vision, but all have one thing in common: fundraising (of course!).

The engine that keeps the mission alive for any nonprofit. Without it, the lights won’t turn on and good community work can’t be done. Fundraising includes many interconnected elements (events, marketing, relationship management) that can be brought together into a single source of truth – Salesforce.

But for so many nonprofits, fundraising is left out of a unified tech stack because payment processing is clunky or siloed. The end result is that end-to-end fundraising processes remain manual or are handled outside of their system of record, Salesforce.

As consultants, we like to say: “There’s a solution!” Because it’s true. End-to-end fundraising should be a part of your organisation’s single tech stack and there are payment processing tools to support that. Payment processing should be automated as much as possible so that fundraisers can focus on running campaigns and engaging with their donors.

In our experience, there are two payment processing solutions for nonprofits that have risen to the top for very different reasons. Both PaymentHub by StepOrange and Asperato are sophisticated and work with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). The differences in these solutions may be more or less important to the organisation depending on the organisation’s requirements.

PaymentHub by StepOrange

Why we like it:

• True to the NPSP and works seamlessly with the NPSP data model
• Merchant agnostic – PaymentHub has an open API and is not tied to any specific merchant. The customer may choose whichever merchant account works for them because Payment Hub will connect to any payment service provider and bank
• Gift Aid – For UK customers, PaymentHub has a module to handle Gift Aid from end to end, which is fully compliant with the HMRC
• Manual file submission to BACS – Automated file submissions can become quite expensive as they are often processed by line item rather than by file. PaymentHub allows you to manually submit your files to BACs to drastically reduce costs

Asperato

Why we like it:

• True to the NPSP and works seamlessly with the NPSP data model
• Merchant agnostic – Asperato is compatible with any merchant or gateway as well as the major online accounting systems
• Invisible to the end user – Your NPSP users view will remain as you’ve configured it because Asperato runs in the background of your Salesforce instance. This means you’ll only have to train your users on the NPSP and Asperato will do the rest
• Full automation – Asperato will run your payments from end to end, from monitoring transactions and sending alerts, to BACS file submissions

Nonprofit organisations move to the Salesforce platform because of its accessibility, efficiency, ease of use, scalability, and flexibility. Payment processing for nonprofits should be defined with those characteristics too! Using the right payment processing solution can bring your fundraising into your single tech stack and open up your fundraising teams to focus on what they do best.

Want to know more about fundraising through the Salesforce Platform?

Contact Pracedo

About the Authors:

Sisu Berhane and Kristin Schutz are both Salesforce Implementation Consultants working at Pracedo. Pracedo is a top-rated Salesforce and Pardot consultancy based in London, serving the UK and Europe. Their expert team is made up of certified Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, CPQ, and Pardot consultants, and certified Platform developers.