Develop Roadmap for Serving Charitable Organizations

[timothyfcook]

Gratipay could become a household name if it became THE place that people went when they wanted to support someone/something on an ongoing basis:

• want to support Betsy? Gratipay.
• want to support an open-source project team? Gratipay.
• want to support an indie journalist? Gratipay.
• want to support the Red Cross? Gratipay.
• want to support your local NPR radio station? Gratipay.
• want to support your alma mater? Gratipay.

If I could do all my giving to a diverse mix of individuals, teams, and organizations all in ONE place... it would be a dream. Most people create their budgets on a monthly basis, but charitable giving is tricky to setup that way for all of the things I want to support. If I have $100/month set aside for giving, with Gratipay I could pick out my 10 favorite things and support them each with $2.50/week.

To get there we need to offer a few more tools that non-profits would want to track their donors.

Specifically, we need:

• a way for organizations to provide receipts to their supporters (this could be automatic via e-mail on a monthly basis and could let donors remain anonymous).
• a way to ask for supporter's permission to provide contact info/names to the organization
• probably an API integration to allow the organization to migrate giving/contact info into Salesforce/Mailchimp, etc. or at least export to .csv

Once the functionality is available, we'd need to do a serious push to build a network of local non-profits who will ask their donors to contribute via Gratipay. I think we could solicit 20+ important Pittsburgh non-profits and build from there. Once we've taken over one City with Gratipay by storm, more will follow.

I think non-profits are looking for a tool like this that doesn't cost them too much extra.

Right now the trendiest tool in this realm is: http://donate.ly/ They are skimming 2% plus .50/donor in addition to the 2.9%+.30 merchant fees. Gratipay could easily provide some of these same services for a lot less and use it to grow it's user base.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for the write-up! I've moved this over to #249.