Online Fundraising
Online Fundraising is great tool that fundraiser's and social advocates have at their disposal. The internet has created a revolution for spreading information and organizing groups so that they can help with all types of causes. It has made it easy to get people motivated to take action. Once you have a motivated group, you usually need money or volunteer's time to make a change. In the past, it was hard for small groups to gather funds from a lot of smaller sources because the credit card companies are too greedy and they would take so much of revenue that it did' t seem worth the effort to try to collect small donations. In addition, service would take their share so online fundraising was profitable for the financial institutions more than for the fundraising groups. Now, there is a solution.
The Original Fundable.Org
Fundable.Org was one of the first organizations to build a web site specifically for aggregating funds online. The founders started in 2004 to make a site that allowed users to create an account and gather funds. Their innovation was that none of the sponsors gets charged until the project gets enough sponsors to fully fund the project. They simply agree to donate and the donation is collected once the goal is met. For this service, they charged a small fee. Everything looked good until the bad press started. The founder made several mistakes but the killer issue was when a transaction went wrong for Mary Robinette Kowal. The headlines read "Fundable rips off Hugo-nominated writer Mary Robinette Kowal" and that was the end of Fundable 1.0. After that now one wanted to have anything to do with the business and it sank, officially going under Oct 1, 2009, according to metafilter.
The New Fundable.Org
Now Fundable.Org is under new management and we have some new goals. In addition to providing an online fundraising tool, we will be publishing fundraising ideas and providing fundraising widgets. We hope that by providing a broader solution for fundraiser that the site can overcome the negative history.
Fundable.Org already has the coding for the back-end to create accounts and collect donation through Paypal. Currently our goal is make this service free and not change any fee for aggregating the fund. Most of the similar online fundraiser's charge a small fee. Since Fundable has a bad history to overcome, we will not attempt to make any profit from the online fundraising portion of the web sites. We feel that we can make enough money using Google Adsense on the fundraising ideas portion of the web site to keep ourselves in business.
Currently, the big issues is to make sure that the security is rock solid so that there is never another negative incidence like the one in 2009. Until our security is ready, we recommend that users try using one of the other existing online fundraising site like chipin.com or thepoint.com. Both these service provide a good option for online fundraising.