The Not for Profit (NFP) sector is an increasingly significant player in the Australian landscape, providing critical support services for the disadvantaged Australians across the country. NFPs are also accounting for an increasingly significant chunk of our economic activity, collectively employing in the vicinity of 10% of Australians and generating revenues approaching 200m/annum.

Despite pressure from Covid and other factors in recent years, the NFP sector has been surprisingly resilient - revenues were up 6% for the 2020 reporting period, despite nearly 2,000 charities not operating for the year (650 cited COVID-19 as a reason).

The bulk of funding for NFPs comes from two sources. The first is the government, which rightly sees NFPs as an effective channel to deliver services at scale that the Government can’t deliver directly, and the second source is donations. Australians, as it turns out, are a generous country – ranking as the 4th most generous in the world when it comes to charitable giving.

Many NFPs come to the realisation that that their mission and impact can (and should) move beyond regional boundaries, expanding nationally (or even internationally) - to do the most good and to reach the most people. Working out how to maximise donation performance on a national or global scale, however, can be tricky.

Deepend Group has a track record of supporting the NFP sector, and this experience has given us unique insight into the world of donations and donation platforms. Recently we have turned our minds to the challenge of helping NFPs overcome bottlenecks in their donation experience performance. Here we’ll discuss the building blocks of a successful donation platform, and how to avoid the pitfalls that can undermine the experience and ultimately donation revenues.

Considerations for building an effective global donations platform

When looking to expand globally, it's important to thoroughly evaluate the additional demands this will place on your donation platform. You may find that it’s not up to the job, and replacing your donation platform could be a major undertaking.

• User expectations and behaviors vary from country to country; investing the time to understand how you can serve them most effectively will pay dividends in the long run.
• Your platform will need to support the languages, currencies and payment methods you need for each country you are expanding into.
• You should check your platform can scale during periods of peak demand (such as when running major campaigns), which may be more significant once global scale is reached.
• You should ensure that your platform has adequate cyber security to cope with the additional attention from malicious actors that a global footprint will bring.
• You should ensure that your platform is compliant with any specific regulatory requirements.
• Finally, you should ensure you have a support model in place that can handle requests from any country of origin and in any language.

In a national setting, things are complicated even more when we are dealing with a federated NFP model. A federated model is where a coalition of largely independent NFPs (typically with the same brand) have joined forces to take advantage of the efficiencies that come with coordination.

Considerations for building a national donation experience for a federated NFP

Each NFP in the federation may have their own strategy, priorities, and tech stacks. In fact, the constituent NFPs may be competing, explicitly or implicitly, for the same audience of donors. There are clear benefits to being able to effectively execute national fundraising campaigns, so the challenge of how to build a good national donation experience in a federated model is worth exploring.

There are no solutions – only trade-offs. In this case, the trade-off is between donation experience, technology/platform investment, and ongoing operational costs.

Option 1 is the status quo. Each NFP in the federation has their own donation experience - the national landing page directs users to the to the right donation flow based on their location. The clear downside is that this approach retains unnecessary friction in the experience for donors – with each additional step in the process you will see attrition and lost revenue.

Option 2 is to invest in an integration solution that can manage traffic between the UI and the underlying platforms - managing attribution of funds, and collection of the donor’s contract details. This option prioritises the donor experience and should maximise donations revenue.

Option 3 is a variant of option 2, where the technology investment is smaller, and some of the work involved in the attribution and distribution of funds is absorbed by operational teams. This lessens the upfront integration investment, but obviously increases the ongoing operational cost.

Our view is that whilst the investment in platform integration can seem onerous upfront, the long-term benefits that will come from prioritising the donor experience (in the form of increased donation revenue) make it well worth it.

Deepend are always looking to apply our skills to help business that are trying to make a positive difference in the world - feel free to reach out if you think we can help.