Several fintech and fundraising firms are joining forces in the race to develop the payment processing technology that encompasses more options for both charities and donors.
Nonprofit fundraising platform Give Lively plans to add payment processor Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) to its platform starting next year. Leaders of both organizations say the partnership will enable streamlined and expanded capabilities at lower cost. The enhancements will include stock and cryptocurrency donation processing capabilities powered by crypto donation platform The Giving Block, a Shift4 subsidiary.
“As we’ve experienced in the payments industry for some time, donation methods are changing rapidly,” said Shift4 Founder and CEO Jared Isaacman. “Nonprofits, like many other businesses, want the ability to accommodate their donors’ preferences. We believe that if you make it easy and affordable for nonprofits to adopt these modern donation methods, they will grow faster. That’s what this partnership with Give Lively is all about.”
The move follows the recent rollout of electronic grantmaking platform Grant Payments by online payment processing giant PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) in partnership with donor-advised fund sponsor Vanguard Charitable. The platform’s May 2023 launch came nine months after its August 2022 debut by the National Philanthropic Trust.
The new platform enables grants of up to $10 million from donor-advised funds (DAFs) to be provided electronically to more than 30,000 charities at no cost to the charity or grantmaker. Funds sent via Grant Payments arrive within one day of the receiving charity accepting the grant, and sometimes within minutes.
Vanguard Charitable donors have electronically gifted more than $130 million to more than 400 eligible charities since the May 2023 launch, according to Vanguard Charitable leaders. The advantages of doing so became especially apparent during the three weeks following the August 2023 wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, when Vanguard Charitable donors collectively gave $3.7 million for relief efforts. More than half (57%) of that amount was sent electronically and arrived within a day of being approved.
“For a long time, grantmakers have acknowledged the shortcomings of sending funds via paper check, but there was no easy, secure, and charity-friendly solution to address the grantmaking space as a whole,” said Rebecca Moffett, president of Vanguard Charitable. “We — Vanguard Charitable, National Philanthropic Trust, and PayPal — saw an opportunity to bring together leaders in their respective fields so that charities across the country could receive funds in a simple, secure, and much faster way, ultimately helping to drive their respective missions forward.”
In another venture, donor-advised cryptocurrency platform Endaoment.org and crowdfunding platform GlobalGiving launched a joint platform to enable crypto and blockchain-derived asset donations to more than 7,000 nonprofits worldwide. Endaoment donors did not have global reach and GlobalGiving’s platform was limited to the 80 currencies in countries where it operates. The partnership launched the same month that private equity firm Alpine Investors announced its acquisition of Australia-based fundraising platform Raisely and intent to pair it with U.S.-based software-as-a-service provider Aplos.
Finally, social impact software provider Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), unveiled Impact Edge™, an AI-powered, social impact reporting and storytelling platform for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social impact teams. It will allow creation of a compelling picture of their organization’s social impact using data captured safely and securely from their employee engagement programs, philanthropic programs, educational initiatives, and other trusted external data sources.
Impact Edge combines the Blackbaud products YourCause® and EVERFI® within a single tool. It consolidates all the impact data gathered from trusted sources — both internally and externally — into a centralized location.
