The Donation feature is a part of the NING E-commerce platform that allows you to accept voluntary payments from your network members.
Asking network members for Donations is a perfect way to raise funds needed to maintain communities or implement charity purposes. It is the most organic and unobtrusive monetization technique that doesn’t force network members to pay, rather offering a chance to contribute to a common cause.
Applying a Donation button as well as a Donation block on your page takes just a couple of minutes, but at the same time, it can bring you a whole bunch of benefits, starting from supporting your community and compensating your expenses on running the website, to fulfilling different charitable missions.
Collecting Donations is your best option if…
- Your network has an altruistic mission;
- Your members joined to be social activists or support a noble cause;
- Your network represents a non-profit or charity organization;
- You want to raise funds for your business idea;
- You wouldn’t like to limit the access to your website or its content and want to introduce monetization steadily with no enforcement;
- You want to let your members support your network voluntarily.
Let’s look a bit closer at how it works and what benefits it can give to you.
Useful settings
When applying the Donation feature to your network, you can set up a number of parameters:
- Donation amount: depending on your needs, you can set up your own minimum and maximum limits of donation;
- Currency: by default, you can use USD, EUR, AUD, GBP, and BRL as donation currency; however, you can apply any other currency by asking the support team;
- Name: you can collect funds not only for one but for several purposes at the same time, creating different Donation buttons and giving them correspondent names (for instance “Support community” and “Christmas charity” buttons instead of one generic “Donate”);
- Description: you can provide a description next to your Donate button with a motivating or inspiring story and picture. This way, you can create a Donation block which can be placed on any page or your network.
- Testimonial: you will have an opportunity to express your gratitude for a donation to every person that transfers your money by writing a personal message, or even offer them a valuable content in exchange for their contribution.
Additional features
Apart from the standard settings of the Donation feature, NING 3.0 platform provides you also with additional features that can significantly ease your networking. You will be able to:
- Monitor your Donations statistics in the “Analytics” section of the NING E-commerce platform;
- Accept donations via PayPal, Stripe, and IDEAL for users from the European countries;
- Receive both one-time donation payments and monthly recurring payments from your network members and unregistered Internet users;
- Send a thank you letter. You will receive names and e-mails of the network members who made a contribution so you can write them a reply letter with appreciation;
- Monitor all the transactions on your network and know all the details of every payment. In case of fraud or error, you can refund or chargeback the funds.
Conditions for Donation transaction
- The Donation feature does not have any fixed or subscription price. There will be only a fee retained during a transaction. The fee will consist of the PayPal, Stripe or IDEAL service price and 5% NING transaction expenses. The NING transaction expenses can be lower according to the agreement with NING. To make an agreement, please contact our support team. The transaction and service fees of PayPal and Stripe you can find on the corresponding websites.
- NING can block bank operations as well as block the E-commerce account.
- NING can refund payment to the network member if they lodge a corresponding complaint.
- If a member initiates refund or chargeback operations, they will get the amount excluding the retainer fee.
- The money will be transferred to the account, which is set as the active payment method. The payments made through PayPal will be transferred to the PayPal account; the payments made through the Stripe method will be transferred to the Stripe account of the network creator.