Having a digital presence allows a nonprofit to spread the word about their work and gain more supporters all over the world. It also helps generate funding, which is vital for the continued operation of any nonprofit. One way to encourage website visitors to support your nonprofit is by integrating an ecommerce platform with your site. A suite of ecommerce tools can help your nonprofit gain additional revenue, or even act as one of its primary funding sources. Read on to learn about how using ecommerce to grow funding can help encourage website visitors to support your worthy cause. 

Offer various donation options through ecommerce

Collecting donations is one of the main sources of funding for many nonprofit organizations. That’s why, when looking into ecommerce platforms for your website, find one that allows you to collect donations. Make “Donate” buttons bright and easy to find on your website. It doesn’t hurt to add them to every website page. This way, visitors don’t lose sight of it and can donate from any page they’re browsing. Let’s look at some of the different donation types you can use with an ecommerce platform.

Collect one-time donations

One-time donations are great for attracting the attention of first-time website visitors. They also benefit people who aren’t ready to subscribe to regular donations yet. One-time donations can be added as a separate option on your website, or as an add-on to a product or service.  For example, Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum allows customers to donate to different targeted funds when they purchase a membership in their gift shop. When it comes to one-time donations, set up fixed price tiers for donating or let site visitors decide on their own donation amount. 

Collect recurring donations

Recurring revenue is extremely important for nonprofits. It allows you to budget more accurately and make running your nonprofit a more predictable and sustainable venture. Here’s how recurring donations work: a person subscribes to donate a certain amount weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or annually. Then they are automatically charged that amount on a regular basis. Apart from being billed regularly, nonprofit supporters can still choose other ways to donate on an ongoing basis. There are memberships or sponsorships that provide interested donors with bonuses for recurring donations.

Chase Animal Rescue Sanctuary allows website visitors to sponsor an animal, for example. They can choose which animal to support and how much money they want to donate monthly. Sponsors are then automatically charged the same amount each month. As a perk, the sanctuary sponsors get monthly updates on their animals, including pictures. Depending on the sponsorship level, some supporters also get free admission for a tour or sanctuary merchandise. 

When you collect recurring donations, it’s essential to keep your supporters in the loop. Think about sending regular newsletters to people who have subscribed to regular contributions. Thank them and tell them about the amazing things their donations have allowed you to do. In addition, use a newsletter to share your nonprofit’s news and plans, announce events, and outline new ways to support your organization.

Add a donation option at checkout

If you have an online store to sell your nonprofit-related products and services, don’t forget to add a donation option to your checkout. Offer your customers predefined donation amount options in either fixed sum amounts or as a percentage of the order total. You can also pre-select a donation amount for your customers that will be automatically added to orders at checkout. In this case, be sure to enable the “No tip” option to let customers check out with no donation as well.  

Grow your funding with an online ecommerce store

Adding an online store to your nonprofit’s website can drastically grow your funding. Why? Because it encourages interested visitors to take action instead of just browsing your website. Having an online store streamlines the process of donating. Visitors can easily support your nonprofit in a couple of clicks, instead of having to research other ways to support your cause or make a bank transfer. 

For maximum flexibility, you can also enable a “Pay What You Want” price for some products so that customers can choose to round up their payment amount. This way, they can choose to support your nonprofit just by adding on a couple of dollars to their total, instead of having to make a separate donation at checkout. Adding a minimum price to this option helps ensure you won’t get less money for a product than it costs. At the same time, “Pay What You Want” encourages customers to be charitable without going out of their way to do so. 

Here are a few other ways to use your nonprofit’s online store.

Use ecommerce to sell your merchandise

There are various items that nonprofits can sell as branded merchandise. Popular choices include mugs, hats, t-shirts, posters, hoodies, phone cases, tote bags, face masks, key chains, soft toys, and more. To create your branded merchandise, print your nonprofit’s logo, slogan, or custom-designed image on products. For example, LaLaLand, a cafe with the purpose of hiring foster youth, offers a wide variety of branded products in their online store. These include clothes, accessories, mugs, and bottles with their brand logo, slogan, and custom images.

However, creating custom-designed products takes extra time and money—two things nonprofits usually don’t have to spare. In this case, you might want to connect your online store to print-on-demand services. They take care of sourcing inventory, storing it, printing and shipping orders to customers. Here’s how it works: a customer buys a hat with your nonprofit logo in your online store. The order is automatically sent to a print-on-demand service. It prints your logo on a hat and sends the order to the customer. The benefits of using print-on-demand services are obvious: you don’t need to source and store inventory and deal with printing and shipping. And because the products are made on-demand, there’s no risk of dead stock.

Branded merchandise is not always about products with printed logos or images. Some nonprofits get creative with the merchandise they offer to make it truly unique. For example, Helping Rhinos, a rhino charity, sells Rhino Tear jewelry: pendants, cuffs, bangles, and earrings in the form of a tear. All profits from jewelry sales go to anti-poaching projects across Africa. 

Sell event tickets 

If your nonprofit hosts paid events such as workshops, classes, courses, or panel discussions, you can sell tickets to those events in your online store. Save the Snakes, a nonprofit dedicated to snake conservation and human-snake conflict mitigation, sells training courses and workshops on their website. Customers can choose the date of a workshop when placing their online order.

Sell educational resources

Education-based nonprofits and other organizations can benefit from an online store if they produce various resources. This works for both physical and digital resources—books, guides, checklists, or brochures. Online classes and courses are also a common product for nonprofits. For example, iSchool for the Future, an educational nonprofit, sells online classes on their website. The link with instructions and resources is emailed to customers upon purchase. 

 

Sell gift cards

Apart from selling merchandise, event tickets, or resources, nonprofits can also add gift cards to their online store. This provides another option to support a nonprofit since it encourages customers to draw others’ attention to the cause they care about. A gift card for a program or resource can be purchased as a birthday or holiday gift, for example. Check out how Amigos de Santa Cruz put gift cards front-and-center for their online store. The “Buy Now” button is visible on every page of the store: the storefront, category pages, and even product pages. This nonprofit supports indigenous Mayan women artisans from Santa Cruz.  All proceeds from the store directly benefit artisans and their families.

 

***

Some people prefer donating. Others like wearing merchandise that highlights the cause they support. But no matter what charitable method is more popular for your nonprofit, an ecommerce store is a great way to let people support you in a convenient way. Whether you offer a donation button or a Pay What You Want feature, make sure to also have a “How You Can Help” page or tab on your website. Use it as a space where you can list all the ways people can support your cause: by donating, volunteering, buying merchandise or other products, sharing your nonprofit website on their social media pages, and so on.

If you’d like to test an online store for your nonprofit, there are a number of free ecommerce platform options available. For example, Ecwid has a Forever Free plan that allows you to set up a free one-page ecommerce website, sell up to ten products, and collect one-time donations. Paid plans provide tools for collecting recurring donations as well as easy integration with print-on-demand services. 

 

*This spotlighted blog post is courtesy of Ecwid

What connects all nonprofits is the need for fundraising and the need to reach out to people and connect with the community. As with almost anything in 2021, nonprofits can do that not only offline but online too. For example, nonprofits can raise funds through ecommerce by setting up an online store to gather donations through merchandise sales or event sales. Or, they can use email marketing tools to get people to stay connected and have them rally behind their favorite organization or around their local community. 

Veterans to Farmers and City Greens Market are two US-based nonprofits that used ecommerce effectively. They successfully used their digital presence to raise funds and awareness for their cause, as well as improve their daily operations. Read on to find out how they did it!

Veterans to Farmers: Fundraising and Awareness with Ecommerce

Veterans to Farmers is a Colorado-based nonprofit that works with US veterans from all over the country. They offer veterans training for sustainable farming. This includes everything from business planning and operation to growing and harvesting to taking that to market or working with restaurants to sell their products. 

The tagline of the nonprofit is turning protectors into providers. Veterans are often leaving the service with not a lot of job prospects. Veterans to Farmers is teaching them a way to continue their work, supporting their community by providing for them.

The challenge for the nonprofit was to connect with their community and generate donations and funds for the organization. As there is a broad range of incomes and budgets, a nonprofit needs to make sure that no matter how someone wants to support them, they can do that—be it a monthly $100 donation, a one-time $5 donation, or buying a mug. Here’s how Veterans to Farmers managed to ensure that with their ecommerce platform.  

Selling merchandise through an online store

There are many people, especially in the veteran community, who are very proud of the Veterans to Farmers organization. The nonprofit gave them an opportunity to show their appreciation by buying their merchandise and wearing it. Veterans to Farmers set up an online store with Ecwid where their supporters can buy merchandise such as T-shirts, mugs, hats, or stickers. Not only does that provide the organization with some funds, but that also keeps veterans involved and supporting one another. 

Collecting donations online

The nonprofit has an incredible mission. But educating and supporting veterans is not inexpensive, and it’s certainly not free. Collecting donations is really important for this organization. 

Recurring donations are a life-saver for nonprofits, and Veterans to Farmers understands that. That’s why they made it possible for their supporters to subscribe to regular donations on the nonprofit’s website. This allowed them to streamline the process of donating and encourage site visitors to subscribe to recurring donations. 

For example, suppose a person wants to support a veteran through the entire year of training with Veterans to Farmers. In that case, they can sign up and purchase a monthly $100 donation that will cover all the costs for one veteran to be trained and educated for the year. 

One-time donations of different amounts are also available on the nonprofit’s website. 

Raising awareness via email

For any nonprofit, connecting with companies, nonprofits, individuals, and institutions surrounding their industry is essential. Raising awareness about the nonprofit is just as important as generating funds. And a great way to raise awareness is through email.

Veterans to Farmers did this by adding a subscribe form to their website so that site visitors can sign up for their newsletter. They also have a monthly marketing email. This helps them keep their community informed about how they can support the nonprofit. 

Not only do they send out the emails to their subscribers, but thanks to Ecwid’s integration with Mailchimp, they can directly pull products from their online store and feature them in their emails. They display their products and donation options in their newsletters, providing a seamless one-click purchase process right in the email. 

City Greens Market: Moving Operations Online with Ecommerce

City Greens Market is a nonprofit in the Southeast neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. That area has historically been a food desert, which is an area that has very limited access to affordable and nutritious food like fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, grains, etc. Historically in the United States, food deserts appear in lower-income neighborhoods. Particularly in St. Louis, these are also neighborhoods where people of color reside.

For City Greens Market, the issue of attacking food deserts and bringing affordable, delicious foods was not just an issue of socioeconomic status but also an issue of race. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit was really struggling to fulfill its mission of providing healthy, safe, delicious foods to people. Grocery stores are crowded places, and operating offline wasn’t aligning with safety measures.  

The nonprofit decided to take its operations online. First, they used Google Forms to organize hundreds of grocery items alphabetically and take orders. Customers would go in and check off the products they wanted to buy. The nonprofit would total it, and customers would pick up their order. 

Obviously, it wasn’t a smooth process. To improve it, City Greens Market decided to build a digital checkup process on Ecwid to use ecommerce effectively. However, they needed to adapt an online store to their specific needs. 

Setting up an online store

City Greens Market had hundreds of grocery items to organize. Not only did they have to upload all those products to an online store, but they also needed to make navigating such a vast assortment convenient for customers. To accomplish their goal, City Greens Market built a simple website with an online store. 

First, they exported all products they had in their Google spreadsheets, turned them into a CSV file, and imported it into their online store. The prices and product names were already there; all they had to do was organize them into categories. When assigning categories to products, City Greens Market was able to add specific products to multiple categories. For example, ice cream could be put in “Dairy” and “Frozen foods,” making it easier for customers to find it.

Setting up member discounts

When it came to setting up the checkout process, it took the nonprofit a little bit of figuring out. There are different prices for City Greens Market members and non-members, so the member status has to be considered at checkout. The nonprofit wanted to allow non-members to check out and pay what they normally would and allow members to get their unique discount associated with their member ID. 

City Greens Market used Ecwid to set up unique coupon codes associated with each member’s user ID. This way, customers get the appropriate discount based on their income level. This allowed the nonprofit to have particular people getting their exact rates without calling in the store. The discounts are applied automatically at checkout.

Organizing in-store pickup safely

The pickup process also had to be organized as having large groups of people in a small building wasn’t allowed. The nonprofit had to figure out a way to get food to the at-risk population without having customers come all at once. 

Ecwid already has a built-in pickup scheduler. It allows customers to make their orders and then select the time and day of pickup for their products. However, City Greens Market wanted to take it a step further and limit time slots. They customized the pickup tool so that each 15-minute segment could be selected by two customers only. That means only eight customers an hour could pick up their orders. 

This way, City Greens Market managed to buffer visitors to prevent lots of customers from coming in and potentially spreading a deadly virus during the pandemic.

 

***

Nonprofits are constantly looking for new ways to raise funds, improve operations and grow awareness. Many nonprofits have found success by leveraging ecommerce platforms to sell their merchandise or collect donations. They’ve also used it to reach out to their community via email or make their daily operations more efficient for their staff and supporters.

If you want to use ecommerce for your nonprofit, you can start with a free online store built with Ecwid. You’ll be able to sell up to ten products (for example, your merchandise) or collect one-time donations.

 

*This spotlighted blog post is courtesy of Ecwid