We’ve made several improvements, mostly for cause organizers. One is that we now accept donations as little as $5. Another is that donors can now opt to provide cause organizers with their email address and/or phone number if they want to stay in touch. Organizers can now add money to the progress bar to show that they’ve received donations outside of CharityGoal. This will not affect the amount we pay at the end or the fees we deduct. It’s just a way to show when a cause has received donations from somewhere else. Organizers can do this by going to their My Account page, then to My Causes, selecting a cause, and then clicking the button to Increase Amount Collected. Also on the Manage Cause page, organizers can click View Donations and they’ll see we’ve added a feature to let them export the list of donors as a CSV file (if you’re not familiar with CSV files, just know that it will open as an Excel spreadsheet). If a cause is a charity/501(c)(3) organizers can now add up to 500 characters of legal information, which is required by some states. This information will appear on the cause page and the receipts we send to donors. We’ve also added the progress to the web embeds. Lastly, we fixed a bug on the Browse Causes page, so that only cause types with causes in them show up. Remember that there are many cause types, not just the ones shown. You can see all of them when if you create a cause.

As always, thank you for using our site!

Adam

Good news! I was able to lower our credit card rates, so I’ve been able to lower our fees. They are now 3.5% and 35 cents per donation, plus a $2 processing fee when we mail out the money raised (and that’s it – no hidden fees). This means we’re now one of the most cost effective fundraising sites that also allows you create your own cause page, so you don’t need to have your own website to raise money. We also provide you with easy to use tools to promote your page on other websites, Facebook, and Twitter. Add in how easy it is on our site to create and manage a cause page and what we offer is top of the line. Not to mention that we encourage people to add any cause (see my previous post). That means that we can attract all kinds of visitors, giving cause pages on our site exposure to a broader group of potential donors.

Ok, so I think CharityGoal is the best site to use when raising money. I’ll let you decide. In the end, I’m just glad to be able to give more to the causes that people have been nice enough to put on our site.

Thank you for your support!

Adam

We’ve launched CharityGoal! It’s an exciting time, but I really don’t know what to say. The first thing that comes to mind is “thank you.” Reading this means you’ve found our site, which is important to every website and especially important to us, because we’re one of those sites where word of mouth is critical and that has to start with someone – hopefully you.

The next thing that comes to mind is to let you know what I’m trying to do. You can read about this on our site, but for me personally, this is about letting people help other people directly. I want people to use CharityGoal as a platform to help others by donating money directly to them or to causes that are near and dear to them. In a sense, I think of our site as a complex way of wiring someone money. There are differences, but the analogy I’m trying to make is that CharityGoal is a tool for you to use.

Along those lines, I mean it when I say our site is for any cause (well, within the bounds of our terms). I really hope people use our site for all sorts of things and that someday I can come on to it and find almost anything to donate to. I’d love it if I went to our site and found college alums helping recent grads to pay down their student loans, great grandkids organizing a fund to help their great grandparents celebrate their 75^th wedding anniversary, successful businesses helping new businesses start out, fans of a local band chipping in to pay recording studio fees, former recipients of cosmetic surgery helping pay for someone else’s cosmetic surgery, etc. I want to see people creating cause pages that other people can relate to and thus donate to. That’s why this site is here.

I really hope you enjoy using our site. Don’t forget to let us know on our Contact Us page if there’s anything more we should do.

Thanks again!

Adam