Recurring Donations: An Easy Way to Pre-Plan and Automate Your Donations

By Angela Bevacqua
Senior Communications Specialist

Do you have soft spot for a particular cause or nonprofit? Is it hard to donate the amount you really want-- in one lump sum? Do you want to plan your donations all at once, and not worry about them the rest of the year?

These are some of the reasons people use the Recurring Donation feature on GivingFirst.org.

Incremental Giving

Recurring Donations allow people to donate to nonprofits in increments over a specific period of time. After setting up a donation schedule, a person’s donations occur automatically—directly from his or her credit card, debit card or bank account. They can set up daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even annual recurring donations for a specific amount. Nice and easy.

How to Do It

There’s nothing particularly special about making this happen. After pressing a “Donate Now” button on GivingFirst.org or a nonprofit’s website, the donation form guides you by asking if your donation is recurring. Then you are walked through a series of questions about the amount of each increment, when you want them to start and when you want them to end. (See screenshot below)

A Growing Option
We’ve offered this online giving option for four years and, so far, found that 14% of all donations from 2008 – 2011 were generated through the feature. This percentage is growing as more people learn about it and nonprofits help spread the word.

What’s Common…and Not So Common
The most common donation installments are monthly, and $25 is the most frequent donation size per installment. But can you believe that one person donated $23,700 and another person made 64 donations through the feature?

So go ahead--check it out and help us break some records!

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