Donately
Online fundraising for nonprofits, businesses & individuals
4,4 /5 (130 reviews) Write a Review!
A really useful tool with a great team of people running it
Pros
As a small business owner and somebody who just wants to make a difference and teach her students to do so as well this is perfect for us. The folks that donate to our program never have a problem using the software and whenever we've run into trouble someone from the team always responds and fixes the issue. I'm hoping to grow with this software and this organization.
Cons
I wish there was another option besides using striped when it comes to accepting the donations. I don't understand why it is that it should cost so much especially since this is all about charity giving back to your community. That being said the format of the software is very good as I said before and the customer service makes up for what I think is pretty hefty when it comes to how much money is taken from our organization being able to help people. Another thing I would really like is it there would be a way to make an app for Android and iPhones. It would be so much simpler for us to promote and use. But again I guess that probably will come with time.
Response from Donately
Hi, Jennifer.
Thank you so much for taking the time to review Donately! We are glad that our platform is meeting your needs and helping you make an impact.
In regards to payment methods, please do note that we also offer PayPal as an option. We understand that keeping costs low is a vital component of fundraising, which is why we're committed to providing our platform at an affordable rate for organizations of all sizes.
Technically excellent product
Overall have had very strong experience. Wherever there has been a hiccup, it has turned out that the Donately technology was working fine, and it was a problem with a third party technology instead.
Customer support has always been rapid and on point. I would strongly recommend use of the Donately technology.
Pros
The thing i like most about the software is its customizability, and the ability to deploy the widgets onto third party websites. The ability to customize the donation form to gather aditional data is great and the ability to manage formatting through the API is also great.
Cons
The out of the box features could be enhanced, both in terms of using the standard donation pages, or in using the API. For example, when inserting a custom field into the donation form, there is some weird logic about the attributes on the form appearing in the code in reverse order, so a bit tricky to figure out where to place your custom object.
Would also love to see more detailed reporting on the 'gross' and 'net' donation information in the dashboard so it's easier to track how much was received from donor vs how much after fees will actually hit the bank account. It should be easier to understand what portion of fee is going to Donately and what portion of fee is going to Stripe.
Response from Donately
Hi, Andy.
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review of your experiences with Donately. We are happy to hear that Donately has fit your needs, and you'd be proud to recommend our platform to others.
We also thank you for providing us with suggestions where we can improve. We will always take this into consideration as we continue to improve the platform.
Simple Easy To Use Solution
Its been okay and it does serve its purpose. Customer support is slow especially when you're trying to have a conversation with someone to answer all your questions. Forms aren't able to be customized which is especially disappointing with campaigns and peer to peer fundraising. There should be more templates for options on both the campaign and fundraiser angle. More importantly I wish there was a way that our campaigns could stay on our site and not bounce to the donately url. This serves its purpose and isn't horrible and given that the other options out there are massively more expensive then this seems like the right option for smaller non profits.
Pros
Ease of use
Cons
lack of different templates and customization
Response from Donately
Hi Claudia,
Thanks for filling out a review! Sorry that there was some aspects of Donately that you felt needed work. The good news is that we take your suggestions very seriously and we are always trying to make Donately better.
Per customizing the donation forms, by using the form embed you essentially have full control. If you are using our free hosted pages I'm happy to say that we'll have all the embed form features available there as well, in the next few months.
Per more campaign types, you're speaking our language there - that's a major push in 2017 for us. We will have various options to choose from.
Per bouncing to Donately from your site, I don't understand that one. One of the main features of Donately is the ability to embed the donation form on your site - and not send them to your free pages on Donately.
If you have any further questions on any of this, please contact me at [email protected]
Cheers!
Bryan
User-friendly donation platform
My overall experience with Donately has been great, though I do think some of the features that are lacking could prove problematic. I would also like to be able to more easily add team members to the free software.
Pros
Donately is an easy-to-use fundraising platform. Campaigns are easy to set up, customer support is reliable, and payments are on time. It is a free platform that allows many payout options and as many campaigns as you want at a time. I would definitely recommend Donately to people looking for a reliable, easy-to-use donation platform.
Cons
The only thing I believe Donately should add to their platform is a feature for comments by donors. At this time, donor comments are anonymous, which means people cannot see their support live on the campaign, nor can the campaign managers respond back publicly. I would love to see a new comment feature in the future.
Response from Donately
Hi, Nora.
Thank you for your honest review of Donately! We're glad to see that you've found Donately easy-to-use and useful tool to enable your fundraising.
We'll definitely take your feedback for a public comment feature into account as we further evolve and grow Donately!
Excellent fundraising tool!
As we raise money for our campaign, it has been incredibly easy to get fundraisers to sign up. Additionally, attracting donors has been simple, too.
Pros
Donately is easy to set-up, navigate and get support when needed (which, thanks to it's user-friendly interface, is very rare).
Cons
The monthly fees are high for our organization but the fee upon completion of a campaign is one of the lowest.
Response from Donately
Hi, Cory.
Thank you for leaving this review! We're happy to hear that you've had a positive experience with our platform and our team.
We understand that keeping costs low are the utmost priority for all organizations. We're committed to providing one of the best values in the online fundraising space, and giving nonprofits of all sizes a scalable option for their needs.
Donately Review
I have enjoyed using the software and each time I have asked for help, I have received the response promptly.
Pros
Being able to see the recurring donations and the dates dates of effectiveness
Cons
The fact that there is no app for the phone.
Response from Donately
Joe - Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate the feedback. While all of our assets are fully mobile responsive, we do understand the benefit of a dedicated app. For now, we hope that our mobile-friendly dashboard, donation pages, and donation forms make for a great experience regardless of device.
Useful free option for receiving donations
Overall, Donately has been a great tool for our tiny nonprofit that doesn't have enough donations yet to justify paying a monthly fee. The free version covers all the basics. It's not a full donor database, but it gets the job done.
Pros
Donately was pretty easy to set up, and gave us a nice looking page. I was looking for an option that didn't force a donor to tip the platform, but did give the donor the choice to cover fees. I also needed to be able to enter donations that came in from other sources, which I can do on Donately. The recurring donor feature was also great. They haven't spammed us a ton with emails like some of the other free options.
Cons
There's no way to delete a donor. The system has no option to email me when we get a donation, so I have to go check for donations. (We can get Stripe transaction emails but they go to a different account.) I can't change the admin user email address or add users on the free version.
I would like to be able to ask for mailing addresses, but my only choice is to require it or not ask for it at all.
Response from Donately
Hi, Ingrid.
Thank you so much for your honest feedback of Donately! We're glad you've found our platform fits your needs and has helped your organization raise more money online.
We'll take your suggestions for improvement into account as we continue to improve Donately for all users.
Excellent, Easy Donation Functionality
Pros
Really easy set-up and the customer service is wonderful
Cons
You have to have a payment processor like Stripe to connect to, so there is additional set-up beyond just Donately.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your kind words, Ken!
Some kinks, but otherwise an effective tool
Pros
I love the ability to have recurring gifts and the process of setting up a campaign is easy. The fact that I can easily link this via Constant Contact, Wordpress, and other applications that we use is also much appreciated.
Cons
Our Office Manager has difficulty figuring out someone's actual donation (TO US; after subtracting out Donately fees and other associated costs); We have donors who use both Donately and checks and I don't like that the campaigns only factor in progress toward our goal with what has been received by Donately...feels like we should be able to manually input funds raised toward the overall campaign goal. The formatting for the campaign photo is a nightmare.
Response from Donately
Hi, Elena.
Thank you for this review of Donately! We're glad to see that you've found our fundraising tools useful and that you've made the most of the many integrations we offer!
We also appreciate you letting us know where we have room to improve. I will reach out to you directly, as you are able to earmark both live donations AND manually entered checks towards a campaign, which will give you an accurate count to your goals.
Best way to accept Donations!
Donately helped our team a lot to get support from worldwide for our startups to kick start. Recommend it.
Pros
They only charge a processing fee only, which is very small precentage. With these service, donators can donate via many options. And user can customize the donation page to match the need. Customer Service is really friendly and helpful.
Cons
When Embedding form to other websites, sometimes getting issues. Need support to more services. Add features to support other currencies as well.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your honest review, Bhagya! We look forward to serving your organization into the future.
Perfect for small NGOs
We've been using Donate.ly for several years now. The 2 major things I like about it are:
1. You pay per donation processing fees, which are reasonable. There is no monthly fee. This makes it possible for small NGOs to accept online donations without it costing us an arm and a leg up front.
2. You can easily embed the donation form into your own website. This allows you to keep the brand of your organization and legitimizes your group because you don't send folks to PayPal or Network for Good or some other third party processor.
Other than that the service is ok. I think they are updating some of their online donation tracking tools, automating some email responses, and such, but it isn't the most advanced in those features if that's what you're looking for. For instance, there is no way to automate a message to donors if their donation doesn't go through and they need to update their credit card. The donation email confirmation options are also pretty limited but we've managed to make the confirmation email look ok and work for our purposes.
We use Zapier to help us track donations into Google Spreadsheets. We don't use the Fundraising pages really, but those are options and they do have peer to peer functionality.
Ultimately, the service is perfect for us. It accepts donations on our website and doesn't have a monthly fee. And the customer service is amazing. I've worked personally with them a few times and they are always so personable and helpful, available via chat right through their site. Definitely recommend.
Pros
Price and ability to embed on my site.
Cons
Limited donation tracking and donor outreach tools.
Donate.ly at a small church
Hello donate.ly! We have been so much happier with your service now that our congregants can manage their own giving. This is huge! One thing that's been difficult is figuring out the best way to export data from donate.ly, say, to a spread sheet. We've not been able to do this successfully and it makes life more difficult.
Pros
The user interface for the giver is easy to use and clean, and looks good on our website. We love that there's an option to make a recurring gift and that we can fairly easily change the interface
Cons
It's been difficult to mine the information from donately (emails, data, etc) for use in our database. Also, donate.ly doesn't alert us if someone's recurring gift stops going through (credit card change, etc)
Response from Donately
Hi Emily!
Thanks for your response. We're glad you're on Donately and we're happy to help solve any of the issues you're experiencing. You can export any donation or donor data from your Donately dashboard. See this article for more information (http://help.donately.com/all-things-donations/donation-data/exporting-data). Additionally, if you go to Settings -> Account Admins, you can sign up for emails when recurring donations fail.
I hope that helps!
Great Software for Non Profits
This site allows us to easily collect donations for our non-profit organization. We are in the process of exclusively using this site to collect donations in conjunction with Stripe because it is so much better than any other site we have ever used.
One con is that donation form codes have to be completely updated on our website, rather than just updating them through Donately and having them automatically update on our site.
Pros
Extremely easy for our customers to use!
Great customer service!
Cons
Not the best at allowing us to view all donors and donations at once.
Sometimes the filtering is really slow.
Form codes cannot automatically update on our website and have to be completely replaced after making a change to the form.
You can only link one bank account to where the donations to go.
Donately is RAD
Over all great company they took us from a prehistoric out dated giving software to something social media friendly, ascetically pleasing and a platform our highly valued volunteers can actually use! Thanks Donately for changing our lives!
P.S. Send me a Amazon gift card or two ;-)
Pros
Easy. user friendly. continues to improve.
Cons
Some functionalities are not totally there that we would like. For example If I'm a long term giver to someones fundraiser Id like to print our my end of year giving report or a selected date range. On the Organizations side I can do this but on the givers side not so much.
We recommend Donately
We use Donately for our donation form on our website and for fundraising campaigns. We have always found it the product very easy to use and functional, and the customer service fantastic.
Pros
The customer service is very fast, helpful, and friendly. The basic product is easy to use and has a lot of options that are useful for us. As a small non-profit organization, I appreciate the number of options that we do have using the basic service.
Cons
I do wish we had more options for developing the look and feel of campaign landing pages.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your kind words and honest feedback, Jenny! We're working hard to improve all aspects of the platform, and will take your suggestions into account.
Great for Small Non-profits
Donately has definitely helped us get the most out of our donations. Donately allowed us to set up an easy and nice looking web form on our site and effectively helps us manage donations.
Pros
Donately is a fantastic tool to use for small non-profits. It is affordable and helps better manage donations. The web forms are also attractive and I like the custom options for email automation and receipts. Donately easily integrated with Stripe and was set-up in no time.
Cons
I was there was more options for sending automated emails after donations and getting notifications to multiple email addresses.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your review, Elizabeth! We will take your feedback into account as we continue to improve the platform.
Overall very satisfied!
Coming into using Donately, we didn't really have anything else to compare it to as this is our first go at an online donor database.
There are a lot of positives of Doantely (including the automatic receipts, it is so easy to use, our donors seem to like it so far!) and a few things our team has found challenging. (isn't really clear on how donors can log-in on their own and change information, can't easy merge contacts..etc.)
But anything we haven't liked, your team has been so willing to try and implement the changes as quick as possible. We LOVE that you all are so easy to get ahold of.
Pros
Easy to use and easy to communicate!
Cons
Not as clear on how donors can re-access their log-in. We have had donors accidentally create multiple accounts which then can't be merged into one.
Just Better.
We were loosing donations due to our clients problems with Paypal's support of immoral policies. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know that other options existed. Then I found Donately, not only did my clients appreciate us not supporting bad business practices, but I found Donately to be 10x better and more functional than Paypal. It's easier to use, cleaner and crisper. I wish I would have known about them in the first place. I for one can say with 100% certainty, Donately is just better!
Pros
Ease of use.
Cons
Could use the ability to be able to have a drop down box for people to select specific options for where their money is being used. Meaning the client and pick for their money to be used for a specific project within the numerous we have.
Perfect for our gap year between CRMs
Pros
In between upgrading our CRMs, a process we knew would take a couple years, we were looking for a nimble and affordable product to manage our online donations. Donately was ideal for this purpose! Customer service was always immediate and top notch, and the product was routinely improving, inspired by what I can only assume was customer feedback. From a UX perspective I vastly prefer Donately, but ultimately a product that speaks directly to our CRM is best for our organization's fundraising goals.
Cons
More developed self-help resources would have been useful when we first implemented Donately, but customer service was so expedient that this never really caused any issues.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your feedback, Ali! We were happy that we could fit the needs of Curtis!
NGOs' True Friend
It is really helpful service to NGOs and Start-ups. The features and support from staff, leads me to recommend this to worldwide users.
Pros
We can create forms to accept donations and can customize the form accordingly. It is able to share the campaign easily to reach more people. There is no monthly fee or other hidden fees, just only a processing fee charging per donation which is really helpful.
Cons
Need more support to Asian Countries. Not getting any notification when recurring donation stops. Need features to customize the donation page more.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your honest feedback and suggestions, Nipuna!
Small nonprofits may benefit big!
Pros
Coming from the nonprofit industry, I am no stranger to fundraising software. I've used Donately in a program assistant capacity. A cool thing is that you don't pay monthly. You pay per donation, which helps small nonprofits (this could also be a con for some). However, focusing on larger, fewer gifts rather than a bunch of little ones -- the per donation fee wasn't horrible for us. Having this tool made us more legit rather than relying on PayPal or a common third party app.
Cons
Customer service could be improved, but thankfully we didn't have too many issues.
Response from Donately
Thank you for your feedback, Brianna! We're sorry to hear that our customer service fell short of your expectations. Please feel free to email us at [email protected] so that we can make this up to you.
Not bad, just wish it was integrated ...
Just wish there was a pre-prepared package that allowed for immediate integration with the top 10 crs programs such as Donor Perfect.
Pros
stats
Cons
not integrated with CRS data bases
Movement for Water Equityin Pakistan
Water is a source of life and its distribution and management should abide by the values of equity and social justice. Equity alludes to notions of distributive and procedural justice and transparency. Equity in water implies the right to a minimum amount of water for basic human needs plus the assurance of procedural fairness and transparency in the provision of this basic human right. YLP attempts to recast water YLP related policy and research to address the vulnerabilities likely to be accentuated by water related disaster. Contemporary water resource planning frameworks are based upon normal conditions continuing into the future. A YLP approach aims to build societal resilience in water related extreme events, such as droughts and floods, by treating extremes as part of the normal continuum of human environment relations.Young League Pakistanis encouraged to become lifelong learners, active participants and resilient, accomplished and confident contributors. Movement for Water Equity in Pakistanrun by Young League Pakistan, with a consistently fine record of achievement. It is also a place where citizen are taught to value spirituality, hard work, friendship, compassion, integrity, good humor, self-discipline, loyalty and community service.
Great support, and a pricing model that works for us
We were drawn to Donate.ly because we are rebuilding our online donation and for the volume of expected donations it made a lot of sense. Our backend CRM is salesforce and so we needed to use Zapier to create opportunities and contact records. Bryan Shanaver was quite helpful in getting that set up for us.
I want to give features and functionality a 4 but no doubt it will get there with a more advanced recurrent donation logging and foreign currency, a 5 would be non-cash gifts. Make no mistake though it is great value for money, so as they grow I am sure it will be well made. I would recommend it for small to midsize non-profits at its current form.
Pros
Great value for money, awesome support.
Cons
Great if we can do multi-currency as we are a global org. Also if it can note down it is Xth recurrent donation somehow it can make our backend record keeping better.
Pretty satisfied
Donately has been pretty good to us so far. I like the simplicity of it. I'd give it four stars in terms of simplicity of use because of the need to be a bit more technically savvy to be able to modify the donation pages and what not. We haven't gotten there yet and the improvements we need to make haven't been done because of the need to get high tech assistance. I think if that process were easier, then the lack of advanced controls would be more easily surmounted. I haven't had issues with customer support, but haven't needed much.
Pros
works well, looks nice, pretty easy to use
Cons
Hard to take to the next level without help.
