The home page of Malala.org includes the Simple Widget, recently created by Give Lively.
Amazon Prime Day is quickly approaching — a stark reminder of the simplicity of e-commerce that more than 100 million shoppers around the U.S. now consider table stakes.
Meanwhile, however, for many nonprofits, obstacles remain to smoothing the process of accepting funds from their supporters.
The team at Give Lively, a philanthropist-funded startup that builds free online fundraising tech for nonprofits, decided to take on the challenge head-on, beginning with a partnership with Malala Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to girls' education.
“[Malala Fund] was looking for state-of-the-art donation technology that would allow donors to give directly on its website,” Molly Trerotola, media and communications manager of Give Lively, recently told NonProfit PRO. “When we learned about Malala Fund’s ask, we knew we could develop a solution that was perfect for Malala Fund and that would also address a larger challenge our nonprofit community was facing: the ability to fundraise directly on their own websites.”
That solution? Simple Widget, a streamlined user flow that allows a donor to give on a nonprofit's website with just one tap. The widget incorporates digital wallet tools like Apple Pay, PayPal and Google Pay to make the donation process as seamless as possible.
More and more nonprofits are starting to make use of the Simple Widget. Trerotola pointed to a Tweet from the Clinton Foundation, that brings donors directly to an embedded Simple Widget.
"Most importantly, all of this is mobile," said Robin DuPont, Director of Social Innovation at PayPal. "Last year, there was a 27% increase in mobile donations. If I have to pull out my credit card and I'm sitting on a train or in a taxi, I'm likely not going to donate. I'm going to say, I'll go back and do that on my desktop. But if there's a mobile wallet available...I'm probably going to donate at that time."
DuPont was joined on a panel at the 2019 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#NTC19) in Portland, Oregon, by David DeParolesa, CEO of Give Lively, and Nicko Margolies, Digital Fundraising Strategist at Malala Fund.
“The platforms [nonprofits] were using in the past didn’t have the capacity to use a digital wallet,” DeParolesa explained. “For a nonprofit looking to raise more online, the conversation has been more about building a consumer-friendly experience."
The widget was designed specifically with simplicity of use in mind, Trerotola explained.
"(Simple Widget) is one of the first products on the nonprofit fundraising market that offers payment via digital wallet and auto-detects the digital wallet on a user's device, making donating via smart phone a simple one-tap process," she said via email.
Margolies made sure to emphasize the importance of thinking of the donor's preferences; while many visitors to the Malala Fund website chose the default $25 donation using the digital wallet, there are still a broad variety of options offered.
The key, Margolies said, is to “allow your donors to give in the way they want to give. Keep it simple and straightforward.”
The team at Give Lively is optimistic about the potential of the Simple Widget.
"I haven't seen it, to that level of efficiency, and that felt really good," said DeParolesa.
