No one has ever explained to me why it's a great leap forward in human progress that Benevity and its ilk have come into being, but perhaps there are good reasons, and if I knew those reasons I might have warmer feelings toward them.
Isaac and John make fair points, about the fees on giving through such organizations being out of the control of the ultimate recipients, and about the lack of transparency in such intermediaries like Benevity wanting the ultimate recipient to treat the gift as its original, pre-fee amount. And it is often the case that we treat our own credit card fees and such as expenses that don't reduce the amount of the gift that goes to fund the intended purpose of the gift. All true.
However.
I wonder how it comes across to our donor when they in good faith make, say, a $1,000 gift through Benevity and then don't appear in the $1,000 donor listing because we only credit the $970 (or whatever) net. When we thank our donors, do we thank them from the gift of $970 that we received from Benevity, and do we explain why? Be interesting to hear the range of practices.
Isaac's comment "If Benevity is a service to the donor..." is interesting. Has anyone taken a serious look at why individual donors contribute through Benevity? Is it the convenience of their portal? Do we know whether donors who give through Benevity give more or less than similarly-situated donors who don't?
If I understand correctly, some portion of Benevity's business model is managing employee giving programs for corporations. It's not hard for me to imagine that corporations would be happy to outsource that work. In the absence of a Benevity, would the likely result be that companies would run those programs in-house, as in the olden times, or that they might just discontinue employee giving programs altogether, and, if the latter, would we think that would be a good thing or a bad thing? In any case, the employee who makes that $1,000 contribution through their workplace giving program is at least a couple steps removed from the decision-making that results in us ultimately receiving the net reduced by the fees charged by the intermediary chosen by their employer. Also, it may worth keeping in mind that giving through the channel that their employer created might be the only way that we also get the nice employer match (minus fees, of course).
I'm wondering whether any among us have done a full communication with our donors, explaining that if they give directly to us more/all of their gift supports the mission of the organization, and perhaps that we can't provide member benefits if they give through a Benevity. If so, what were the results? If not, why not? Because that's not a message that we want to prioritize?
From a back-office perspective, I can see the logic of only crediting the amount that we actually receive, and I understand how getting a net of someone else's fees results in less control and is different from an accounting perspective than crediting the full amount and expensing the fees from our contracted payment provider (which is, after all, another third, albeit one working for us). I empathize with the motivation to "hold the line." I certainly empathize with the difficulty and time involved trying to infer the portion of an aggregated check that should be attributed to a particular donor, esp. given what sometimes seems like a Byzantine and variable fee structure.
But I wonder whether this looks different from the donor's point of view, for people who aren't so steeped in the "inside baseball" of the matter. We know what we'd like the donor to do, presumably, which is give to us directly (well, unless they're giving through an employee giving program and we also get a match, or...). But does crediting the net actually incentivize that? One hopes that it's not just irritating our supporters.
Lots of questions today.
My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.
Thanks,
Alan
Alan S. Hejnal (he/him)
Data Quality Manager
Office of Advancement
600 Maryland Ave SW Ste 600E
PO Box 37012, MRC 527
Washington, DC 20013-7012
(: 202-633-8754 | *: HejnalA@si.edu