Click & Pledge's software-as-a-service technology helps organizations of all sizes connect with donors even in today's troubled economy.
Click & Pledge can't do anything about making potential contributors feel flush enough to make donations, but the company is using clever technology to make the process of donating to your favorite nonprofit organization or political party as fast and easy as possible -- and has made a business for itself in the process.
As the economy heads south and potential contributors worry about their own finances, everyone from schools and churches to political parties and public TV stations is concerned about their contributions drying up. In response, these organizations are trying to do everything they can to remove any barriers that might keep their donors from giving.
("Kami")
Razvan
For more than 9,000 such organizations, that means turning to Click & Pledge. The company, founded in 2000 in rural Blacksburg, Va., took its Web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) system live in 2002. Called Trio, it now handles millions of dollars in transactions. In fact, dollar volume has been tripling year to year, according to Kamran ("Kami") Razvan, Click & Pledge's CEO.
The idea, says Kami, is to give even smaller organizations access to powerful fund-raising technology. Using SaaS principles, Click & Pledge charges an initial fee of just $50 per component, with free hosting, free support and maintenance, and free updates. Other costs include donation fees of up to 4.5%, processing fees of $0.35 per transaction, and so on.
Beyond The Donation
Over the years, Click & Pledge has expanded its Trio service to include helping organizations sell products, create Web sites, and manage their all-important contact databases. The combination has forced the company to implement a wide range of technology solutions.
With a mix of commercial and open source development, the system includes a custom Internet credit card payment system, a Sugar CRM donor-management system, and a Joomla Web content-management system. Click & Pledge also works with Constant Contact for e-mail marketing, TransFirst for e-Payment banking services, and many others.
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Technology Priorities
With all of that, however, "Our No. 1 priority is security," Kami says. The company is currently going for its PCI Level 1 certification, a process Kami describes as "excruciatingly painful."
Uptime is the No. 2 priority. "No matter what operating system people use, we have to provide uptime," Kami says. "A Web site is not a storefront," we have to have a 24/7 presence. But operating in more than 47 countries and accepting some 35 different currencies presents a constant string of availability challenges.
"The average user has no idea why it doesn't work," Kami says. "It worked yesterday, they say, 'and all I did was...' "
Worse, "people's expectations don't match their level of expertise and understanding. They want the Web to work like their desktop applications." To try and meet those expectations, Click & Pledge last year began moving away from static Web pages to take advantage of Ajax technology, but it proved quite challenging to provide compatibility on all possible platforms and browsers. "By the time we test something and make sure it works, it's obsolete," Kami says. As soon as Click & Pledge was able to be compatible with all the current browsers, for example, Internet Explorer 8 came out, Kami complains.
Bank of America can tell users their system supports only IE 6 or IE 7, Kami says. "I don't have that luxury ... We get [customer service] calls from people using Netscape 4!"
Other tech keys for Click & Pledge's developers in Blacksburg, New York, and Washington, D.C. (the company also is opening offices in Toronto and the United Kingdom) include redundancy, availability, and backups.
Next Page: Carrying The Load
