The Power of Apps: Donations – Declarative Donation Forms for Nonprofit

By: Sergey Erlikh, Netherlands Nonprofit User Group Co-Leader and Salesforce MVP

In post 5 of The Power of Apps series, we’re talking to Chris Ferderspiel, COO of Blackthorn.io who shares how its app, Donations – Declarative donation forms for nonprofits (NPSP) is helping nonprofits create point and click native Salesforce donation forms, fully integrated with NPSP.

AppExchange Listing: Donations

Tell us about the company and your team?

blackthorn.io was founded in August, 2015 by 3 Salesforce veterans with the vision to help businesses succeed through innovative solutions built on the latest technology. We believe enterprise software should be easy to use, work out of the box without a costly implementation, and deliver great user experience without sacrificing customizability. Our first app was Blackthorn | Payments (formerly payment360). We are 100% bootstrapped, with 13 of us on the team and growing fast.

How does the donation app work? What’s the benefit for nonprofits?

Blackthorn | Donations helps nonprofits to point-and-click create beautiful, no-code, mobile-responsive embeddable donation forms and pages in minutes that help drive conversion and provide a first-class donor experience. It’s built natively for NPSP and leverages our free Blackthorn | Payments app (a native Stripe integration with Salesforce). All donation form submissions go directly to Salesforce with Household, Contact, Recurring Donation, Opportunity, Payment, etc. creation and matching logic (reducing duplicates significantly) and get processed automatically. The full implementation and initial form setup takes less than 20 minutes.

How did you get started working with nonprofits?

Blackthorn | Payments was receiving a lot of interest from nonprofits looking for help with managing donations and donations forms but no existing solutions were built natively (and only) for NPSP, all required integration or implementation, and/or lacked automation. Since our Payments app already provided a good foundation we decided to build Blackthorn | Donations to help nonprofits succeed with the solution they were looking for and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.

Do you have any nonprofit success stories you’d like to share?

We asked two of our live customers, SPCA International and Habitat for Humanity, what were four reasons they selected blackthorn | donations, and here’s what they said:

Stephanie Scott, Director of Marketing and Communications of SPCA International, said:

1. Price
2. One-click donations is a feature that other nonprofits have used with great success and we want to use it internally
3. Historical Invoices/Receipts was important to us
4. Saved payment information [within Salesforce for subsequent donations] was critical

Jordan Lewis, a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity who evaluated options and implemented blackthorn | donations said:

1. Salesforce native integration [to store the data natively]
2. On page secure cc processing
3. Custom form building features
4. Since it [Stripe] is direct to [our] bank account, it’s not necessary to keep separate ledger entries for PayPal.

Both nonprofits created their forms without outside development help and manage their whole donation process in an automated fashion, without writing a single line of code. Since go-live both processed hundreds of donations successfully without issues and received great feedback from their donors.

Why should ISVs support the nonprofit community?

Nonprofits help the worlds’ causes and people in greatest need. Supporting nonprofits makes work and life more fulfilling, knowing that our efforts are going to a greater cause, albeit with an adjusted profit, but for the greater good, it makes it all worth it.

How can nonprofits get started with your app?

Click “Get It Now” on our Blackthorn | Donations AppExchange page and start receiving donations with your live form in less than 20 minutes from installation (including configuring Blackthorn | Payments). The pricing is 1.25% + 20c per transaction (plus Stripe’s fee. For 501(c)(3)’s in the US, their pricing is 2.2% + 30c. Their pricing differs by country and entity type). If a nonprofit’s volume is greater than $80,000/month USD, there is auto-discounting built into the app. Read our documentation here to help you get started and don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Check out more apps in the Power of Apps series >>