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Online giving keeps climbing.
In 2024 Americans contributed roughly $592.5 billion, a 3.3% jump from the year before, with corporate gifts up 6%.1 Yet the infrastructure behind those dollars still relies on aging payment flows, patched-together work-arounds, and high processing fees that quietly nibble away at every gift.
For years, PayPal Giving Fund's Donate Button has dominated the market. Its simplicity is undeniable, but the cost is fixed: 2.89% plus $0.49 on every domestic donation if the nonprofit is not “confirmed”.2 At real volume that adds up fast, and the funds must still snake through PayPal's settlement rail before a charity sees them. Platforms like Donorbox promise lower platform fees (as low as 1.75%) yet add another processor's cut on top.3
In parallel, professional fundraisers such as Fandiem or Member for a Day regularly juggle thousands of micro-donations, then transfer lump sums to a donor-advised fund (DAF) days later. Each extra hop means extra reconciliation work, longer audits, and higher compliance risk. And, most importantly, it takes longer for the benefiting nonprofits to receive their funds - a critical component of this entire operation!
Most professional fundraisers first settle donations into their own merchant account, then initiate an ACH to a DAF within two business days. That ACH takes another three to five days to clear, delaying distributions and muddying the audit trail.
When processors, DAFs, and payout tools live in different systems, generating a complete ledger for annual audits becomes a spreadsheet marathon.
Verifying that every benefiting nonprofit is in good standing against 38 separate state registration regimes (plus DC) is a job few payment providers touch.
Layered “platform,” “processing,” and “payout” fees erode the final amount that reaches the cause, which is compounded when you serve hundreds or thousands of nonprofits at once.
Change partnered with a leading full-stack payments processor to ship a single embeddable payment form that deposits every dollar straight into Our Change Foundation, Change's partner donor-advised fund, with neither interim merchant account nor ACH relay.
Here's what that unlocks:
Removing multiple ACH transactions back and forth saves valuable time. Donors get instant receipts and nonprofits see gifts sooner.
Change's partner payment processor operates as its own acquirer, eliminating third-party mark-ups and saving platforms up to 40% versus traditional stacked models while charging lower interchange mark-up overall.
Because donations never co-mingle with commercial revenue and always arrive at a federally registered DAF, state charity officials get a clean, regulator-approved flow of funds. Change layers on automated EIN checks, 50-state registration status, and watchlist screening before any payout is triggered.
The same API that accepts the donation also records the net payout to every beneficiary, so reconciliation happens seamlessly.
Whether you disburse to ten charities or ten thousand, the form handles bulk payouts in a single run, making it ideal for high-volume campaigns, round-ups at checkout, or national sweepstakes.
There are limits. The form is designed for flows where all checkout funds are charitable. It's not meant for mixed carts where only a dollar goes to charity and the rest to merchandise revenue, and it currently cannot replace Shopify's native checkout. For those pure-play donation cases, though, the combination of lower processing cost, faster settlement, and built-in compliance is hard to beat.
Change doesn't just plug in a payment form. We continuously verify the legal status of every beneficiary across 38 state charity bureaus and DC, maintain the DAF that receives the funds, and generate campaign-level compliance reports. Law firms that already trust us to automate multi-state registration for their nonprofit clients recognize the same rigor baked into our payments stack.
The result is a turnkey path from checkout to compliant payout: a simple integration, one ledger, zero guesswork.
As online giving accelerates, donors expect seconds-fast checkout and charities expect timely, transparent disbursements. Legacy rails stitched together from “donate” buttons, ad-hoc ACHs, and manual spreadsheets may start to feel inefficient and too much of a headache. A drop-in payment form that deposits funds straight to a DAF, backed by a leading payment processor's cost-efficient processing and Change's compliance engine, delivers the speed, savings, and audit readiness that modern fundraising platforms need.
If you process donations at scale and are tired of juggling bank transfers, fee spreadsheets, and state filings, let's talk about how Change can simplify your flow from click to cause.
Works Cited
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