Project Big Fish is a creative agency.

There are a lot of options for online fundraising and it can be a very hairy task to figure out what is going to work best for your needs and budget. Many services are very difficult to determine the time for setup and all the various charges, setup fee, month minimums and the floating % of your donation they keep. Some even provide free setup and no minimums but end up taking a much higher % of your donations and/or require you to setup your own gateway in addition to their donations platform. This can be very confusing and end up costing even more since you will pay a % of your donation to the service which provides the forms and theservice which process the donation.

In our experience we have leaned toward Qgiv as a nice solution for clients who simply want a rather quick solution (usually takes up to 5 business days after receiving the client's basic financial information) . However, over the years, as we have wanted more and more control of tracking where donations are coming from especially through social media avenues and more control on the basic language, templates and style of the forms. With Qgiv and similar solutions this is more difficulty to customize. The forms are fairly set in stone and to change templates, files must be sent and completed by the team at Qgiv. That can be a problematic as campaigns need things "yesterday!"

These limitations have not effected many of the non-profits we work with because they are typically looking for the lowest cost for receiving donations and tend to not worry as much about the general language and style of the forms. Plus we usually have a little more of a timeline for making edits.

However, our political clients are much different. On the Democratic front, most clients throw customization out the window because they have a great and virtually cost free solution in ActBlue.com. If you're a democratic candidate, go no further, use it. The site is specifically built to help Democrats raise money fast and cost efficiently.

On the Republican side we are using Piryx more and more for the very reasons we feel limited by Qgiv. The setup is free and all we need is a candidate's bank information to get started. From there we can set up multiple donation pages rather quickly and customize the basic template, introductory content, disclaimer and style of the form. This is still a hosted solution, meaning we can not have the donation process occur within client's domain, like a truly custom solution. But for the price and ease of use, it is a great solution.

Watch this introductory video on Piryx and contact us today to integrate online donations to your site and social media avenues!