Dropcash offers almost instant online donation tool

Howard Lake | 7 February 2006 | News

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Developed in 2004, Dropcash makes setting up a Paypal-based online donation system about as quick and easy as one can imagine. On the other hand it lacks true fundraising functions, so the likes of Bmycharity, Justgiving and Charities Aid Foundation can rest easy.

Dropcash lets anyone, individuals, groups of people, or organisations, set up a fundraising appeal online. The resultant appeal page can then be linked to from your own website or blog and you can solicit donations. Its creators say that it can be used for “raising money for a charity, a trip overseas, a family gift for mom, or to pay off a surprise hosting bill.”

Donations can be made by credit or debit card using Paypal. Indeed, Dropcash is simply an method of enabling paying using Paypal created by programmers Andre Torrez and Jason Kottke, using the Paypal application program interface (API). An API is “any interface that enables one program to use facilities provided by another.”

You can create one or more campaigns. To do so you need a Paypal account. Assuming you have one already, you then simply create a typekey account, a method of managing users online, for which there is no charge, and login to Dropcash. Then you give your campaign a name and add some details about what you need the money for, and perhaps details about your organisation.

Once the donation page has been created and promoted visitors can donate to the campaign or view its progress on a graphical ‘badge’. UK Fundraising has set up a campaign encouring readers to say thank you for the service with a donation:

Creating the turnkey account and the campaign page could take as little as 60 seconds.

The system has some useful features. Visitors can leave comments on the campaign, as well of course as making a donation.

You can also move your Dropcash campaign page to your own website simply by cutting and pasting some of the relevant HTML, namely the form tags. Andre Torres recommends: “Keep the IPN information in-tact and PayPal will continue to ping the correct server. Change the “thank you” page variable to your own page and now nobody will even know you are running a Dropcash campaign.”

Beyond that, of course it doesn’t compare with the sophisticated online fundrasing tools offered by Bmycharity, Justgiving and Charities Aid Foundation. There’s no mention of Gift Aid, although you could flag that up on your campaign page. There’s no way of creating other fields to gather further data on donors.

Still, it’s a good example of how API’s and some technical knowledge can be made to create a functional tool.

Note that Dropcash remains “in beta”, which means it is not guaranteed error free. Also Paypal will take its usual deductions from any donations or payments made using the system.

Does it work? In the 18 months since it was created people have donated US$323,497.58 using it.

So, feel free to try it out by contributing to UK Fundraising. We’ll use any money we receive to improve further our services to fundraisers.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.