Supporting the CiviCRM project
List reader Jim Miller of the North Shore Choral Society writes in with a generous thought:
Is there any way to code the PayPal button on our website so that CiviCRM could receive revenue?
And he references the recent civicrm.org blog post RevShare & CiviCRM, which highlights exactly this point:
If you’re using PayPal, Stripe, iATS Payments or TSYS to process payments in CiviCRM, you’re already supporting the CiviCRM project financially — at no cost to you or your organization.
From the blog:
These are payment processors that have literally processed millions of transactions for organizations using CiviCRM and, as a result, have voluntarily chosen to share a small portion of each transaction fee with CiviCRM.
The income from RevShare has generally represented around 20% of our annual budget, so it’s quite important.
… Our revenue sharing agreements don’t increase the transaction costs that organizations incur when using the payment processors. ... The rates that payment processors charge is the same regardless of whether CiviCRM participates in the RevShare or not.
What’s happening here? It’s pretty simple:
These payment processors have a financial interest in ensuring that systems such as CiviCRM work seemlessly with their offerings. It naturally increases their own profitability. To help incentivize CiviCRM developers to keep it all working smoothly, they offer the CiviCRM project a tiny percentage of their own part of each transaction fee.
It costs you nothing, but it helps the CiviCRM project significantly.
But Jim, bless him, goes one further:
From a practical standpoint, given the low volume of PayPal transactions processed by NSCS, it might make more sense to just make a direct contribution from me to the organization as a whole or to a project you consider worthy.
And the answer there is also quite simple. I’ll tell you what I told him:
That's a generous thought. If you like, the CiviCRM project does accept financial contributions on its Support CiviCRM page.
To sum up:
The CiviCRM project is a community effort, not a giant corporate profit-making machine.
If you’re using one of the more popular payment processors (PayPal, Stripe, iATS Payments or TSYS) in CiviCRM, you’re already helping to fund CiviCRM’s mission.
If you’d like to take it a step further, you can certainly offer any financial support here.
All the best,
A.