Show HN: Spora, New online giving service and its different
wearespora.comMy feedback would be to simplify pricing, seeing that 1% suggested you weren't using something like stripe - your website elaborates that you are and you charge on top of them, but your users really shouldn't have to deal with that.
Having two % based prices is really not very transparent. Do you take your 1% before or after stripe? That would change the total cost right? Making it a flat 4% with no other fees would be much better than indiegogo for example, and probably an easier model for your users.
From your video it seems to allow single or monthly donations on all funds - while a fund specifies one? While it makes sense to make it easy to give however you like, is it not awkward for fund creators to monitor and for the UI? I mean, if a fund is asking for $1000/mo and I donate $500 as an individual payment, what happens to the meter? Or vice versa, fund needs $1000 one-time and I donate $500 a month?
On an easier ux note you should default monthly funds to the monthly donate view instead of making users switch it.
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to thoroughly review our product. I really can't tell you how helpful it is! We put a lot of thought into how we should communicate our pricing strategy and the reason we decided to go with our approach is it's a similar approach all other giving tools take that don't charge monthly or set up fees. I think it's because if you don't specify the pricing breakdown, you end with with people asking for that information. By communicating that we charge %1 in addition to credit card fees, someone considering Spora knows exactly what the price breakdown is immediately.
Your UI comment is incredibly insightful. Our developers (Matt and Warren) have actually run into that problem and we are releasing version 2.0 in a few weeks with corrections to the mistakes you pointed out.
Just curious, what's your interest and experience with online giving tools?
Thanks again for the reply!
-Dane
That seems fair enough - rethinking about it that probably makes it easier to support other payment types too - indiegogo seem to quote 3-5% for various options. BTW your pricing does seem really cheap compared, is there any reason beyond you just charging less?
Tbh I'm not a huge user of these tools, just thought my feedback could be useful :) I've donated to a few indiegogo campaigns and raised on there twice. The faith aspect also isn't really interesting to me, but the site suggests it'll be available to others too? Btw I think the video only mentioned the faith aspect so it might be worth making it more general at some point too.
What allows us to charge only %1 is the fact that we are not investor funded. All of the indi-gogo's and the look alikes have to charge %5 so they can pay back the pockets funding them. We are building from the ground up- we believe our product will truly help nonprofits, so we're not interested in making a profit off of a handful, we won't be making much until we have over 200 nonprofits utilizing our service.
We are also working on removing the faith aspect. Our original target market was churches, but we realize nonprofits in general need what we have.
Spora improves the online giving experience with a completely re-imagined user interface, fine tuning the log in process, allowing a giver to sign up and give in minutes. Using a giving meter now givers can see the difference they make when they click "send," and the meter moves. Lastly and most importantly charge is 1% per transaction, which makes us less expensive than any other giving service provider Spora is truly the first major improvement to online giving in years You can see all of these great features in action by visiting https://www.wearespora.com/ and watching our video at https://vimeo.com/113853742
Why don't you use something like Google Forms, LaunchRock, or similar and just have a mailto: link?
Your so right...we need to get on that ASAP.
Thanks for the input! -Dane
Well, providing the input cost me 1 karma point as for whatever reason people downvoted it. Anyway, my mailto: handler on my work laptop is Outlook with my work email, so, that's one of the reasons mailto: is not a good idea!
Our developers our building a mail form into our page now...so as far as I'm concerned you should get that Karma point back and then some!
I know, that's the only karma that matters. 😄 What I meant is that people downvoted my comment here because I dared to make a suggestion.