SDA boosts donations with school-branded online forms.
School profile
Mount Saint Dominic Academy (MSDA), established by the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell, is a Catholic, college preparatory school for young women. MSDA was founded in 1892 and is located in northern New Jersey.
“It’s really impossible to quantify the full value of VenturEd’s CampusPay. The first year we used CampusPay for our major annual fundraiser, we increased donations 5-fold compared to the previous year.”
— George Hayes, Director of Development, Mount Saint Dominic Academy
In a nutshell
- Increase donations- Online forms empower more families and friends to donate
- Complete flexibility- Easily and quickly customize donation forms and website pages for each giving campaign and/or audience
- Accelerate campaign launch and success- Speed campaign delivery with an intuitive, easy-to-use payment solution. Edit campaign pages “on the fly” to create targeted compelling content
- Lower cost- Online solution saves time and there are no hidden processing or customization fees
- Exceptional donor experience- Offer a more trusted, secure payment process with school branded campaign donation pages
The challenges
Modernize donation processing with online payments
Most private schools count on donations to ensure they have the funds necessary to meet budget requirements. Without an efficient, easy-to-use giving process, schools may not get the money they need to fund day-to-day operations, payroll or major capital-intensive projects.
According to George Hayes, Business Manager for MSDA, “before CampusPay, we were using a terminal at MSDA, writing out each person’s credit card information and had no online procedures – all and all, a pretty archaic and time consuming process.” Given the small size of the staff coupled with how long it took to process donations, George needed a more efficient donation collection process.
“What really sold me on VenturEd was the simplicity and flexibility of the payment solution. CampusPay look no different than any other page and completely integrate with our website.”
— George Hayes, Director of Development, Mount Saint Dominic Academy
Flexibility and creating an exceptional donor experience
It was important to MSDA that payment solution was “online-based” and integrates with the school website and provides an easy, seamless payment experience for parents and school staff alike.
“We looked at many different payment solutions including those that are dedicated to not-for-profit organizations as well as services that integrate with general payment processing services such as PayPal. Each one had significant drawbacks.”
According to George, one competing vendor only directed people where to send the donation rather than processing the payment directly online. “I noticed while reviewing its features that people started the process, but then stopped in the middle. The donation page could not integrate easily with our website, nor could we brand it to look like an MSDA page. I could see that some donors might feel the site was untrustworthy,” said George.
After seeing a demonstration of VenturEd’s CampusPay, an online application to create custom forms for all types of school payments, George was quickly convinced that this is the ideal solution for MSDA. “It is simple, simple, simple – and the page looks just like our own website. I can customize online forms for each of our giving campaigns and for each audience as well. Comparable products did not give MSDA the flexibility to easily customize campaign pages, and they cost almost double in ongoing fees,” said George.
The solution
Simplicity and seamless donation experience accelerates time to market of giving campaigns
When MSDA launched CampusPay they were in the midst of a website re-design. As a result, they needed to create forms for both websites. “VenturEd Solutions was great to work with. Not only did they answer all of my questions, they quickly worked on helping me create the necessary online forms for both website designs,” said George.
Once MSDA started using CampusPay, the school realized how easy it was to customize donation pages. Today, MSDA uses a unique online form for each giving campaign. MSDA has a standard donation page that is always on the website; at different times of the year the school adds custom pages for specific programs. Donation pages are also tailored for each audience. This customization is done in-house by the MSDA staff. As George emphasizes, “what makes CampusPay so easy is that it has an intuitive interface that allows me to easily edit online forms in real time, without requiring any coding knowledge. If I find that a particular message resonates with a specific audience, or if I want to just run an alumni campaign, I can customize a page for that constituency and be up and running in minutes.”
The result
Rapid growth in donations drives additional uses for CampusPay solutions
“The first year of using CampusPay was amazing,” said George. “Not only did my staff get back lots of time to do more important tasks, we actually saw exponential growth in our giving. Also, once we started using CampusPay for donations, we found lots of other uses for it.” For example, MSDA started to use online forms to promote campaigns and events to the community. They realized they could use the forms to solicit community sponsors for school events as well.
