We look at your current website and create a dedicated online donation page, on our own secure servers, that carries the same as your website. We then send you a widget for you to place on your website and in your emails that links to your secure donations page. We handle all the back-end processing and reporting and we send you your money, less transaction fees. That's it. Your only job is to get people to your website and donation page.

The transaction cost is a specified percentage, depending on which version you chose. For smaller campaigns that don't expect to raise a lot of money, it is frequently better to go with the higher transaction fee that is associated with the no-monthly version. For larger races, paying the monthly fee and the much lower transaction fee is often the better way to go. American Express charges higher rates than Visa, MC, Disc. The rate for American Express is always plus 1.3% over the base rate.

It depends in the version you choose. With the standard version, no. With the Pro and Custom versions, yes.

The break-even point is $2500.00 a month. If you raise less than that amount online each month, it is cheaper to pay the higher discount rate and go with the standard version with no monthly cost.

Yes, Blue Utopia operates in over 35 states and collects all required information, automatically, for all state agencies where we currently have a presence.

Every week, we generate reports for the previous week. That report is automatically posted to your dashboard and details all donations and charges and includes all the donor details needed for reporting.

Yes. Our system can be configured to tie into your merchant account. This the Custom option. The only requirement is that your merchant account must be configured to work with Authorize.net.

Cost and effort. You would need to raise a fair amount of money for it to be cost-effective. First, there’s an additional setup fee for us to configure our online donation software with your merchant account. Second, there are the additional costs of the merchant account itself. These costs typically range from $50-$300 setup and $20-$50 per month. You must also get a gateway account, which would come with the merchant account as long as you get an online transaction account (typically referred to as card not-present).

There are several potential advantages. First, is timeliness. When you have your own merchant account, any money donated to you goes straight to your bank account so you can save several days in processing time. Second is branding & perception. When you have your own merchant account, the name that appears on your donors’ credit card statement is your name (not Blue Utopia’s).

It would seem so but it's actually not very likely, at least not over the rate you can receive with the Pro version. The reason is the difference between the base-card-rate and the premium-card-rate. A very good 'base' rate is 2.1%. That would be the rate charged on all standard credit card trasnactions. However, corporate cards and rewards cards have additional fees that add considerably to that rate. A base rate of 2.1% will usually end up being an end-rate of 2.8-3.1% after the additional fees from these premium cards are included. That's equal or near the rate you get with the Pro version so there isn't really much room to save tranaction fees.

Financially, it probably wouldn't. You would do just as well to go with the Pro version. There are some non-financial benefits though and they are outlined above.