Marketplace Example Application

Scenario: you operate a marketplace, in which the seller wants to donate a portion of the proceeds to charity. As the platform, it is assumed that you control the flow of funds.

1. Charity selection

   You will want to present a list of charities to your seller/creator. Our embeddable nonprofit search widget streamlines this selection. On the other hand, if you want full control over the UI, you can use our REST API to retrieve the nonprofit data and present it to your liking.

2. Donation is triggered

   When a transaction occurs where the seller/creator makes a donation, make a call to the donation API, and provide the donor’s information (name, email, charity, donation amount). We log the donation as pending, and can send the creator a tax receipt.

3. Donation funds sent to Pledge

   On a periodic basis, we will batch up all of the pending donations and charge them to a payment method you provide us in a single transaction. It can either be a credit card or ACH. You can configure these transactions to happen monthly, or more frequently, based on when certain donation thresholds are met. For example, you can say, “I want to pay for the donations whenever we accrue $1k in donations.”

   At a minimum, you should be charged monthly so that the donations don’t take too long to reach the charity. You will find that some of your creators care a lot about the funds reaching the nonprofit in a timely manner. Our tax receipts include a tracking link that they can use to follow when the funds reach the nonprofit.

4. Donations disbursed to nonprofits

   We disburse funds to nonprofits on a monthly basis. At the beginning of each month, we disburse processed donations from the prior month. This means that if you choose to pay via ACH, we recommend setting your billing date to the 23rd day of the month so that the transaction has time to settle before the end of month. That way, the donations will be disbursed in time for the beginning of the following month.

Regarding fees

Pledge takes a 5% fee from the donation. The other fee is for payment processing. If you pay via ACH, the fee is 0.8% (capped at $5). Credit card is 2.9% + $0.30. There is also a $5 disbursement fee for the nonprofits. A nonprofit typically has donations from many of our partners in a given month, but there is just one disbursement fee. Nonprofits have a dashboard (called Impact Hub) where they can see where the donations come from.