Memorial Platforms
Pledge maintains a database of nonprofits and offers APIs and embeddable widgets
to facilitate searching and donating. The overall flow involves collecting the
user’s choice of nonprofit, and then embedding a Pledge donation form into the
memorial where donations can be made. We also offer a variety of communication
methods for your application including frontend (via postMessage) and backend
webhooks and APIs. Our developer documentation site covers much of this in
detail, but feel free to reach out to our support team if you have any questions.
Charity Search
Section titled “Charity Search”During the memorial creation, you may want to ask the user if they want to support donations to charity (e.g. in lieu of flowers). Memorial platforms can integrate charity search in two ways:
Our Nonprofit Search Form
Section titled “Our Nonprofit Search Form”We provide a search form that renders in an <iframe> on your page. The form
provides a simple yet powerful typeahead nonprofit search. When the user selects
a nonprofit organization, a postMessage payload is sent to your parent page so
that your logic can take over (presumably to show some kind of confirmation
screen before the points are redeemed). This approach allows you to offload the
nonprofit search onto Pledge, while still keeping the user in your environment.
See Embedding Instructions
Example Search Form
Our REST API
Section titled “Our REST API”Use our REST API to search for nonprofit organizations programmatically. You call our API on the backend to retrieve nonprofit data, then present the results to users with your own custom UI. This approach offers the most flexibility in terms of design and user experience, but requires more developer resources to implement compared to using our pre-built search widget.
See API Reference
Donation Form
Section titled “Donation Form”When the nonprofit has been selected, you can use the Fundraisers API to create a donation form for this nonprofit. The result of the API call provides you with a fundraiser ID that you can use in the embed parameter of the donation form.
Donation Disbursements
Section titled “Donation Disbursements”We disburse funds to nonprofits on a monthly basis. At the beginning of each month, we disburse processed donations from the prior month.
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 that is extracted from the donation 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 the Impact Hub) where they can see where the donations come from.