Point Redemption for Charity
Pledge maintains a database of nonprofit organizations and offers APIs to facilitate searching and redeeming points. Reward platforms can choose to use our search widget or API if they want to keep the user within their website. Alternatively, we offer a charity search microsite that provides a UI for both search and redemption.
Charity Search
Section titled “Charity Search”Reward platforms can integrate charity search in several 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
Our Search Nonprofits Microsite
Section titled “Our Search Nonprofits Microsite”In this scenario, the rewards platform sends their user to a Pledge microsite where a robust nonprofit search and redemption UI is provided. This approach requires a deeper integration as the rewards platform needs to provide a redemption API and user session handoff. We can provide further documentation on request.
Search Nonprofits on Our Website
Redemption + Flow of Funds
Section titled “Redemption + Flow of Funds”To redeem points, the rewards platform converts the points to a dollar amount, and makes an API call to the Pledge Donate API. Pledge tracks this donation as pending. On a periodic basis, we will batch up all of the pending donations and charge them to a payment method provided to us in a single transaction. It can either be via credit card or ACH. The rewards platform can configure (via the Impact Hub dashboard) these transactions to happen monthly, or more frequently, based on when certain donation thresholds are met. At a minimum, you should be charged monthly so that the donations don’t take too long to reach the nonprofit.
Upon redemption, we can send a tax receipt to the user (once reviewed and approved by our compliance team). Our tax receipts include a tracking link that donors can use to follow when the funds reach the nonprofit.
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. 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.
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.