Challenge

The Canadian Red Cross relies heavily on online donations from more than 250,000 individual donors annually. While its online donation platform was functional, it didn’t integrate well with the organization’s other tools, and it wasn’t adequate for the growth planned for the years ahead.

Jessica Bernat, CRC’s director of digital marketing, was hired in 2022 to lead the organization through a digital transformation aimed at modernizing the fundraising process. “We had a lot of different tools. Nothing was necessarily wrong with them, but they didn’t talk to each other,” said Bernat.

To future-proof its operations, CRC needed a platform that allowed donors to self-serve more easily, with payment forms and checkout pages that were intuitive and easy to navigate. To remove additional friction, the organization wanted to add mobile-friendly payment options, including digital wallets. The migration needed to be frictionless for existing donors—something that was particularly important given the older demographics of some of CRC’s donor base, many of whom have been donating to CRC for decades. “Any time you’re making a change that will impact your donors, it’s a risk,” said Bernat.

CRC also wanted retention tools that would enable it to grow monthly donations, as well as tools to analyze donor payment data both natively and in its own data lake. And it needed powerful fraud prevention—a particular challenge for charitable organizations, which are often targeted as fraudulent actors test stolen credit cards.

Though the project was large and complex, CRC wanted the integration to be as seamless as possible, with minimal disruption for new and existing donors, as well as its internal team.

Solution

After evaluating several donation platforms, CRC selected Fundraise Up, a Stripe partner that helps nonprofits engage more supporters and raise more money. CRC was drawn to Fundraise Up’s digital-first mindset and AI-powered donation form that intelligently suggests donation amounts and prompts to give monthly. And with 20+ languages and 135+ accepted currencies, Fundraise Up would give CRC the flexibility needed to engage its international donors.

CRC modernized its checkout flow with Fundraise Up’s donation forms, which rely on Stripe Payments to process transactions. CRC used Stripe Payments to easily add digital wallets including Apple Pay and Google Pay and pre-authorized debits (PADs) in Canada. Stripe also powers Fundraise Up’s self-serve donor portals, which CRC’s donors can use to manage recurring plans, dedicate donations, and download tax receipts.

CRC used Stripe’s card account updater and fraud prevention solution, Stripe Radar, to help increase authorization rates while reducing fraud. The card account updater automatically updates payment details for cards that have expired or been replaced, while Radar uses AI technology to help CRC distinguish fraud attempts from legitimate donors.

Stripe’s integration with Fundraise Up made implementation easy, despite the project’s complexity.

Results

Payment optimizations increase average online gifts by 5% and monthly recurring revenue by 24%

CRC has launched numerous fundraising campaigns and emergency appeals on Fundraise Up and Stripe, which have resulted in consistent revenue increases and an improved online donor experience. AI-suggested amounts have increased the average gift size by 5% since implementation. “Our volume can be high, so that increase is a lot when you add it up,” said Bernat.

The new platform has also driven increases in the number of monthly donors CRC has acquired, retained, and upsold by allowing customers to use the payment methods of their choice. CRC has seen a 24% increase in monthly donor revenue and a 51% increase in the number of new monthly donors acquired in the past year.

Digital wallets drive $2.3 million CAD in new revenue

Adding Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Canada PADs has made it more convenient for donors to give, resulting in $2.3 million CAD in incremental revenue since launching Fundraise Up and Stripe.

Chargebacks decline by over 40% due to Stripe fraud optimizations

On its previous donor platform, CRC had been diligent about creating rules to limit fraudulent transactions. Not only did those rules transfer to Fundraise Up in the migration process, but Radar’s fraud prevention tools drove chargebacks down even further. “The machine learning tools Stripe has to identify fraud are working for us, and we’re seeing a reduction in how many chargebacks are coming through,” said Dan Korth, CRC’s senior manager of business systems.

Reconciliation and data processing are streamlined and automated with Data Pipeline

Data Pipeline has simplified CRC’s reconciliation process, making it easier to generate reports for the organization’s finance team and maintain consistency among the donor platform, Stripe, and CRC’s internal database. “Stripe’s APIs made it really easy to see what we needed to pull into our data lake, and that makes it a lot easier to build the reports our teams use to reconcile to the bank,” said Korth.

99% of existing monthly donors retained in migration to Stripe and Fundraise Up

About six months after going live with Fundraise Up, CRC started phase 2 of the migration, to move existing monthly donors onto the new platform. Bernat’s team worked closely with Stripe and Fundraise Up to develop a full migration plan that would deliver minimal disruption to these valuable donors. “We lost less than 1% of our donor file in that process,” said Bernat. “The experience was nearly seamless.”

About Fundraise Up

Fundraise Up is unlocking the world’s generosity by delivering the world’s best donor experience. Their AI-powered platform helps leading nonprofits advance their missions by converting more supporters into donors at scale.