We'd Rather Be Checked Than Trusted

In June, the National Council of Nonprofits published something this sector has long needed. It's called the Principles for Ethical Online Fundraising Platforms, and there are four: nonprofit consent, transparency, partnership, and accountability.

The NCN wrote them with its network of 52 state and regional nonprofit associations, and they wrote them because of behaviors most of you have already encountered first-hand:

• Platforms listing organizations without asking them
• Collecting donations on your behalf that you never agreed to
• Hiding platform fees in inflated processing costs
• Default selections that take advantage of vulnerable donors
• Your mission, in front of your own donors, described in words nobody on your staff ever approved.

Nothing in that document surprised me, and in truth, it felt validating. The ethical fundraising it describes is how we've operated since we started in 2021, and it says out loud what we've been arguing for ever since. The difference is that NCN said it with 52 associations standing behind it, which travels much further than any one platform's promise about itself.

We have endorsed the NCN fundraising principles.

We're one of a small handful of platforms to sign on so far, and I hope that number gets impressively large by the end of the year, including the platforms we compete with for your donation form. I don't want to stand out by being one of the only ethical options available. I want ethics to be the floor, and I'm proud we get to help put it there.

I started Better Giving in 2021 on a simple conviction: a nonprofit should own its own infrastructure and be able to build real reserves, rather than run its entire mission from one grant cycle to the next while a share of every dollar quietly disappears in transit.

Better Giving is a nonprofit itself, which means free forever isn't a position we could quietly reverse later. There are no investors to satisfy, no revenue target, and nobody to sell to, because there is nothing here to sell. We fully intend to still be doing this decades from now.

We used to publish our own version of these principles. We called it the Better Giving Manifesto, and it claimed three rights for every nonprofit: financial self-sufficiency, equal opportunity, and organizational autonomy.

I still believe every word of it. I just no longer think this sector needs one more platform maintaining its own private pledge and membership badge. The NCN said it better and said it for everybody, so we're standing ours down and getting behind theirs.

What that looks like in practice is less romantic than a pledge.

Our entire codebase is public and open-source, which means nobody has to take my word for any of this.

Have it audited.

When we say the contribution that funds us is always opt-in and never pre-selected, go find the code that draws that checkbox.

Don't want to sign up for our managed platform? No problem, you can copy the code and host it yourself.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Nothing we've built depends on us being the ones running it. Most nonprofits will still want the managed version, because a three-person development office has better things to do than maintain servers, and that is exactly why we make the alternative real. Staying with us should be a preference, never a trap.

We also go beyond free donation processing and give away the part most platforms charge for: free high-yield savings and free fund management, with no setup, AUM, or performance fees.

A nonprofit with reserves can survive dry seasons and afford to say no to the wrong grant. We publish our target allocation, too, so any nonprofit that wants to build the same thing elsewhere can copy our homework.

And because none of this should depend on where you happened to be incorporated, we act as fiscal sponsor for organizations that can't hold U.S. tax-exempt status themselves, so a grassroots team in Sierra Leone can accept a tax-deductible gift from a donor in Ohio.

That's the one place we charge anything, at 2.9% per sponsored gift, which is the lowest rate I've found anywhere and covers compliance cost rather than margin. I want it at zero eventually.

Next out the door is an employer donation-matching module, open source like everything else, because matched giving is one of the largest piles of money nonprofits leave on the table. It won't be the last open source product we release. The infrastructure this sector runs on shouldn't be proprietary, and we intend to keep publishing it whether or not you ever create an account with us.

So this is an invitation.

Join us at better.giving, free, in a few minutes, with no contract waiting at the end of it.

Or read our code first and come back when you've found the thing that would have made you hesitate.

Either way, hold us to it, out loud and in public. Nonprofits have been asked to trust this industry for a long time and burned often enough to know better.

We'd rather be checked than trusted. You can't audit a promise. You can audit us.

Chauncey St. John Founder & President, Better Giving