Changes to our fees

Dear GiveForward Community,

In an effort to be completely transparent, we wanted to let you know that, after some serious deliberation, we have decided to raise our fees by 1%.  Previously, we deducted 3% of every donation to cover the costs of mailing letters, issuing checks, and keeping GiveForward.org running.

We knew from the beginning that taking one of the lowest fees of any online fundraising site in the world would show our commitment to helping our users raise the most money possible and would demonstrate that we are not a profit-driven company.

Over the last year, we have experienced tremendous growth.  We have helped raise more than $1.2 million for people battling cancer, organ transplants and other serious illnesses.  We now have our first paid staff member (up until now, all of our interns have been volunteers and Ethan and I have not taken a salary in more than two years).   But with growth comes additional expenses.  For example, our hosting fees for the website are ten times what they were just a few months ago.

We now know that 3% is simply not enough to sustain GiveForward into the future.

In order for GiveForward to offer additional services while keeping the site fast and easy to use, we are going to have to rebuild GiveForward.org.  We are still going to offer the same simple fundraising tool, but we’ll soon have cool features like a widget that will allow you to fundraise from any site, the ability to send updates to all your donors at once, and better integration with Facebook.

We hope that you will be as excited by these improvements as we are.

Thank you for being a valued member of the GiveForward community, and we look forward to serving you better in the future.

All the best,

Desiree, Ethan, and The GiveForward Team