Giving potential donors and visitors the opportunity to contribute, buy a membership, or buy event tickets online is something that is simple to implement, if you know.  Adding an online store is not much more difficult, although it does require some extra thought.

Online payment options are something seemingly foreign to most small museums.  If you can build a website for your museum, you can add some simple payment functionality.

No matter what you do, make sure it is secure.  I’ve considered joining a professional organization relevant to my field, and apparently, they expect me to give them my credit card over a server that will not encrypt the data in any way!

Memberships and Donations

The easiest way to add secure payment options for membership or donations is to use an online payment service, such as Google Checkout or Paypal.  With either service, you can set up your button(s) with just a few clicks, and knowledge of HTML is not necessary.  Once you configure your options, either service gives you the HTML code that you can then simply paste wherever you want to see it on your website (make sure, if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, that you paste the copied code into the code pane, and not the design pane — alternately, if you’re using a CMS like Drupal, you need to make sure you have appropriate permissions for all the HTML, and/or you may need to remove the line breaks).

The process to set either of these services is predominantly the same.  Google Checkout offers free processing for non-profits who are also part of their Google Grants (Adwords) programs. Paypal offers a discounted rate for non-profits, so be sure to give them your 501(c)3 information when you sign up.  Paypal’s rates are $0.30 per transaction, plus a percentage based on your sales volume, and compares decently with regular terminal rates. (The thing I truly hate about the per transaction fee is when people do multiple, unnecessary transactions.  Yes, you can change the quantity to 2, you don’t have to do the transaction twice!)

The nice thing about Paypal is that you can set up your account so that anyone can pay you, even without a Paypal account.  The drawback is that Paypal makes such visitors click through about 5 screens to make such a transaction.  With Google Checkout, no such functionality is possible — everyone must have an account.

Paypal

Google Checkout

Alternately, if you don’t like the look of Paypal’s button, you can attach their code to your own button image.  I don’t think this is possible with Google Checkout.  Do be sure that if your page background is anything other than white, and you’re using Google, that you choose the button with the transparent background.

One other easy option is a more full-service provider, like Network for Good’s “Custom Donate Now.”  I’m not a particularly big fan of this because small non-profits can do it themselves much cheaper.  It seems to me that if you have the cash to work with them, you have the cash to hire a web developer to implement another cheaper option for you.  I’d love to hear from anyone who disagrees.

None of these options require you to have access to your own secure server (https), yet are all secure.

For three great tips on configuring your donation page, visit Network for Good.

Event Tickets

Both Paypal and Google Checkout can be used to sell event tickets.  If you’re doing something large, however, this can get kind of messy.  Many shopping cart systems can be configured to do this,* there are many expensive ways to do this, and there are some cheap and easy ways to do this too.  Some options:

CiviCRM

Eventsbot

* I wouldn’t recommend setting up a shopping cart system just for event ticketing, but if you are already using one, give it a try!