The Complete Guide To Stripe For Nonprofits

To get your nonprofit discount, first, you need to sign-up for a Stripe account. The process is fairly straightforward: just follow the prompts.

We can help you navigate the Stripe sign-up process if you need it.

To qualify for Stripe fees for nonprofits, you’ll need to show that at least 80% of your transactions will be tax-deductible donations. You can still use Stripe for other organization-related purposes, but the lion’s share of your processing must qualify.

Non-eligible donations include membership fees, tuition payments, ticket sales, registration fees, and auction payments.

Next, you’ll need to prove to Stripe that your organization qualifies for your discount.

First, you’ll need proof of your 501(c)(3) status. Your EIN number or a letter from the IRS is sufficient.

You’ll submit these, as well as the information you gathered in Step 2, by email to [email protected]

Stripe Elements can save you the trouble of creating your own UI assets while still giving your donation forms a feel that’s particular to your nonprofit.

Stripe Elements is a feature of the Stripe.js library. There’s also a mobile version available called Mobile Native Elements for Stripe’s mobile SDKs. Each prebuilt element is made to tokenize sensitive information. You can customize payment elements, buttons, and card elements. Additional elements — address and authentication — will be available soon.

Stripe Elements supports 18 payment methods with no additional integrations.

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble of implementing Stripe Elements, you have an alternative in Stripe Checkout.

Stripe Checkout is a premade, hosted payment page that offers convenient features, such as one-click payments, CAPTCHAs, and address autocomplete. It’s built with responsive elements, so it should work well on both desktop and mobile devices. You’ll still need to do a little coding to get it up and running, but the actual design elements are handled for you.

To enable donations in Stripe Checkout:

1. Enable Stripe Checkout through your Stripe Dashboard.
2. Add donation amounts to your Dashboard as though you were adding products.
3. Create donation and thank you pages on your website.
4. Integrate Checkout into your donation page.

Stripe’s a big enough name in the payment processing world to be supported by a vast library of integrations for project management, bookkeeping, marketing, and niche payments. Additionally, Stripe’s powerful API makes it possible to design your own should you not find a ready-made solution.

Notable integrations include:

• Mailchimp
• Zoho Subscriptions
• Paid Member Subscriptions
• Buy Me A Coffee
• Donorbox

Stripe supports recurring payments. You can implement these directly in Stripe or by using a nonprofit-focused integration that supports recurring donations through Stripe. Recurring payments have an additional fee of 0.5%-0.8% depending on whether you want the Starter plan or the Scale plan. Scale comes with all of Starter’s features plus Stripe Connector for NetSuite and the ability to give customers quotes prior to subscription.

Stripe supports recurring payments through both stored credit information and ACH payments. In most cases, you’ll want to handle subscriptions with ACH payments, as they’re considerably cheaper to process.

Stripe Checkout allows customers to self-enroll into recurring payments and supports custom enrollment through your website.

If your nonprofit sells merchandise, you’ll be happy to know that eCommerce is Stripe’s specialty. Stripe integrates with popular eCommerce platforms, such as WooCommerce, Zoho, and Magento.

Further, if you want to use Stripe as a white-label processor, eCommerce platforms such as Shopify can grant you access to Stripe without having to do any coding.

If you prefer, Stripe can help you handle your taxes and bookkeeping through — you guessed it — Stripe Tax.

For an additional 0.5% per transaction (or 0.4% if you process over $100,000/month), Stripe Tax will collect all applicable sales taxes for you. If you’re doing business internationally, it can collect the appropriate local taxes or VAT. You can then file your taxes yourself or automatically through one of Stripe’s partners.

A 1099-K form can help your organization report its taxes to the IRS.

Stripe provides these for accounts that process at least 200 transactions in a calendar year that collectively add up to $20,000 or more. The account also needs to belong to a US-based account, or a US citizen.

Stripe generally charges nonprofits 2.2% + $0.30 for online credit and debit card donations. Some transactions, like American Express, may be charged a higher rate.

Yes, Stripe can be a very cost-effective payment processing platform for nonprofits that take most of their donations online.

To get your nonprofit discount, you’ll sign up for a basic Stripe account online. You’ll then submit your proof of 501(c)(3) status to Stripe, along with documentation showing that at least 80% of your transaction volume will be tax-deductible donations.