How to receive donations online in Nigeria

What are donations? How do you accept donations on the internet?

Donations are more like free will gifts that people offer on behalf of a worthy cause. People who are influenced by your personality, business or goodwill can decide to make donations(mostly monetary) to support your cause. They do not expect anything in return or may at least expect that their contributions would be used for a noble cause.
Donations are more popular if you are promoting a good cause that adds value to human life such as charity or other non profit organization but the bottom-line is that they are primarily gifts that people give without expecting something directly in return. So they are really not buying anything but simply making a free no-string attached offering.

People normally give donations as goodwill gestures in places like fundraising events, weddings, church service, book launch, political events, naming ceremonies and so on. Majority of such donations that are done in Nigeria is normally cash based but with the growth of the internet, it is becoming imperative to also start accepting donations online.

What does it mean to accept donations online?
This simply means to be able to accept donations using the internet from people who identify with your cause. If for instance you run a charitable organization that helps in feeding and housing the poor, you can setup a website where people can make immediate contributions into your online account and you may even automate the process to include things like sponsors list and so on.

What do you need to accept donations online in Nigeria?
- A website: that informs the public about your cause and has a donation button
- An online payment account
- A payment processor

How it works:
People click on your donation button and enter the amount they want to donate, make immediate payment and receive a feedback page.

Online payment account
This is an account that works like a bank account that allows you to receive donations from the public. Good examples are Alertpay, Liberty reserve, Etranzact, Interswitch and so on. These are processors that can accept credit and debit card payments and can help receive, hold and remit payments on your behalf.

Personally, If you intend receiving donations from people worldwide irrespective of their currency, I prefer you go with Alertpay. It allows you to receive payments from all major credit card brands in the world as well as from anyone with funds in their Alertpay account and the fees are quite affordable. Get a free account today

Here is an example of an Alertpay button you can use to make donations to Multidox