Helpful Questions for Evaluating Giving-Day Platforms

The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Day of Giving has raised more than $40 million for local nonprofits over the past six years. Beginning in 2014, the community foundation moved its 24-hour giving day to coincide with Give Local America, an event started by online fundraising platform Kimbia to bring community giving events together on the same day. Like many of the participating community foundations, Pittsburgh had used Kimbia’s software with no complaints during the previous two years.

“Until May 3, we were completely satisfied,” says Christopher Whitlatch, the community foundation’s manager of marketing and communications. “Maybe too satisfied, because we weren’t looking under the hood.”

This year, during Give Local America, when nearly 50 communities held Giving Days using Kimbia’s system, the company experienced technical troubles, which made it difficult -- in many cases, impossible -- for donors to give.

To compensate, some charities extended their 24-hour giving days. Others put offline contingency plans into motion. But at 5 p.m., the Pittsburgh Foundation made the call to cut their giving day short, rescheduling for September 21.

Even before the tech failure, the foundation’s contract with Kimbia was to end soon, and Christopher Whitlatch, the community foundation’s manager for marketing and communications, was asked to evaluate other providers. In doing the research, he developed a list of questions other community foundations could use when evaluating a current or potential provider. The questions cover areas such as a platform’s capacity and availability of customer support.

Mr. Whitlatch recommends that community foundations or charities do this kind of due diligence every year. “There’s always new technology coming,” he says. “It’s a very fast-evolving world right now, and we need to stay as abreast of those changes as possible.”

As the Pittsburgh Foundation and others have realized, “It really can impact our brand if something goes wrong with our technology provider,” Mr. Whitlatch says. “We have to hold our partners accountable.”

Download the list of questions.