During the presentation titled “Paystik: Increasing Response Rates: Data, Analytics and Streamlined Donations,” the executive discussed Paystik’s new mobile method to ease and simplify the giving process. Streamlining the donation process is critical to nonprofits these days as mobile’s role in fundraising grows.

“We’re building a seamless bridge between the online and offline,” said James Ioannidis, CEO of Paystik, San Francisco. “We tell donors to skip the form. You have a smartphone with you – use it, donate on the spot.

“You need a way to bridge your offline strategies like direct mail with your online strategies, and that’s what Paystik does,” he said.

Nonprofit Mobile Day, a conference owned by Mobile Commerce Daily parent Napean LLC, was co-presented with the Direct Marketing Association.

Easy giving
Paystik claims to make it significantly faster and easier for donors to give to nonprofits.

Once donors download the Paystik application, they can set up an account and scan their credit card in under 90 seconds. Then they can scan a Paystik code for a specific foundation and donate in less than 15 seconds.

The partnering charities are responsible for publicizing the technology by including call-to-actions in their direct mailing and other channels.

For the more than 25 top nonprofits that use Paystik, the company claims that the total donations have risen 10-20 percent since switching to the new payment service.

Some companies that already use Paystik include Susan G. Komen for the Cute, Heifer International and Alliance for Community Media.

Organizations can sign up to use Paystik in 24 hours. Once they send in some basic information about the organization and its campaigns, Paystik will respond with the code that is specific for the foundation.

Donor insights
Additionally, Paystik provides nonprofits with data and insights on their donors.

The company accumulates data such as age, gender, education, marital status and income. Paystik also links to social networks, so it can use donor email addresses to obtain more data for about a third of its donors.

Paystik also breaks down the performance of individual campaigns within an organization.

The company promises to offer real-time analytics, so charities do not have to wait six months to see if a campaign was successful.

All of this means that charities can create more meaningful relationships with donors.

The technology goes beyond simply delivering money from donor to charity. It allows charities to follow up with the donor and create a more lasting impact.

“Text-to-donate has been awesome,” Mr. Ioannidis said. “It’s really valuable to capture an impulse, but more importantly donors want to give more.

“Text-to-donate is offering fixed value,” he said. “There are all sorts of limitations and regulation around it. Eighty-two percent of people want to give more. On an impulse, humans are more generous. On an impulse, people give 20 percent higher than when they have time to think about it.”

Final Take
James Ioannidis is CEO of Paystik, San Francisco