“We’re a nonprofit. Don’t we get a discount?”

Every organization we work with is a nonprofit. That’s not a special circumstance we make an exception for. It’s the entire client base. So when somebody asks for a nonprofit discount, the honest answer isn’t a policy, it’s an explanation of what the price already reflects.

Nobody on that call was wrong to ask. A dollar saved on software is a dollar that goes to the mission, and asking is exactly what a careful volunteer should do. What’s missing isn’t goodwill. It’s a place to check the math before the meeting, rather than during it.

What’s actually true about the free ones

Zeffy, RallyUp, GalaBid, and Givebutter really do cover the card processing. That part of the caller’s instinct is correct. Card networks charge roughly 2.9 percent plus thirty cents on every transaction, and somebody pays it. On a free platform, that somebody is arranged to be the supporter, not the parish, through a tip prompt that shows up after the ticket price is already decided.

So the actual question isn’t whether the free platforms are honest about covering the fee. They are. The question is who ends up paying, and how much more than the fee itself.

Three honest answers to the discount question

The middle row is the one that actually answers the caller’s question. It costs the parish nothing, same as the free option, and it loses almost nobody at checkout. It’s the discount that was actually being asked for, just not the one being described.

Which of the free ones will let you turn the prompt off

If your parish is on Zeffy, there’s no version of this where the prompt goes away. No tier to buy, no switch to flip. Every parishioner sees it, every time, for as long as you use them.

Givebutter earns a separate note. Their prompt asks donors to cover card processing specifically, not a tip for the company, and we don’t think it does the same damage. What we couldn’t tell you is what percentage they preset, since they don’t publish it. Turn their prompt off and they charge 3 percent plus your own card fees, which on a typical parish raffle lands close to what we charge. Their real limit isn’t the checkout. It’s that they can’t run a basket raffle, a Queen of Hearts, or a duck race.

Why the number is 12

Twelve wasn’t a guess and it isn’t a round number picked to sound modest.

We wrote the first raffle software of its kind back when the alternative was a coffee can and a roll of tickets, and our team has watched tens of thousands of checkouts since. Twelve covers the card processing and the cost of running the site, and it lands on the comfortable side of where people stop reading and start abandoning. That’s the whole reasoning.

If you’d rather not take our word for it, test it. Run two raffles side by side, same prizes, same list, same week. Put 12 percent on one and 20 on the other, and count what actually completes. It costs one campaign and tells you more than anything on this page could.

Put your own numbers through it

Where the 30 to 40 percent actually comes from

This is the part that’s hardest to believe on the phone, so here’s the reasoning rather than just the number.

An unexpected cost at checkout is one of the most reliable ways to lose a sale that was otherwise decided. The Baymard Institute puts cart abandonment from unexpected fees at 48 percent across ecommerce broadly. Nonprofit checkouts do better than that, since the person arrived already committed to the cause, and ordinary abandonment for reasons that have nothing to do with fees sits closer to 7 or 8 percent.

Every figure on this page has that ordinary abandonment already stripped out. We use a Premium raffle with nothing added at checkout as the zero point, so when we say a tip prompt costs 30 to 40 percent, that’s on top of whatever you were already going to lose, not instead of it.

Why this hits parishes harder than most

• Older parishioners read the screen carefully, and they’re the most likely to stop when it asks for something they weren’t expecting.
• Anyone who already gave at the offering plate feels asked twice.
• Somebody who abandons at that screen tells three other people about it after the service.
• The tip is a percentage, so the better your raffle does, the bigger the ask against your own congregation gets.

On our Zero Fee option, the 12 percent is fixed, disclosed before checkout, identical for everyone. There’s no prompt, no pre-checked box, nothing to decide. Abandonment runs 1 to 2 percent.

What a discount actually costs, on a $20,000 spring raffle

The $1,240 shows up on an invoice, so it’s the number everyone remembers from the call. The gap in the bottom row doesn’t show up anywhere, which is exactly why it’s the one worth writing down before the meeting rather than during it.

What to say the next time somebody asks for the discount

• The free platforms really do cover the card fees. Say so, since it’s true and denying it undercuts everything else.
• They cover it by asking your supporters for a tip at checkout, not by asking your parish for anything.
• That prompt costs 30 to 40 percent of completed purchases at events like ours, on top of ordinary abandonment.
• Our Zero Fee option is the actual discount being asked for: it costs the parish nothing and loses almost no one at checkout.
• Every organization we work with is a nonprofit. There isn’t a special rate above the ones already on this page, because these already are the nonprofit rates.

And if a free platform really is the right call, use one

If your raffle is small, one prize, no cash sales, no basket format, and your parish is genuinely fine with supporters seeing a tip prompt, a free platform may be the right answer, and we’ll say so on the phone. We’ve told people that before.

What we won’t do is let the discount conversation end with “we’re a nonprofit, so it should be free.” Every organization we work with already is one. That was never the variable.