How can community organizations collect money online securely?

I spent 20 minutes at a school PTA sponsored bake sale trying to figure out how to give change to parents who were paying for baked goods with cash that was in just as crumpled a state as their currency. Meanwhile the line of waiting parents continued to grow longer and longer until it went out the door and around the parking lot. I sat in a folding chair behind a folding table with a spreadsheet open on my phone and the cash box sitting open in front of me. This was not my idea of a good way to spend my time, after all I’m a volunteer and I have better things to do with my time than to be a part of an organization that is barely scraping by on fumes. But that is the life of the volunteer treasurer of a community organization that is operating on borrowed time and good will.

When collecting money for community groups it can get very messy. Many people are happy to donate to a club/school/organization but the way of paying can be a real problem. Most people are used to just paying with cash or writing a check but when dealing with a non-profit organization with no fixed structure this can lead to some weird and confusing situations. The treasurer (usually a volunteer who is already juggling a full time job and two kids in activities) is left to sort out the problems that arise.

What “secure” actually means for community groups

Note: In the following article, “secure” refers to financial transactions and methods for community groups such as soccer clubs and school fundraising events.

• Payment processing through encrypted channels, not a personal bank account or informal app where funds pool awkwardly with someone’s personal finances
• PCI-compliant platforms that handle card data without your organization ever actually touching it
• Clear refund and dispute policies so contributors know what happens if something goes wrong
• Access controls so that only authorized people can see financial data or withdraw funds

A community group is not a bank. A community group should not be processing raw payment data, ever. A good online payment collection platform for a community group should remove all payment processing liability from the group’s treasurer and from the group’s bank account.

Why online collection actually changes things

For a treasurer, payment collection is the initial step. The following step is to track, account for, and report the money that was collected. For a group that uses a variety of methods to collect money, tracking the money can be complicated and time-consuming for a group of volunteers. This is why having a secure online system for managing the money collected is very important for a treasurer and for the rest of the group.

Money handed over informally can create disputes or be forgotten. The treasurer and others on the committee already donate 6 hours a week or more of their time to the group. They shouldn’t have to spend time dealing with emails from frustrated donors questioning whether a check was received. Automatic receipts, time-stamped contributions, and a complete and transparent history of all transactions are the hallmark of online financial collection for non-profits and will protect the organization in case all of their hard work collapses due to poor financial record-keeping.

Unacceptable behavior by an organization with a good program for serving a community is to have the organization’s donor money and confidence lost due to fixable bookkeeping problems.

Pick the right tool for the job.

There are many online payment processing systems available to use for collecting money, including free online payment processing by PayPal and familiar credit card processing by Bank of America for example. Most of these online tools were created to enable individual online purchasing and as a result are not useful for groups of people collecting money for community organizations or events.

Look for online tools that are specifically designed to enable groups of people to collect funds online for events and other activities. In other words, you want to find a tool that does not require each collector to sign up for an account and allows each payer to pay for individual items. For example, permission to a field trip for students of different grades, club dues plus optional t-shirts in different colors, etc.

Approach	Best for	Main drawback
Cash collection	Very small, in-person groups	No records, easy to lose
Personal payment apps (Venmo, etc.)	One-off, informal payments	Mixes personal and group funds
Purpose-built group collection tools	Schools, clubs, nonprofits, ongoing collections	Small transaction fees
Full nonprofit accounting software	Large organizations with staff	Overkill for most volunteer groups

The administration side nobody talks about enough

Each dollar collected needs to be treated as a positive and then there is work to be done to track and report on the funds collected. This can include sending out receipts to donors for tax purposes, as well as reviewing past fundraising efforts. I have seen many volunteer treasurers spend as much time or more dealing with the leftover work from a past event (2 hours) than they spent preparing for and running the event itself. Having a single collection point and being able to export all of the transaction data is key to reducing this work. It won’t eliminate all of the work, but it will remove a lot of it.

A single point of collection for all online fundraising for your organization is better than having multiple applications that need to be dealt with for each event or fundraiser. The transactions for all money collected through the one point of collection can be recorded and then exported at the end of the period to be included in your financial reports.

Many community groups now choose purpose-built platforms that make it easier to collect money online securely while keeping payment records organized, transparent, and simple for both volunteers and contributors. 

A few practical steps to get started

1. Decide who has financial authority in your organization and get that documented before you set anything up — this step alone prevents a surprising number of later conflicts
2. Choose a platform with a dedicated group or nonprofit account, kept entirely separate from personal finances
3. Test the payment flow yourself before sharing it with your community
4. Communicate clearly to payers: what they’re paying for, what confirmation they’ll receive, and who to contact with questions

My name is Josh, and I have been speaking with the PTA treasurer of a school where I have friends that are part of the organization. This school has all of the makings of an ideal community-based organization. They have a strong volunteer-based PTA, after school activities for kids of all ages, lots of events throughout the year, etc. The type of organization where, if all of the behind the scenes work was to be perfectly streamlined, would allow everyone involved to have so much more time and focus to devote to the actual events and activities of the group. As it stands, the organization of events and activities is being eaten away by the time required for financial organization. 

For the PTA’s recent bake sale, the treasurer spent twenty minutes on the field counting out the money from the event while a line of parents waited outside in the parking lot to pay for permission for field trips. After the PTA collected up all of the cash from the day’s sales, the treasurer opened up a spreadsheet on her phone to log the funds from the day. She said that it was a sad day for her and the other committee members. They had put in lots of hard work to host the event and all of their efforts were being consumed by the tedious work required to run the financial volunteers organization. 

But as I said before, the financial work required to host the bake sale only took 20 minutes to count out in cash, and then the rest of the day and the rest of the week to tally everything up and enter it all into the spreadsheet. Why the hours of tedium for the organization and volunteers?

Organizations looking to improve efficiency can also benefit from following trusted digital technology resources that explore practical tools, automation strategies, and emerging solutions for managing everyday administrative tasks. 

Of course, the ideal way to organize the financials for a community group would be to set up a perfect system. The fact is, however, that no one has ever set up a perfect financial system for a community group, and with the way community groups are organized and run, it is unlikely that anyone will ever achieve such a lofty goal. Thus, the only goal that matters is to create a system to collect money for a group that is so easy to use that people actually end up paying.