Good Things Come ...

Like other early adopters of the day, I was more than eager to pay the $200 Donate Now account sign-up fee and high donation-processing rates. Donate Now buttons were perhaps the most exciting "Next Big Thing" to hit to charitable giving in decades, if not ever.

Well, imagine my — rather our — disappointment when we discovered that simply having a Donate Now button on your website didn't result in thousands of dollars in monthly donations. In fact, I think the first month I hit $100 in total donations was a much celebrated benchmark. Many of us just assumed that donors, especially younger ones, would automatically convert their giving from using checkbooks to credit cards. We were wrong. It took almost a decade for online giving to reach just 5 percent of all giving in the United States.