Venmo is launching a new feature called “Charity Profiles” that will allow charities to raise funds and receive donations directly within its app, the PayPal-owned company announced on Monday. The new profiles will be available to charities that have received confirmed charity status from PayPal.
The new profile option will allow charities to reach more people who are passionate about causes in their community, directly in the Venmo app. Venmo also notes that charity profiles offer charities seamless setup, low fees and an easy charity verification process.
To set up a charity profile on Venmo, PayPal confirmed charities can visit the Venmo Charity Profile setup page and log into a confirmed charity PayPal account. Next, Venmo will ask charities to create a new Venmo account to link to a charity profile. Venmo will use the charity information from PayPal to build an associated Venmo profile. Charities will then be able to publish their profiles and share them with their communities. Charities can confirm if they are a PayPal confirmed charity on PayPal’s website.
In addition to the launch of the charity profiles, Venmo announced that it will launch a charity hub in the coming months to give customers a new way to discover causes that they care about.
“As Venmo has continued to grow and evolve over the years, we’ve seen the Venmo community come together in unique ways to send payments of goodwill and share random acts of kindness with people in their community and beyond,” said Denise Leonhard, the vice president and general manager of Venmo, in a statement. “We have been continually inspired by how Venmo customers help one another, and support causes close to their hearts. Today, we’re introducing the ability to create charity profiles on Venmo, so that charities can now raise funds and receive donations directly from Venmo’s app.”
Venmo says 61% of donors are most likely to hear about causes through word of mouth from their friends and family, and that charity profiles will allow Venmo customers to support causes they care about.
Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after PayPal expanded further into the charitable donations business with the launch of support for Grant Payments. The product allows Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) sponsors, community foundations and other grantmakers to move their donations electronically through PayPal’s platform. In addition to moving money quickly, the system includes an online Grant Payments dashboard available to grantmakers and charities alike where they can view all the grant details, including the donor information, which can be exported to help simplify record keeping.
PayPal debuts ‘Grant Payments’ to shift charitable giving from paper checks to electronic transfers
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