September 03, 2004
Back in April I had a show of photos of children I'd taken in Nepal. I've recently A: put the photos online and B: received an email from one of the people I met in Nepal asking for help with tuition. From the feedback I received from both the show and the web pages, I thought a donation link would be a good idea. Visitors who wanted to donate a buck or two for one of the kids education would have any easy way to do so. My thinking was to put a small link for a "donation jar" after the last photo, or on the main page. PayPal doesn't really seem to be an option, as when I log in from abroad my account gets locked (it seems PayPal doesn't trust people logging in from Asia). Ideally I'm looking for something that's easy to use (for the "tipper"), pretty much a "one trick pony" (not bloated with un-needed options), and easy to set up and maintain. I'd love to hear of any options you know of.
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How about the Amazon Honor System? From their page: The Amazon Honor System charges minimal transaction fees. The fee schedule is very simple. The person making a payment is not charged any fees at all. The person receiving a payment is assessed 2.9% of the total payment per transaction plus $0.30. The Honor System is designed to be self-service for your convenience. That way, our limited customer service costs allow us to keep your transaction fees low. The only catch seems to be that the Honor System administrator needs to have a U.S. issued credit card and checking account. :-(
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This just cries out for dropcash.
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Aw crap, dropcash uses paypal. Sorry.
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As I found out when I said I'd front the money for tracycle's birthday present, getting money across country borders is a lot more difficult that you might expect. PayPal will allow you to receive money from the US, Japan, England, Canada and the European community, and will convert them to your currency (assuming you live in one of those areas.) If you want to collect from other places, you should probably recruit locals to collect and send it on. Not sure how easy that would be to do it electronically. But, if you go with PayPal, not everyone has an account, so you might have to deal with personal checks. I didn't find any difficuties with that, but Monkeys are pretty honorable. Dealing with a wider audience could be a problem, since banks charge everyone they can for checks that bounce. PayPal is also limited in where they will send money. I don't think they cover Nepal, since they didn't New Zealand. You'd need to check out how foreign funds can be received in Nepal and have a contact to send them to. The 2 choices that I'm aware of are international money order (which you send by snail mail) and wire transfer. I used the latter, but the fee was $42US. To do a wire transfer, you need information from your local contact which soothes your banks anxieties. And blogs I've read from Iraq and South Korea have talked about the difficulties of getting the money that was donated. (PayPal also charges a small fee to the receiver of the money.) We did check out other money transfer sites on the internet, but got warnings from other Monkeys that they might not be trustworthy. On the other hand, it might be best if you can find a charity that serves Nepal that you could donate the proceeds to. There may be some out there where you could specify the recipient. Again, since the intervening financial institutions will all take a cut, what you send may not be what your friends will get. They all have to cover their costs. So, I hope this gives you some directions to look into, based on my very limited experience. Best of luck.
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(when i first read this i thought you'd taken children from nepal. how many? heh.) (but seriously it's very nice what you're doing here)