Lepra, a UK-based international charity working to beat leprosy, previously had a platform to take online donations through their website, however there was no link between the platform and their fundraising database, Advantage^NFP Fundraiser. Lepra were storing data twice and having to rekey or import.

Lepra were looking to change their website provider to reduce costs and have more control over the content. Advantage^NFP Web Modules provided transactional capabilities, integrating with either Stripe or Paypal and enabled the donations and any new supporter contact details to be entered directly and securely into their fundraising database, Advantage^NFP Fundraiser. The project has reduced Lepra’s processing costs and allowed them to migrate to a lower cost website provider.

The Advantage^NFP development team implemented the web modules with little fuss in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown and enabled Lepra to launch an emergency appeal.

Nick Avery, Director of Finance and Support Services at Lepra, explains, “The intention of phase 1 was to get a working system to allow us to take payments and ideally for these payments to be automatically matched and allocated to our donor database. It was part of a bigger picture allowing us to reduce the huge costs of working with our previous supplier and to take back control of the non-transactional elements of the website. We will be looking at what we need for our phase 2 requirements, but in short it is working well and more cost effective than our previous donation routes.

When we started the project we had no idea that we would be trying to direct people to online donations in the way that we have done. We’re amazed by the amount of donations we have taken in the first six weeks but we are hoping that there is much more to come. Phase 2 will include things like event specific URLS which will allow us to provide better event based fundraising opportunities and also enable us to capture many more people onto the database.”