Firstgiving provides free online fundraising pages that you can use to raise money online for your cause.

Firstgiving has teamed with Guidestar, the leading provider of data on more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations, to provide the most accurate and trusted selection of recognized nonprofit organizations. You can search for your cause by organization name, keyword, city and state. If your cause is in the Guidestar database, you will be able to select it for your page.

Choosing your cause
If you can't find your cause using our system, they may not yet be listed in GuideStar. If your cause is a tax exempt 501(c) organization, have them:

• visit: http://www.guidestar.org/npo
• fill out the GuideStar Information Form
• or if they prefer, they can contact GuideStar customer service at 800-421-8656.

It is free for your cause to register with GuideStar.

Choosing your event
You choose a category of event: 'Sporting', 'In memory of someone', 'Personal Occasion' or 'Other'. If you've chosen to create a page for a sporting event, you can then choose from the list of organized events in our system or enter the name of your own event. If you have a non-sporting reason for fundraising, you can enter the event name yourself.

Setting up your Firstgiving page
You choose your own URL (web address), choose a page title, enter your personal message to your donors and upload a photo or image. Once your page is live, you can always come back to your Firstgiving account to make edits and updates. Your page will expire automatically on the date you choose.

Emailing and linking to your Firstgiving page
Once your page is live, you email the link to your friends, family, coworkers and any other potential donors. You can also link to your page from your blog, social networking profile page, email signature and anywhere else you can think of.

Collecting online donations
Your donors can make an online donation with a credit card and leave a comment on your page. Donations are transferred automatically to your cause. Our system sends an automatic thank you email and a donation acknowledgment email. A 7.35% service fee (including credit card processing fee) is applied to all donations before they are transferred to the nonprofit.

Support
Firstgiving provides free support for you and your donors. We have a great virtual support area on our site. If you still have questions you can email our support team for help.

Privacy

If you are a fundraiser:
We share your information with the organization you are raising funds for.

If you are making a donation to someone's page:
We share your name with the fundraiser; you may choose to share your email address with that person. Your name will display next to your donation on the page (if you're shy, we have a feature so you can hide it). View our Privacy Policy. We never rent or sell our lists.

Security
Firstgiving transactions are completely secure. We use industry standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to encrypt all personal and credit card information so that it cannot be read over the Internet except by the processing bank.