Fiscal Sponsor Organizations

I know a few fiscally sponsored orgs that switched from Flipcause to GiveButter recently because Flipcause was holding their funds for “extended periods.”

@Lisa Dugdale I recommend going straight to the CEO. Let me know if you don’t have his contact info. Also, I’m curious, do you request funds in batches for all your projects at once? We request funds in a batch for all of our projects about once a week and they told us that we are the only fiscal sponsor that does it this way (they said others request funds individually for each project, I believe), and they said that the cause of our delays recently was because they sort of had a bespoke way of doing our transfers and the person responsible had been unexpectedly out. But it sure does seem like something else is up.

@Susan Light Sure, that would be great! We do not have that info. Yes, we request funds for all projects at once, every 2 weeks.

@Lisa Dugdale I sent you an email! Hopefully to the right address

We also use Flipcause and process transfers once a month for our projects. We've experienced similar issues with transferring funds from Flipcause to our project's accountant, as well as a lack of communication from their team regarding the matter. I had to step in personally, and part of their response was that the issue lies with their ACH service provider. They mentioned that their leadership team is currently working on resolving it.

This has been an ongoing issue for some time, and we've had to support our projects in the meantime while waiting for the funds to arrive. My team is increasingly frustrated with the lack of responsiveness and the time it’s taking to resolve this issue.

Same issue here. We request once a week for all projects. They are habitually late and we are going to be changing platforms. I think a class-action lawsuit might be in order. Think of all the interest they are making on our programs’ funds. They did say the problem was ACH providers having a set number of transfers they could do per day. They gave us our own person representative which was helpful at first, but now we are right back where we started.

Yes, this problem has been going on since last July. We request funds once a week or so and it takes them over a month to get them to us and ONLY because I send an email to the account representative. He is always apologetic and gets us our money within a few days, but I have to ask every time. They also told me it was an ACH issue. We have over 50 sponsored organizations, most of whom have Flipcause campaigns, so it would be a real pain to move them all to someone else. I hope we don’t have to do that.

It does sound like these issues continue which is not a promising sign. Have any CA sponsors reached out to CA DOJ on this? From what we’ve heard, Flipcause may not be adhering to the “prompt disbursement requirements” from AB 488 at least as relates to members of this community. . .

Apparently there is a class action lawsuit against them. We will be switching, but haven’t found the ideal platform. Do others have suggestions?

We did look into GiveButter, but it wasn’t viable for an organization with 50+ orgs on our fundraising platform.

Hello, I’m jumping back into this thread because we are having issues again. Previously, it was like @Stacey Hunt said back in May — we would experience delays, but when we reached out, we would get apologies and the transfers would resume. Now we are getting non-responsiveness, which is even more concerning. @Lisa Dugdale do you have more information about the class action lawsuit? Have others here gone a legal route yet? @Josh Sattely I’m curious about the CA DOJ as well. I will look into how to do this. Let me know if you have other specifics to point us to.

We were getting non-responsiveness last week, which is why we are quickly moving to switch. But this week they are back to apologies and delays, and did send another payment. I swore I read about a class action lawsuit but am now not seeing that.

@Lisa Dugdale yeah my coworker saw something about the class action too, but I don’t know where. Who are you communicating with now who gave you the most recent apologies?

In terms of finding something new, we have been working with https://www.mazlo.com/ on a broader solution for banking, AR, etc. They have a donation campaign aspect of what they offer, which is simple to use and is integrated into their overall platform. We are hoping many projects will be satisfied with that, but also need to find another partner for those that want more features associated with a more robust fundraising platform.

@Susan Light Ok, thanks. We are hoping to pilot the donation platform only with them pending a final conversation tomorrow.

Hi everyone, is anyone here still looking for a new fundraising platform? SGF has decided to go with Fundazr https://fundrazr.com/pages/nonprofit-fiscal-sponsorship and they’ve been really helpful with the transition. Let me know if you want to get in contact.