Private foundations, community foundations, university endowments, hospital foundations, and DAF sponsors.
Hospital foundations, university endowment campaigns, community foundations running hundreds of DAFs, and national phonathons hit compliance and operational walls that small-charity tools were never designed for.
Run a phonathon with 200 student callers, or contract a 400-seat agency, and your PCI compliance surface blows up overnight. Every caller who hears a card number is a potential breach point. Most foundations don't have the security tooling to control that at scale — and if something goes wrong, the liability sits with the 501(c)(3), not the agency.
Asking someone to read their card number out loud while they're pledging $250,000 to a capital campaign is awkward for everyone. It's also a compliance headache. Major donors expect discretion. The moment they're dictating 16 digits to a development officer, trust wobbles — and the gift can wobble with it.
Community foundations often run hundreds of donor-advised funds, scholarship funds, and field-of-interest funds in parallel. Every contribution has to land in the right fund for fund accounting and IRS Form 990 reporting. Generic payment tools see a contribution as just a dollar amount. They miss the point — donor intent matters as much as the money itself.
When you contract a fundraising agency under your state's charitable solicitation laws, their staff often handle your donors' card data. Which means you inherit their PCI compliance gaps. Most agencies aren't PCI Level 1 certified, so the risk flows straight back to your foundation — no matter what the contract says about indemnification.
We didn't bolt these features onto a generic payments tool. We built them around how large-scale US fundraising actually works day to day.
When it's time to take payment, the donor keys their card number straight into the phone keypad. The caller hears flat tones — not the digits. Card data never touches your foundation's phone system, your CRM, or your agency's environment. It works the same way whether you've got 10 callers or 500.
We run in the cloud with no hard cap on simultaneous payment sessions. Whether your phonathon peaks at 150 callers or 800 on a Saturday night, there's no capacity planning, no queuing, and no per-seat licensing fights. Scale up for peak nights, scale back after — no renegotiation.
A major donor can set up a multi-year giving schedule in a single call. They enter their card details via DTMF masking, confirm the pledge amount and frequency, and that's it. Future payments collect on schedule — annually, quarterly, or monthly — and the donor doesn't need to be called again just to rekey a card.
Every payment gets tagged to a specific DAF, fund, campaign, or restricted purpose at the point of collection. That attribution carries through to your reporting dashboard and your fund accounting export — Foundation Source, Fund Suite, Stellar, Foundant, or whatever your fund services team runs. Reconciliation matches contribution to fund the same day, not at month-end.
When you use Paytia, your fundraising agency never touches card data. Full stop. Doesn't matter how many staff they have or what their own PCI status looks like. Donor card details go straight into our certified environment. The agency is out of scope — and the compliance liability you used to inherit from them is gone.
Level 1 is the top PCI tier. Every year, a Qualified Security Assessor goes through our controls line by line. Most payment providers self-assess. We don't. When you need to show your board, your auditors, and your state attorney general's charitable trust division that your data protection is the real thing, the difference between Level 1 and self-assessed matters.
Capital campaigns, board-member top-up gifts, and major donor calls. Card data stays out of your CRM and your 990-PF audit pack stays clean.
DAF contributions, scholarship fund top-ups, and field-of-interest fund gifts. Per-fund attribution at capture time means clean reconciliation across hundreds of funds.
Phonathons, capital appeals, planned giving calls. Phone-bank scale without capacity caps, and major-donor calls without forcing the donor to read out 16 digits.
Inbound contributions from fund advisors, recurring grant recommendations, and same-day acknowledgments. Tokenization handles repeat contributions without storing card data.
Secure phone giving for major donors and phonathon callers — fundraisers stay on the call throughout.
Learn moreMulti-year endowment pledges and recurring DAF contributions on a tokenized card schedule — no rekeying.
Learn moreSecure links by SMS or email for capital appeal follow-ups, board-member gifts, and event registrations.
Learn moreCapture banking details on the same call for ACH gifts, DAF contributions, and grant payouts.
Learn moreThese are the actual reasons large fundraising and finance teams come to us — not the generic sales-deck ones.
Your own callers, a contracted agency, your fund advisors — doesn't matter. Card data never touches your systems. That takes your foundation out of PCI scope for telephone payments entirely. Your annual compliance review just got a lot shorter.
A $500 donor and a $500,000 donor deserve the same privacy. When donors key in their own card details instead of reading them aloud, the interaction feels secure — because it is. That matters especially at the major gift level, where your relationship with the donor runs for decades.
We plug into the processors US foundations actually use — Stripe, Chase Payment Solutions, Braintree, Authorize.Net, Adyen, Worldpay (US). You keep your existing merchant account and banking relationships. We just take card data out of the capture step.
Every contribution lands in the right fund or DAF the moment it's collected. Your fund accounting team has what they need without hand-reconciling payment exports against contribution records. One less audit headache for the auditors who sign your 990-PF or 990.
Tokenized card storage means a donor who commits to an annual endowment gift during a call actually gives annually — automatically, without another call needed. No chasing lapsed pledges, no re-authorization calls two years in.
Every payment interaction is logged with a full audit trail. Call timestamps, payment amounts, fund attribution, confirmation references — all stored. If your state's charity bureau or attorney general's office asks questions about a specific campaign or professional fundraiser, you've got the documentation to answer them.
Yes — and this is where donor dignity actually matters. Rather than asking a $100,000 donor to dictate sixteen digits to a development officer, the donor keys the card number into their own phone keypad. The fundraiser hears flat tones, the call recording stays clean, and the gift is captured into our PCI DSS Level 1 environment. The relationship-side conversation continues uninterrupted. DTMF masking is what makes that possible.
Most private foundations cut grant checks or run ACH disbursements through their bank — that side stays where it is. Where we add value is on the inbound side: capital campaigns, donor-advised fund contributions, board-member top-up gifts, and any case where a donor or grantee is on the phone settling a payment. We can capture banking details for ACH securely on the same call your program officer is taking, so DAF contributions and scholarship distributions don't need a separate paper form mailed back and forth.
Each DAF, scholarship fund, or restricted fund gets its own reference inside Paytia. When a donor or fund advisor calls in to add to their DAF or recommend a grant, your fund services team selects the right fund at capture time. The contribution lands tagged for that specific fund, the receipt cites the right fund name, and your fund accounting reconciles cleanly without anyone retrofitting attribution at month-end. Useful when you're running 200+ DAFs and your donor base expects same-day acknowledgment.
No — the money flow itself doesn't change. Contributions still land in your operating or fund accounts through your existing merchant account and bank. We just take card data out of the capture step so your contact center, call recordings, and CRM aren't in PCI scope. For Form 990-PF (private foundations) or Form 990 (public charities including community foundations), you report contributions and grants the same way you always have. What changes is your audit risk profile: fewer systems handling cardholder data, fewer breach notification triggers under state laws, and a much shorter PCI SAQ for your finance team.
Yes — and honestly, this is one of the strongest use cases. Hiring a fundraising agency to run a phonathon used to mean inheriting their compliance gaps. Card data went through their systems, their staff, their recordings — and the liability flowed back to you regardless of what the contract said. Because we route card entry straight into our certified payment environment, agency staff never hear or handle card data. The agency stays out of PCI scope. Your foundation isn't inheriting their risk posture, no matter how many callers they've got.
We'll walk you through how Paytia fits your campaign structure — phonathon setup, major donor calls, DAF contributions, endowment pledges, or all of them. Book a demo with someone who actually understands US foundation fundraising.
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