Picture the scene: it’s the second Tuesday of the month, someone has brought store-bought cookies, and your treasurer says the sentence that has ended more good ideas than any budget shortfall ever did. “Our donors are older. They write checks. Who’s going to use it?” Heads nod around the table, and the proposal to add online giving quietly slides to next quarter’s agenda, where it will meet the same cookies and the same sentence. If you’ve lived this meeting, you already know the objection isn’t really about technology.

It’s about a fear of doing something visible and having it flop. That fear deserves a real answer instead of a pep talk, and the good news is that the real answer is more persuasive than enthusiasm anyway.

What Your Board Is Actually Worried About

Listen closely the next time a board member says nobody will use it, and you’ll usually hear one of three worries wearing the same coat. The first is money: nobody wants to approve a spend that produces nothing. The second is embarrassment, because a donation page that sits untouched feels like a public admission that the organization misjudged its own supporters. The third is workload, since every new system means somebody, probably the same two volunteers who already do everything, has to learn it and babysit it.

Naming those three out loud changes the room. A vague objection can’t be answered, but a worry about wasted money, a worry about looking foolish, and a worry about volunteer burnout can each be handled with a specific design choice. Most of the rest of this post is those design choices.

Why “Nobody Will Use It” Is a Guess, Not a Fact

Here’s the thing about the claim itself. Nobody in that boardroom has data on how your donors would behave, because you’ve never given them the option. The statement feels like knowledge because it’s been repeated for years, but it’s really a hypothesis about people who have never been offered a choice. Plenty of donors who write a check every December do it because the check is the only door you’ve ever opened for them, and a person who has never seen another door can’t be said to prefer the first one.

Treating the objection as a hypothesis does something useful for the conversation. Instead of arguing about whether donors are old or young or tech-averse, which nobody can settle from their chair, the board can agree to find out. Finding out is a much easier thing to vote for than a leap of faith, and it lets the skeptics stay skeptical while still saying yes.

Define Failure Before You Launch

The single most persuasive move you can make is to hand the skeptics their own exit ramp. Before anything goes live, write down what a failed pilot would look like and get the board to agree to it. Something like this: if after ninety days the page has produced fewer gifts than the number the board names, we stop, we keep the checks, and we’ve lost a few hours of setup. If it clears that number, we keep going.

Pick the threshold together, and let the most doubtful person at the table choose it, because a bar set by the skeptic is a bar the skeptic can’t dismiss later. We call this a tripwire scorecard, and its power comes from the fact that it converts an open-ended commitment into a bounded experiment with a date on it. Boards that would never approve “let’s start accepting donations online” will often approve “let’s run a ninety-day test with a number we all agreed on first.”

Keep the Checks and Add a Second Door

A big reason boards stall is the unspoken assumption that online giving replaces something. It doesn’t have to, and framing it that way sets up a fight nobody needs. Your check-writing donors keep writing checks, your envelope-and-stamp tradition stays intact, and the online option simply sits beside it for the people who would rather give from their phone at eleven at night. The walkthrough on adding online giving without replacing checks covers how to run both channels so neither one feels neglected.

This framing also protects you from the worst-case story the board is imagining. If nobody uses the page, nothing was taken away, and the existing revenue stream never wobbled. The downside collapses from “we bet the organization’s fundraising on a gadget” to “we left a door unlocked that nobody walked through yet.”

What the Downside Really Costs

Money is the objection that deserves the most precision, so it’s worth being exact about it. With SolaFund, the fees are taken from donations as they’re processed: 2.9% plus 30 cents goes to Stripe, and 1.5% goes to us, for a total of 4.4% of the volume that moves through the page. That structure matters to a skeptical board because cost follows activity. A quiet month doesn’t generate a pile of charges for a service nobody touched, which is a very different risk profile from a product you have to pay for whether or not anyone gives. If the board wants to compare the full picture against the cost of staying put, the piece on the cost of accepting donations online lays out what’s included and what isn’t.

It’s also fair to put the cost of the status quo on the table, because the cash box isn’t free either. Checks need to be collected, logged, deposited, and sometimes chased, and every one of those steps belongs to a human being with a limited number of evenings per month. A treasurer who spends two hours entering gifts by hand is paying a real cost, just one that never appears as a line item.

Usually “Nobody Uses It” Means “Nobody Knew About It”

If a pilot does underperform, the likeliest cause is the least dramatic one: the page existed, but supporters never encountered it. A donation link buried three clicks deep on a website is functionally invisible, and a board that judges the experiment after ninety days of invisibility will conclude the wrong thing. Give the test a fair shot by putting the link where donors already look.

That means the footer of your regular email, the thank-you message that goes out after an event, the bottom of the printed appeal letter, and a short URL or QR code on anything that lands in a mailbox. Say it out loud at the next gathering too, with something plain like “you can now give online if that’s easier, and the envelope still works.” A sentence from a trusted person in the room does more than a banner on the homepage ever will. Skip the clever launch campaign, since a quiet, steady mention in the places people already pay attention to is the version that actually gets noticed.

Running the Conversation at the Meeting Itself

How you raise the topic matters nearly as much as what you propose. Open by acknowledging the concern as reasonable, because it is, and because a board member who feels dismissed digs in harder. Then bring the three pieces together in about two minutes: the tripwire number, the fact that checks stay, and the cost of the pilot in plain dollars. People who came ready to argue often relax when the proposal already contains the guardrails they were about to ask for.

There’s a deeper layer here too, and it’s the reason the conversation sometimes feels heavier than the decision warrants. Boards are guardians of donor trust, and a new payment method touches that trust directly, which is why the piece on the board conversation you’re not having about donor trust is worth reading before the meeting. When the real concern is that donors will feel less safe or less personally treated, say so and address it head on instead of letting it hide behind the word “nobody.”

A Ninety-Day Plan You Can Hand Over

In the first two weeks, get the page live and test it yourself with a small gift from your own card, then confirm the receipt looks the way a donor would want it to. During the following month, mention the option in every outgoing communication you were already going to send, adding nothing new to anyone’s plate. Around day sixty, take a quiet look at what has come in and ask a few donors, informally, how they found it. At day ninety, put the agreed number on the table and let the data make the decision it was always supposed to make.

If the numbers clear the bar, you’ve earned a case built on your own supporters instead of an industry anecdote. If they don’t, you’ve spent a modest amount to learn something true about your community, and you can adjust placement or timing before trying again. Neither outcome is a failure in the way the original objection imagined, and that is the point.

Deciding Without Perfect Information

No board ever gets certainty before a decision, which is why the useful question is whether the downside is small and the learning is large. A bounded pilot with a pre-agreed scorecard, checks left in place, and costs that rise only when gifts arrive meets that test comfortably. What it asks of the skeptics isn’t belief, only willingness to look at results with the rest of the table.

So the next time someone says nobody will use it, you can agree that they might be right and offer a way to find out. It’s a quieter argument than a sales pitch, and it wins more often.