GiveCampus Will Support Cryptocurrency Donations to Schools

GiveCampus will become the first and only educational fundraising platform to process cryptocurrency donations.

Washington, D.C. – April 20, 2021 – GiveCampus, the world’s leading digital fundraising and volunteer management platform for nonprofit educational institutions, announced today that it will begin facilitating cryptocurrency donations for the nearly 1,000 schools on its platform in 2021. This news comes only weeks after GiveCampus launched a first-of-its-kind integration that enables donors to make donations with Venmo, and further expands the broad suite of modern payment options available to donors on the GiveCampus platform.

GiveCampus is integrating with The Giving Block to process cryptocurrency donations. The Giving Block is the leading cryptocurrency solution used by nonprofits including United Way, American Cancer Society, Save The Children, and Team Rubicon. As The Giving Block’s exclusive partner for cryptocurrency donations to educational institutions, GiveCampus will be the sole provider of The Giving Block’s unique technology to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools.

“More than $2 trillion of wealth is now held in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and many of the people holding that wealth want to give some of it away to support causes they believe in, including education. We’re excited to finally make that possible,” said Kestrel Linder, CEO and Co-Founder of GiveCampus. “By accepting cryptocurrency donations, schools will be meeting a new population of enthusiastic donors where they already are.”

More than 100 million people own cryptocurrency and the value held in cryptocurrency has more than doubled over the last three months. In recent weeks, major financial institutions have embraced cryptocurrency: in March, Morgan Stanley announced it will offer access to funds containing cryptocurrency and Visa announced it will allow payment settlement using cryptocurrency.

Donating cryptocurrency has significant tax benefits for donors. The IRS considers cryptocurrency to be property for Federal income tax purposes, so donors receive a tax deduction equal to the fair market value of the donated cryptocurrency and they do not have to pay capital gains taxes. This means schools will receive donations that are 20-30% larger than if donors instead needed to sell their cryptocurrency and donate the after-tax proceeds. The average cryptocurrency donation made to a nonprofit using The Giving Block is approximately ten times as large as the average online donation made using other payment methods.

“Cryptocurrency is the best performing asset class of the last decade, with more users than every U.S. brokerage combined,” said Pat Duffy, Co-Founder at The Giving Block. “Crypto-enabled schools will have a decisive fundraising edge over their peers, and with this partnership, we’re making it easy for schools to gain that edge.”

With this new capability, GiveCampus will become the only fundraising platform enabling cryptocurrency donations for schools, just as it is the only platform to offer a Venmo and PayPal integration built for educational donors. This new offering also complements GiveCampus’s new GC Wealth service, which provides schools with cutting-edge wealth data and analytics to identify major donor prospects—many of whom may prefer the tax benefits of making cryptocurrency donations.