Here’s a question worth asking at your next staff meeting right after the digital guru finishes bragging about the online revenue numbers: if ActBlue stopped processing your donations tomorrow morning, what exactly would you do?

Not what would you do next quarter, once someone convenes a task force. Not after the emergency call where somebody from IT says they’re “looking into it.” Tomorrow morning. Could you put up another donation page, run another credit card, keep your monthly donors giving? Could you get money out of a stranger’s wallet and into your bank account without ActBlue standing in the middle of the transaction, the way it stands in the middle of hundreds of thousands of transactions in this business? If the honest answer is no, what you’ve built isn’t a fundraising system. It’s a dependency, and it’s the kind of thing that ought to keep a person up at night.

This Isn’t an Obituary

Let’s get one thing straight before the alarmists start drafting subject lines. ActBlue is very much alive, processing enormous sums of money, and nobody sane is suggesting Donald Trump and his enablers are about to reach over and unplug the server at midnight even though they’d love to.  But saying a company like Act Blue isn’t about to disappear is a different claim than saying you shouldn’t prepare for the day it stumbles.

CNN just gave the sector a fairly unglamorous look under the hood: more than 20,000 campaigns and organizations run their contributions through ActBlue, which says it has processed more than $19 billion since 2004. That’s not a vendor relationship. That’s the major circulatory system of progressive politics running through one artery.

One Democratic strategist told CNN, with the kind of understatement that makes you wince, that the ecosystem has built itself a vendor that’s “too big to fail” — the same phrase Washington used for the banks in 2008, right before taxpayers had to bail them out because nobody in the system had a backup plan. “Too big to fail” institutions don’t fail safely, they fail catastrophically, precisely because no one built a Plan B.

The Threat Isn’t a Fever Dream

None of this is imaginary. Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, and CNN reports the investigation is still open. Republican congressional committees have run their own inquiries alongside it. And to complicate a story that would otherwise write itself as a simple morality play, ActBlue’s own former outside counsel raised questions about how the platform screened certain foreign-address contributions and about what it told Congress about them. ActBlue disputes that it misled lawmakers and says it has since tightened its safeguards. Nobody there has been charged with anything.

But notice what doesn’t have to be true for organizations using ActBlue to have a problem. ActBlue doesn’t have to be guilty of anything. It doesn’t even have to shut down. A subpoena creates disruption. A banking hiccup creates disruption. A compliance fight, a technical failure, a user-confidence wobble stoked by a hostile administration — all of it creates disruption, and disruption in October of an election year like this behaves nothing like disruption in February, when nobody’s paying attention and there’s time to fix it quietly.

Some candidates and organizations have gotten the message already and are standing up backup systems in case ActBlue takes a hit before November. Fine for them. What about the 501(c)(3) down the street that’s never once run a fire drill?

One Platform, Two Tax Codes

Remember that “ActBlue” isn’t just political campaign money. ActBlue Civics serves the (c)(4) advocacy world, ActBlue Charities serves the (c)(3) world, and to the donor swiping a card at 11pm, it’s all one seamless machine — which is exactly why it got so powerful, and exactly why it’s worth asking whether the sector built itself a major point of failure and called it leading-edge infrastructure.

The Agitator’s spent decades urging folks not to lean too heavily on a few major gifts, not to build a program around a few list sources or one acquisition channel. Perhaps now’s the time to not depend on one payment platform either, no matter how good it’s gotten at getting people to give.

So, What’s Plan B?

For nonprofits, I’ve found one platform worth a serious look is Fundraise Up. I’m not telling you to look at it like a kitchen appliance everyone suddenly has to own because a neighbor got one. I’m merely suggestion you explore and test an alternative before the day you need a new payment processor don’t have the luxury of testing anything.

I wrote about Fundraise Up last year after sitting through a demo that changed how I thought about checkout, and the idea behind it wasn’t especially exotic. It was the thing Amazon and Apple figured out years ago: you should not make it hard for a person to hand you money.

Too many nonprofits have made a religion out of doing exactly the opposite. Mobile accounts for an enormous share of web traffic, and nonprofit revenue on mobile still lags the commercial world badly, because too many donation platforms make people type, scroll, hunt for a card number, and eventually give up. Fundraise Up goes after that friction directly — mobile-first checkout, digital wallets, adaptive ask amounts, a shorter distance between “yes, I want to help” and “gift completed.”

One number stuck with me in the performance data Fundraise Up showed me. The San Francisco SPCA’s monthly donor count reportedly climbed from around 400 to more than 1,000 after it switched platforms, with 42 percent of revenue arriving via mobile and a meaningful chunk of that through Apple Pay and Google Pay. That’s one organization’s results, reported by the vendor selling the platform, which means you shouldn’t take my word for it or theirs. Run the test yourself. See what happens to conversion, to recurring giving, to mobile performance, to whether your CRM will even talk to the thing. And see, above all, how long it will take you to turn it on if your primary processor goes dark, because that’s the question that actually matters here. The product isn’t Fundraise Up. The product is redundancy. Pick a different vendor if you want; just make sure you have one.

Build the Lifeboat Before You Hit the Iceberg

CNN closed its story with a Democratic strategist shrugging that donors will adapt — tell them ActBlue is gone, ask them to re-enter their card number, and they will, with maybe a little more friction. Maybe true.

Maybe.  Every fundraiser reading this knows exactly what “a little more friction” costs. It’s abandoned carts. It’s lost conversion. It’s recurring gifts that quietly stop recurring. It’s a staff meeting at 4:47 on a Friday where someone discovers the CRM was never built to talk to the backup processor, because nobody thought they’d need one.

Keep using ActBlue if it’s working for you. Defend it against a politically motivated attempt to strangle it, and fight the administration weaponizing the Justice Department against its opponents — that fight is real and it matters.

But do that while you’re also opening a second door, installing a second pipe, testing a second checkout, and knowing exactly who flips the switch and where the donor data goes if you ever have to. And don’t be surprised if the second door turns out to be a better door.

That’s what happened to me when I went looking at Fundraise Up — I wasn’t hunting for a replacement, just a hedge, and I came away thinking the hedge was much better than what I was using.  Sometimes the fire drill leads you to a new house.

Having a Plan B isn’t pessimism, it’s competence and preparedness. Neither has ever gone out of style.

So ask yourself again, and answer candidly: if your ActBlue button –or that of any payment platform you’re using — stopped working tomorrow morning, what exactly would you do?

Roger