How we help CHARACTER COUNTS!® offer their customers payment choice

CHARACTER COUNTS!^® helps create strong, vibrant communities that value positive, healthy relationships and respectful behavior with our public awareness and programming grounded in research. Our initiatives are created for people of all ages and are easily adaptable for families, schools, workplaces, and more. Our lessons are guided by the Six Pillars of Character^®: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and good citizenship. CHARACTER COUNTS! is a project of The Ray Center at Drake University.

CHARACTER COUNTS! was founded by Michael Josephson, an influential and internationally renowned champion of character education for youth and ethical conduct in business, government, policing, journalism, sports, healthcare, and law. He’s credited by many as the person most responsible for reviving and professionalizing character education in school and youth service organizations.

In 1992, Josephson created a character development initiative based on the core ethical traits of the Six Pillars of Character. CHARACTER COUNTS! has continually evolved to reflect current research and best practices to become a comprehensive student development program embracing academic, social and emotional skills as well as the Six Pillars of Character.

Josephson saw a need to incorporate character development into youth education. He found that educators and families value a focus on building students’ character, social-emotional, and academic skills while shaping a positive school culture. 

We’ve been working for more than 30 years to create a flexible framework to help kindergarten through 12th grade educators and students develop good character and create positive school cultures. Through our work, we help develop responsible citizens and create strong, vibrant communities that value positive, healthy relationships and respectful behavior. 

As a global initiative that transforms lives and strengthens communities, CHARACTER COUNTS! has served more than 9 million youth and their families. Our work supports our mission to improve civility through character development and ethical leadership.

We’ve developed a CHARACTER COUNTS! framework to help educators and students develop good character and create positive school cultures. We conduct professional development workshops to demonstrate to educators how to best teach, enforce, advocate, and model good character. And educators can use our curricular resources to weave those values and skill-building strategies into their lesson plans.

Administrators, educators, and families want safe, supportive, high-performing schools. By prioritizing character development and positive school culture, schools can help improve students’ character and academic skills, and ensure their school is a safe and welcoming learning environment.

CHARACTER COUNTS! educators understand the importance of preparing their students for life. Through our curriculum, educators can help students achieve their personal, school, and career goals and become engaged, responsible, and productive citizens. They’ll be more likely to develop positive, healthy relationships, manage their emotions, and make good choices.

When The Ray Center became the global headquarters of CHARACTER COUNTS!, we came to possess an online store selling curricular resources and merchandise, which Authorize.net was integrated into. It was so easy to use and had such strong security that we had a smooth transition internally for payment processing.

Authorize.net gives us peace of mind that our payment transactions are safe and secure. It runs so smoothly as a supplement to our online store, which is a significant source of revenue for our non-profit organization. With Authorize.net, we can maintain our profit margins and not pass on payment processing fees to our customers.

Recently, we have worked through international credit card payments and fraudulent order attempts. Authorize.net includes a variety of account and fraud detection security settings to ensure that our genuine customers’ payments are successfully processed, while monitoring for suspicious or fraudulent transactions.

In addition to our internal operations, Authorize.net offers our customers safe and secure payment transactions. We can provide our customers with lots of different payment options through our online store and with direct email invoicing links.

Authorize.net has always been an intuitive platform to use. The recent upgrades have made it even easier. We are now providing our customers with more payment options, including direct email invoicing. Our customers know they can trust their payments to us.

The new Authorize.net also has brief explanations of specific account settings, making it easier for us to understand the technical policies and procedures. We have used these explanations to try new features and upgrade our account to help both our organization and our customers.

As a non-profit service organization, the sustainability of our operations relies on the trustworthy and reliable services of Authorize.net. Account services, system features, and product benefits are all included in our reasonable monthly fee. And the customer service is timely, reliable, and customer-focused so they can provide us the best solutions.