Online giving is an important part of donating for supporters – the average online charity donation jumped by 32% to nearly £70 last year. But with smaller charities and community groups tight on resources, how can they make the best use of what they already have to maximise online donations?
PayPal is often a default option for registered charities who can’t afford the resources to have a fully operational payments system connected directly to their bank. Matt Sexton, business administration officer of small organisation the Lesbian and Gay Christian charity, finds it an easy choice: “There’s a discounted charity rate. We pay a transaction fee of 1.4% (usually its 3.4%) on each donation, plus 20p.
“We build our own donation pages using Wufoo, an online form builder (this costs £13 per month) and then combine these payments with cheques and standing orders to make our Gift Aid Claim each month.”
Some charities, like the small youth organisation Envision, are happy to use a well-known giving site. Damian Chapman, head of fundraising, explains: “We use a variety like JustGiving, BT MyDonate and Virgin Money Giving because they’re recognisable and cost-effective.
“JustGiving has put a lot of money into making the site very accessible and a lot of people know it and see it as safe. They have to find the money from somewhere to pay for this so I don’t mind the fees. We have a PayPal option too,” he adds.
Chapman says that if the charity had a dedicated database team and web developers it would integrate payments fully into its own site. “The closest I know to that at the moment would be PayPal or the JustGiving donate widget,” he says.
For those looking at donation platforms but who are unsure which one to choose, John Barrett, the head of the Small Charities Coalition, suggests reading the Fundraising and Charity Finance Group’s recently launched Making the Most of Digital Donations Guide and checking out Moneysavingexpert.com’s independent comparison tool.
All platforms offer a different service, with some giving quite detailed fundraising support, which might outweigh the cost. LocalGiving, for example, charges fees at the higher end of the scale, but offers a very detailed service which brings in match-funding for charity donations.
A relatively new organisation, Golden Giving, which is funded by philanthropists, doesn’t charge fees and might offer a challenge to the big guns. Michael McGrath, is chief executive of a £100,000 turnover charity called Muscle Help Foundation. He previously used Virgin Money Giving, but has been pulled towards Golden Giving.
“I really love what Golden Giving is doing,” he says. “There’s an absolute alignment of values with our little charity and what they’re looking to achieve. If you donate £1 we receive the whole amount. That is very important for our supporters. There’s a whole bunch of different functions we’re using through them to grow our donors and retain our existing ones.”
But, what if you don’t want to use a third party site at all? For Alex Smith, chief executive of Harrison’s Fund, having online donations fully integrated into his charity’s site rather than using third parties, is crucial to fundraising.
“When we launched in early 2012 we used several of the big names. Givey was probably our favourite and I really like the way it’s developing. But, then we came across Charity Checkout which was more what we wanted.
“It integrates fully into our site – including automatic Gift Aid – and so allows us to keep donors on our own website. Before we started using them, our analytics showed that people would disappear once they clicked from our site into another to finalise their donation. Our stats now show that we are keeping the user with us after donation.
“I think donors trust the process more because they’re donating directly to us. And, since we’ve brought in a direct debit option using their system our donations have increased by 600%,” he adds.
The social enterprise payment processing company Charity Checkout charges larger charities £300 a year to use the service, subsidising the £99 subscription for small charities. There’s also 2.43% fee for every transaction, and other charges for extra services. Smith pays about £20 a month for these, he says.
But, as Facebook and Twitter inch their way further into our personal and working lives, there might well be a big change in this area.
A year ago, Facebook launched its donate button in the US and three months ago, Twitter began trialling its purchase button in America, too. Facebook doesn’t charge any fees for this and pays the card fee for the donors. Twitter would not give any more detail on its charges.
What gets trialled in the US often finds its way into the UK and, depending on what they offer exactly, charities struggling for time and money might well see these as quicker, easier options for enabling online donations in the future.
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This article was amended on 12 January 2015 to correct Matt Sexton’s job title to business administration officer and the fee that his organisation pays to use PayPal.
