Which online giving platform should I use?

Since the heady days of the turn of the century when JustGiving was synonymous with online donations (much like Hoover and vacuum cleaners), there has been an explosion in online giving platforms. Some, like BT MyDonate and CharityGiving, have come and gone. Others, like Virgin Money Giving and GoFundMe, have directly taken on JustGiving. Others like Givey have focused on specific niches in the market (Givey focuses on smaller charities). You can read more about the evolution of the online giving market in the February 2020 issue of Fundraising Magazine.

With increased competition and turbulence in the sector, almost all have changed their pricing structures. Most have dropped fixed platform fees. Some have adopted a “tipping” structure where donors can add a “tip” to their donation to help fund the platform. All have processing fees, with some offering donors the opportunity to pay those fees instead of the charity.

This diversity of fee structures makes it almost impossible to compare the costs of different platforms (in fact which is cheapest often depends on how much you expect to be coming through in donations). Moreover, with widely varying functionality between the sites the comparison task gets even more complicated.

Larger charities often just go with all the main platforms in the hope of picking up opportunistic donors (such as those organising their own challenge events). But smaller charities can’t afford to do this, it just costs too much volunteer and administration time to manage multiple platforms effectively. And smaller charities rarely expect to receive opportunistic donations through such platforms anyway; why would they want multiple platforms anyway?

This leads us to conclude that some form of price comparison site for online donation platforms would be helpful to smaller charities, and one that keeps up with the ever changing pricing structures of the many players in the market.

However, even with such a site, the barriers to changing for many small charities are just too great. How do you keep switching effectively if you need to migrate existing supporters across to the new platform each time, or at least publicise the new platform to supporters? If there was to be a price comparison site there would also need to be a switching service, rather like there is for bank current accounts or (less effectively) energy suppliers.

All this goes to show that competition is both very good - the costs to charities are coming down as new platforms join the market and innovate - and bewildering for many small charities who just want a simple online donation facility for their website and to support sponsored challenges.

This is an area we increasingly find ourselves helping clients to navigate; maybe one day we’ll have the time to put together a simpler guide to price comparison between the main online giving platforms. For now, if you need help with choosing an online giving platform for your charity, we’d be delighted to help.

If you’d like to chat about your charity’s online fundraising options or anything else related to fundraising please contact us at julian@almondtreeconsulting.co.uk to arrange free initial telephone discussion.