• Fundraising
• How charities use your money
• Who regulates fundraising?
• How to make a complaint
• General vs. specific appeals
• Membership and sponsorship schemes
• Fundraising FAQs
• Fundraising factsheets
  • Mailings addressed to you
  • Unaddressed mail
  • Telephone fundraising
  • Street fundraising
  • Doorstep fundraising
  • Advertising in newspapers and magazines
  • TV and radio advertising
  • Raffles and lotteries
  • Fundraising events
  • Internet fundraising
  • Mail order trading
  • Leaving a gift in your Will
  • Gifts in memory
• Fundraising costs
• Fundraising case studies

Giving a donation online is as simple as buying something from an online retailer. Most charities with a website can also take your donation. The larger charities have the equipment and software to take a secure donation from a credit or debit card.

Smaller organisations are able to use the facilities of an agency to collect these funds. The most popular agencies are Justgiving, Worldpay, efundraising and Givenow. All charge charity clients a fee for using their service. These vary, but typically charities have to pay a small set-up fee to begin using the service followed by a small transaction fee of 3-5% of the gross amount donated. There are also the usual fees that charities have to pay the banks for handling credit and debit cards whether the donation is being made online or not.

The table below gives an example of how this works. The fees quoted here are those charged by Justgiving - fees charged by other agencies may be higher.

	By Credit Card	By Debit Card
Donation	£25	£25
Tax reclaimed under Gift Aid	£7.05	£7.05
Transaction fee payable to agency of 5%	£1.25	£1.25
VAT on transaction fee	0.22	0.22
Credit Card fee of 1.4%	0.35
Debit Card fee of 22p for Switch, Maestro and Solo, 25p for Visa and Delta		0.22
Total cost to charity	£1.82	£1.69
Net donation	£30.23	£30.36

Agencies are widely used by smaller charities who handle only a few online donations each year. In these cases it is cheaper for the charities to pay transaction fees than to invest in the technology they would need to handle the donation themselves.

If you give to a number of charities online you will begin to recognise the agency being used by each organisation as the process of making a payment, and therefore the screens you will view, are very similar. You will also see that the agency site may ‘remember’ your details, just as an online retailer would, so that when you give other donations through the site the process can be speeded up.

To complain about fundraising on the Internet:

If your complaint is about material on a charity website you should contact the charity.

The ASA covers advertising on the Internet, including banner ads and pop-up ads.

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