Words by Smiley Team
After two years of Covid, charities are in need of support – and funding – more than ever before.
One company invested in helping them is Give A Little, who is building a community where charities support each other.
Funded by its parent company, Caution Your Blast Ltd., as part of its mission to use digital as a force for good, Give A Little is a point-of-donation platform that aims to be a flexible and affordable way for charities of all sizes to collect donations in a cashless society.
“Give A Little came about as a result of a project that our parent company, Caution Your Blast Ltd worked on with BT in 2016,” explains Ben Stewart, Give A Little’s service manager.
“That project set out to develop the first portable solution for payment card donations with a touch screen - the “Digital Tin”.
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“Trials of the Digital Tin were very successful," says Ben, "with charities like Comic Relief, Cancer Research and UNICEF loving the solution. Through this important work, Caution Your Blast Ltd realised smaller charities needed the support of a sponsor to be able to afford cashless donation solutions as the cost of entry was too high, and the technology very complex, sometimes even for bigger charities.
“So Give A Little was set up to drive down the cost of accessing cashless donations for charities of all sizes, as it was out of reach for many.”
Since launching in 2019, the Give A Little point-of-donation platform has grown and now over 3,500 charities are using Give A Little and they have raised over £7m in donations between them, says Ben.
“Keeping fees as low and transparent as possible is part of our ethos,” he says. “We have a subscription model with no tie in, which is tiered depending on how much donation revenue the charity is bringing in.”
Charities raising less than £1k in annual revenues via the platform don’t have to pay anything. Above that, they charge a flat fee that works out between 0.25% and 2.5%. In 2021, Give A Little enabled over 1,000 small charities to use its platform for free, which is 30% of its users.
“We are very proud of what we have achieved so far and look forward to introducing even more charities of all sizes onto the platform to help them to adapt to the cashless society we are all now living in,” adds Ben.
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