How to make fundraising easier with just a smartphone

Charities could be missing a trick – or several tricks. Your supporters are a fundraising asset: passionate about your cause and knowledgeable about your charity. Armed with the right resources, and the right tech, supporters can supercharge your fundraising, not just on the day of an event but long into the future. In simple terms: supporter-led fundraising is the future.    

However, until recently, it has been difficult for charities to help their supporters to collect donations digitally. In an increasingly cashless society, supporters have struggled to collect sponsorship and donations in any other way beyond the physical donation bucket or online fundraising page. And while fundraising pages can be shared online with social networks, they lack that spontaneous edge that helps people give in the moment, as and when they are thinking about donating. The physical donation bucket, on the other hand, limits what people can give to whatever change they have in their pocket.  

Indeed, with individual donations on the decline overall, charities need to find innovative ways to make it easier for fundraisers and donors alike to give to the charities they support. More than a fifth of people say they did not donate to someone participating in a charity event because they either forgot or didn’t have time to when asked.  In a world where we pay for so much with just a tap of a phone or card, fundraisers have simply not been able to keep up. 

Successful supporter-led fundraising depends on empowering supporters with the tech to collect funds on a charity’s behalf. And for many charities, this can seem not only technically daunting but expensive. Yet the answer may lie simply in supporters’ smartphones.  

The Give A Little Champion App, created by leading cashless fundraising platform Give A Little, is a quick, secure, and easy way to collect in-person donations, whether supporters are hosting a bake sale, pub quiz, or simply having dinner with friends. Supporters just need to download the app on their phones and, using Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, they can collect contactless donations without fuss.   

Donations are processed by payment processor Stripe, allowing supporters to accept all payment methods from physical debit and credit cards to digital wallets including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and giving donors a wealth of options for how they want to give. 

While the app puts power literally in the hands of supporters, it is also revolutionary for charities. Twenty charitable organisations took part in the app’s pilot, including Dogs for Good, Julia’s House, St Catherine’s Hospice, Cardiac Risk in the Young and the Stroke Association, with many organisations hailing the app as “transformative” in the world of fundraising. 

The app makes it easy for charities to invite and manage groups of supporters at scale, track donations, collect marketing opt-ins and Gift Aid declarations, automate digital receipts, and create custom campaigns. Charities control which campaigns their supporters have access to and add CRM supporter codes to make updating supporter records easy. It even comes with a back-up plan in the event that a donation fails, offering the chance to donate instead via QR code or email donation link. 

It’s affordable, with minimal transaction fees, and charities subscribe to Give A Little’s services monthly, with subscription tiers starting at just £7.50 a month, based on how much the charity raises through the platform in a rolling 12-month period. 

The app is an all-in-one toolkit to empower supporters at scale, to help them help you. Charities can try it, worry-free, with low fees and no contract tie in. Supporters can raise for multiple charities and see how much they have raised in a handy in-app report. In short, supporter-led fundraising has never been easier.  

Below, we explore some of the key benefits of supporter-led fundraising and how empowering fundraisers with better fundraising technology can boost your charity fundraising. 

The benefits of supporter-led fundraising 

Extend your reach 

The first and most obvious benefit is reach. Supporter-led fundraising means that your supporters, wherever they are based, can fundraise on your behalf, and with the right tech, still using your voice and your branding. That means you can raise funds at a cake sale in Catford and a dog walk in Durham at the same time, with all the money going directly to your charity.  

It’s not just about geographical reach, either. Consider a mass fundraising event. Typically, you’d find collection hubs, perhaps signposting, maybe volunteers with tin rattles or high-vis buckets. Now imagine every supporter of your charity has the ability to collect donations in a matter of seconds, using only their smartphones. A few collectors quickly become an army of collectors and donating becomes much easier. 

For smaller charities, this extended reach can be a lifeline, with affordable technology shortening the gap between what they are able to achieve compared to their larger counterparts. The Give A Little Champion app doesn’t require charities to send out expensive payment terminals to their supporters – armed with the app and a smartphone, supporters can collect donations for their chosen charity at their leisure.  

Olivia Rainford, Director of Income Generation at Dogs for Good explains: “The Give A Little Champion App is a bit of an equaliser, which is unusual in the charity sector. Bigger charities can usually clean up due to big marketing budgets so being able to have supporters fundraising on our behalf is a bit of a game changer and that feels very important to us.” 

Boost your authenticity 

Supporters make brilliant fundraisers. They’re already championing your cause and believe in your mission, often through a personal connection with the charity.  They speak from experience and with passion making them a trustworthy and authentic representative to potential donors.     That authenticity boosts not only the number of donations but has the potential to also boost the recurrence of donations. Supporters now have the opportunity to convert one-time donors into life-long advocates with monthly recurring donations set up through the Give A Little Champion app. Passion translates into serious commitments from donors. 

There’s also the matter of helping supporters feel like an extended part of your team – which they are. The fact that they can use an app like the Give A Little Champion app, that carries the branding of the charity they support, helps them to raise money confidently and spread the word about the organisation widely. And it can pay dividends in the future - research has shown that charity branding improves the ability of donors to remember the charity they have given to at a later date. 

Make giving seamless and secure 

Supporter-led fundraising, backed-up by the right platform, makes everything seamless. You can offer potential donors various routes to donation: tap to donate apps, donation stations, contactless donation boxes, online fundraising options, and more.  

And newer fundraising methods don’t mean compromising on what’s worked before either. The Give A Little Champion app empowers charity supporters to collect contactless donations securely, without the need to handle cash. With charities able to customise the app’s branding with their logos and imagery, donors can feel more confident their donations are going directly into the charitable organisation’s bank account, while the seamless experience of the app brings a little modernity into the process of giving.  

“We were keen as a charity to show that we’re not afraid of embracing new technology and could see the many benefits of giving people more freedom in the way they can take donations rather than just sending them to JustGiving,” says Sally Woodford, Database Manager at hospice charity Julia’s House, about taking part in the Champion App pilot. And research has shown that charities who are digitally mature tend to experience more fundraising growth than those who are not. 

Fundraising technology is all about meeting the evolving needs of donors without throwing the existing playbook out of the window. Trust and convenience are vital parts of any fundraising strategy – digital tools such as the Give A Little Champion app support charities to achieve this while growing and diversifying their fundraising activities, using exciting new technology 

To find out more about the Give A Little Champion App, click below.

Find out more about the Give A Little Champion app