PayPal and Oxfam offer 100% giving for February
Howard Lake | 1 February 2011 | News
Throughout February PayPal will cover Oxfam’s running costs for all donations to Oxfam via PayPal. The organisations describe the “100% giving” campaign as “a completely new form of charity giving in the UK”. They claim that “it is the first time a charity has offered a donation scheme in which it is guaranteed that 100% of your donation will go directly to the cause because a corporate partner is paying the running costs”.
Oxfam explains that for every £1 donated to Oxfam, 81p is spent directly on emergency, development and campaigning work; 11p is spent on support and governance; and 8p is invested to generate future income/fundraising. It is this 19p per pound of running costs that PayPal will cover during the month.
There are over 20 million PayPal account holders in the UK, so the campaign could have a significant impact if enough of them were persuaded to give via PayPal during February.
Not only will PayPal cover the running costs of individual donations, but it will also will pay the running costs for the first 12 months on any regular donations via PayPal started in February.
When combined with Gift Aid, a £1 donation through the 100% giving campaign will be worth a total of £1.57. In other words, PayPal will top up 19% of a donor’s total donation including Gift Aid (i.e. £1.28), not just the original amount.
Oxfam say that they have initiated this campaign in response to their research which showed that people “are often deterred from giving because part of their donation usually goes towards the charity’s running costs”. The charity’s “100% giving report” reveals that “72 per cent of Britons believe running costs eat up a significant part of their donation, whilst 65 per cent admit they have been put off supporting charities because of these costs”.
The partnership with PayPal is just for February but Oxfam states that “if it is successful, we plan to repeat it with PayPal in the future”.
https://giving.oxfam.org.uk
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.