WaterAid shares experience of online direct debits
Howard Lake | 29 April 2004 | News
WaterAid’s IT and Internet Manager Sue Fidler has just shared a Powerpoint presentation of her charity’s experience of setting up paperless direct debits online.
The Powerpoint is available in the new media section of the UK Fundraising Forum, the free discussion forum for fundraisers. She made the presentation at last week’s volcom meeting in London hosted by nfpSynergy’s Joe Saxton.
Sue explains WaterAid’s track record in fundraising online, starting in 1999 when they first accepted online credit card donations for the Mozambique flood appeal using Worldpay Junior Select. They raised £50,000 online in their first year, £120,000 in their second, and £200,000 in their third.
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WaterAid offers its own online events sponsorship tool, and this year 75% of their runners in the Flora London Marathon used it to fundraise and collect their donations.
The charity started soliciting direct debits offline in 2001, and signed up to accept paperless direct debits (PDD) in 2002. It now has over 80,000 direct debit donors.
After examining the options for handling PDDs online, WaterAid learned about Charity Technology Trust’s (CTT) new product in this area. It then worked with CTT and their payment gateway partner RSM who agreed to build PDD system for WaterAid in advance of the formal launch of their new service. The development work cost just £2000 and WaterAid is charged just £1 per PDD mandate.
In the first six weeks of this new system WaterAid collected 400 PDD via its Web site. The average total annual gift was around £100, far better than the average offline gift of £60.
The majority of the first 378 PDD’s received were monthly. The breakdown was as follows:
29 Annual – average gift £12.82
307 Monthly – average gift £7.03
42 Quarterly – average gift £8.74
Not surprisingly the charity has just e-mailed all their UK-based regular credit card donors asking them to convert to PDD.
Later this year it will start an online advertising campaign aimed at PDD recruitment.
Read the full details in the Powerpoint posted on the UK Fundraising Forum.
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.