Charities Aid Foundation launches text donation service
Howard Lake | 23 November 2010 | News
Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) has launched a text donation service designed to make it “easy and affordable for all charities” to fundraise and communicate with supporters through their mobile phones. The new service, part of CAF’s Fundraising Support Service, has been established in partnership with Vir2 Ltd, the specialist provider of mobile fundraising solutions to the not for profit sector.
CAF has set up two charity shortcodes to collect £3 and £5 donations on behalf of charity clients. CAF will set up campaign keywords, collect payments from the moblie phone networks and claim Gift Aid on behalf of charities.
John Low, Chief Executive of the Charities Aid Foundation announced the new service saying; “Donating by text is easy, quick and simple for both donors and charities. We have seen substantial growth in donating by text with Comic Relief raising £7.8milllion this way in 2009.
Roger Craven, Managing Director of Vir2 Ltd, which has run over 1,000 campaigns and works with 25% of the top UK charities, said: “It is important that more charities can utilise mobile phone technology especially as the delivery of social networking, entertainment and payment are converging on the mobile phone. I know at first hand the growth in demand from charities for text services and how successful text campaigns are proving. It is key to the future of fundraising and helps charities reach new audiences.”
CAF will charge charities £20 per month for each keyword used and a small fee (2.5%) for every donation.
www.cafonline.org/text
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.