VIR2 Ltd and BT offer multi-channel donations to charities
Howard Lake | 13 December 2010 | News
Mobile fundraising solutions provider Vir2 Ltd is working with BT to enable charities to offer donors a choice of low-cost payment methods for collecting donations. As a result Vir2 can now offer charities the option to support integrated telephone and SMS campaigns.
Charities using the platform will only have to ask for donors’ personal information once, yet still be able to recognise the donor regardless of the way the donor contacted them.
The system also enables charities to trigger repeat donations by text and take the donation in the most efficient way, whether that is by card or text donation, depending on the amount.
Telephone donations will be taken by BT SafePay, BT’s PCI DSS Level 1 payments system, an automated telephone interactive voice response (IVR) system for securely collecting credit and debit card donations. It enables charities and other organisations to avoid the expense of using call centres and “guarantees that every call is answered”.
Launched by Agilemedia, BT’s Wholesale interactive communications and payments division, the IVR platform in conjunction with the BT Buynet card payment solution has already been used by BBC Children in Need , BBC Wildlife, Soccer Aid, Comic Relief and the recent Disaster Emergency Committee’s appeal for Pakistan.
The platform can handle Gift Aid instructions, so that donors can register a declaration that they are a UK taxpayer.
Vir2 say that “the fully automated platform can be up and running in a matter of hours and allows calls to be managed 24 hours a day”. Once money is pledged, the payment is authorised and deposited with the charity within 48 hours.
“This deal is about giving our charity clients and their donors’ choice,” said Roger Craven, CEO, Vir2. “Our charity clients can now access a robust, secure and instant method of handling large value donations, which fits perfectly with our text platform which handles low value donations.”
www.vir2.co.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.