National Funding Scheme to promote mobile giving to arts and cultural organisations

Howard Lake | 4 July 2012 | News

National Funding Scheme (NFS) is a new initiative that is intended to increasing giving to arts, cultural and heritage organisations through the use of mobile technology.
Announced by Secretary of State for Culture, Media, Olympics and Sport Jeremy Hunt MP, the scheme will provide a means for visitors and supporters to use their mobiles and tablets to direct funds to the arts and cultural institutions they wish to support. It will be available from March 2013. It has been established by William Makower, CEO of Panlogic.

William Makower, Panlogic
The scheme will enable visitors to make a donation at the “the point of high emotional impact”, such as in the cafe after the exhibition, reading a plaque, or at the encore. It will allow organisations, with visitors’ permission, to collect donor details and therefore begin a conversation with the donor. This data will be sold to participating organisations by the NFS.
The platform will allow donations via four mobile methods:
• SMS text giving
• System stored credit cards
• Interactive voice/tone response (IVR)
• Near field communication (NFC)
• Apps
Panlogic also plans to provide all donors with a record of their donations and, for higher rate UK taxpayers, facilitation to make appropriate Gift Aid reclaims. Basic rate Gift Aid will be reclaimed by the charity behind the National Funding Scheme and be paid over to the recipient institutions.
Institutions will be provided with a web portal and brand guidelines to develop appropriate signage for both individual exhibits and entrances/exit ways.

Jeremy Hunt MP
Jeremy Hunt MP said: “The country’s Arts, cultural and heritage institutions need to develop easy ways for people to give them money. Digital is a great way to do this and I am very supportive of the plan to develop the National Funding Scheme to be available for all our cultural institutions.”
The National Funding Scheme secured grants from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts and others to carry out over
85 face-face interviews with senior individuals across the cultural landscape to explore the need for this kind of service and had nearly 950 responses to their online consultation.
www.panlogic.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.