Interview with Giveacar’s Patrick Church
Howard Lake | 18 July 2014 | News
As car donation programme Giveacar introduces the British Heart Foundation as its featured charity for the next six months, UK Fundraising spoke to the company’s General Manager Patrick Church about how it is helping charities.
Which charities can benefit from Giveacar? Is it just the large national charities?
Giveacar can be used to raise funds for any registered charity. The donor of the car chooses, and there is no charge for charities to be listed on the site. We are a not-for-profit social enterprise, and we arrange free collection of your car and then either sell it for scrap or at auction. We donate the proceeds to the chosen charity, after we deduct our administration fee. That is 25% of the car’s profit, plus 5% VAT.
Patrick Church at Giveacar. Photo: Luke Brown
What do charities have to do to benefit?
After signing up for free, our charity partners promote the scheme to their donors and supporters. It isn’t a requirement but it makes sense for them to do so.
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What are the benefits of being a featured charity on your website?
We feature a charity on our front page for six months at a time in order to keep the site fresh, and offer visitors a suggested charity to support if they haven’t yet chosen one. Although most donors have chosen, we know that featured charities do benefit form an increase in donations to them.
British Heart Foundation is our fourth featured charity. They haven’t all been big charities either.
We also offer advice to featured charities on how to make the most of the opportunity, with suggestions covering social media, promotion at events – we come to some of the featured charity’s events – and competitions. We make it clear too that some people will come to the site who are not yet in a position to donate a car.
Which tactics have worked well for charities benefiting from Giveacar?
Alzheimers Research Trust was the first featured partner and they found that internal promotion to staff, volunteers and shop volunteers worked particularly well.
Also, we’ve found print media has been the most successful. So we produced some tailored marketing material for them, and the charity printed them out.
How does Giveacar generate funds for charities?
Once a donor hears about us and decides to donate their used car, they usually contact us. We’ve found most prefer to call us and speak to us. Some are suspicious of course, given that the car scrap industry hasn’t always had a good reputation.
We arrange to pick up the car, and then we sell it for scrap or, if it is in good condition, we resell it at a trade auction. We usually get a much better price if we do the latter.
We keep our costs low. There are only four of us in the office.
How much can a car be worth?
Of course it depends, but just this week we obliterated our record! A car was donated to an animal home run by the RSPCA and we sold it at auction for £13,000! Before that, our record had been £6,113.
Of course, most cars don’t achieve that level of value. Not least because our most popular donation is a Ford Fiesta.
But we have noticed that people are donating better quality cars, so we’re confident we can continue to increase the amount we raise for charities.
How big is the used car market?
It is hard to be precise but we estimate it is about 1.3 million cars a year, although not all are disposed of by legal means. Given that we handled 2,947 cars last year, we can see great potential for expanding what we do.
We are in contact with a major car manufacturer so believe that will help us to increase the funds we raise for charities too.
What next for Giveacar?
One area of activity that we would love to do more of is ‘Giveacar Projects’. We are working with the Heal Kids Foundation to fund a particular project. As a result, they are half-way to building a school in Burma, all funded through Giveacar. Each car sold for the project raises about 1% of the cost of the school. We love being able to see the impact our activity is having, so plan to do more of this.
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.