The Good Exchange sees £4.7m distributed to charitable causes in first year
Melanie May | 5 September 2017 | News
Not-for-profit cloud platform The Good Exchange has announced that it has seen £4.7m distributed to good causes in its first year through the platform.
The Good Exchange platform went live on 1 September 2016 and matches charitable local projects with funding from grant makers, donors and fundraisers. It replaced findmeagrant.org, which was Greenham Common Trust’s web platform, and is wholly owned by the Trust. It enables organisations with money for good causes to identify projects that meet their giving criteria, while allowing charities to receive multiple grants from one application form, manage fundraising events and public donations in one place. To date, users of the platform transact an average of 208 donations per month, with the average donation amounting to £721.
In its first year, the platform found funding for 353 projects, ranging in size; for example from £370 raised to replace tools by the Newbury and Thatcham Green Gym, to £5 million being raised to build the Ark Cancer Charity Treatment Centre in North Hampshire. The types of giving also vary and in the last year £900,000 has come from charitable grants, a further £1.6 million from grants which match fund donations and fundraising events and £2 million from public donations, all managed through the platform.
Mark Jones, Director of Fundraising and Communications at Ark Cancer Charity Treatment Centre in Hampshire said:
“The ability to source donations from a number of places, while managing more sophisticated donation schemes such as ‘match donation’, is what has been most impressive about The Good Exchange. We’ve already raised nearly £1.5 million of our £5 million target and we’re still going strong.”
Ed Gairdner, COO of The Good Exchange said,
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“We’re delighted to have seen such a positive response to The Good Exchange cloud platform and truly proud that it has generated so much money for good causes. Significant cuts to government funding have meant tighter budgets than ever, which is why it’s essential that we apply our technical maturity to generate efficiencies in a sector that needs it the most. The Good Exchange’s one-step, on-line matching service for funders and fundraisers that automatically links organisations with money for good causes with those who need it most has been designed exactly for this purpose.”
The Good Exchange also recently announced that it had selected Finn Partners to help it raise brand awareness in the UK. Finn Partners intends to raise awareness with a two-pronged campaign; utilising extensive customer references and positioning the company as a thought leader on the future of funding in the UK. Finn Partners is experienced in PR programmes for technology companies and at tailoring these to individual markets, and also has specific experience in CSR and social impact campaigns.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.