My daughter’s Florence and Amelia recently embarked on a quest to fundraise for Woodgreen Pets Charity – the motivation was all their own, but naturally being a parent and experienced with fundraising platforms I wanted to help them make the most of their efforts. I’d been aware of recent developments by Give as you Live and this seemed the perfect opportunity to delve a little deeper.
For those unfamiliar with Give as you Live, their Online offering enables you to raise money for your favourite charity when you shop online. However they also have a dedicated Donations and Fundraising side to their platform offering a host of tools, many standard, some highly coveted, three of which I will go into today.
Beginning with what I believe is a big sell for charities looking to equip their fundraisers with the best possible tools to succeed.
Tap to Donate
The Covid-19 pandemic kicked into high gear what was already a fast-paced transition away from physical cash to digital transactions. Research by Give as you Live revealed fewer than 12% of donations made in the UK are made with cash, whilst 94% of our cards have contactless functionality. Gone are the days of coins in buckets, instead potential donors want to tap their way to giving.
Having created a fundraising page for my daughter’s I was immediately prompted to download their app to my device, and upon logging in was presented with my newly created page (and in future any others I start) to begin accepting donations immediately.
The app was simple enough to use that my ten year old daughter could manage it (under supervision!) An easy to follow flow began with a predetermined or custom amount ask (£2 minimum) followed by some brief information gathering from, the donor and then a simple tap to complete the process.
There were some barriers. A tick box prompts the donor for an additional 12.5% to cover associated fees; rather than go into the small print of this each time with every donor I simply unticked it. But an unaware fundraiser could potentially charge donors substantially more than they anticipated giving.
The requirement for a donor email address was a hindrance. People are more privacy conscious than ever before; everyone we spoke to hesitant to provide one. In the end we used a fake email to bypass this requirement. It’s also important to note that donations via this method have an additional 5% in fees applied to them (see the comparisons below for what this looks like in practice)
However, in the end these hurdles were surmountable and 85% of the donations they took on the day came via the contactless app.
A charity that promotes Give as you Live as a preferred fundraising platform will automatically give their donors this functionality – no more hardware investment, no more juggling devices between supporters, no additional contracts to manage, no PCI DSS to certify. Campaign pages setup in a similar way would also enable staff and volunteers to access this functionality for community, corporate and challenge events across the board.
Read more about their Tap to Donate app here.
WordPress Plugin
In person, face-to-face donations are increasingly shifting to online donations, and it’s no longer enough to have a donate button on your website. An extra click is an extra barrier between an individual being a website visitor and a converted donor. Visit the websites some of the biggest charities like Oxfam, Cancer Research UK and Save The Children and you’re presented with an embedded donation box, front and centre.
It’s a feature smaller charities often desire, but development costs and complexities make this difficult to achieve. Give as you Live have taken complexity out of the equation by developing a plugin for WordPress, a CMS often quoted as powering over 43% of websites on the internet, and a very common choice for charities.
The plugin offers adjustable donation amounts (up to eight in total) with a custom amount for the supporter to use themselves, as well the ability to customise the appearance and offer both single and regular giving choices. No APIs required, simply create a form in WordPress and use the shortcode to place it where you need it most.
What it doesn’t give you is donation framing; if you want to talk about what each amount could pay for to give your donors impact visualisation, this will have to be presented elsewhere on your website. You also cannot choose variable amounts for single and regular giving, which could be prohibitive to one or the other when going for bigger or smaller asks. That said, you can also create forms dedicated to just one or the other, enabling you to better customise your ask in dedicated sections of your website.
So in the spirit of my daughters’ fundraising efforts and in true Blue Peter style, here’s one I made earlier for Woodgreen Pets Charity.
Read more about their WordPress Plugin here.
Swiftaid
Not a week passes, not a donation goes by, without someone in your charity mentioning Gift Aid (probably!) and for good reason. Figures from HMRC show that £1.7 billion in Gift Aid was paid to charities at the basic rate of Income Tax in the tax year to April 2025 (up 7% on the previous tax year.) However at the same time, according to the Charity Finance Group, an estimated £560m of Gift Aid relief goes unclaimed every year.
Enter Swiftaid.
For those unfamiliar with Swiftaid, their service collates Gift Aid Declarations from participating platforms, enabling Give as you Live to apply Gift Aid to any donation made on their platform where a declaration has been given for another. The result is an improved donation flow for your donors and maximised gift for you, the charity.
How do they compare?
The cost of fundraising matters, especially for smaller charities looking to extract every last penny from the donations they receive. I’ve summarised below the fees that are applied to donations by Give as you Live, Justgiving and Enthuse to give an idea of what the above functionality could cost you.
| Fee Comparison | Give as you Live (Donations) | Give as you Live (Tap to Donate) | JustGiving | Enthuse |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription fee | £0.00 pcm | £0.00 pcm | £15.00 to 39.00 pcm | £24.99 to 39.99 pcm |
| Gift Aid fee | 0% | 0% | 5% | 5% |
| Platform fee | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| Payout fee | 0% | 5% | 0% | 0% |
| Processing fee | 2.5% | 2.5% | 1.9% + 30p | 0% to 1.9% + 30p |
| Donor fee cover option | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Monthly cost | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 |
So what does this mean in reality? Let’s assume in a single month you receive £10 from 100 donors each, all through fundraising pages, all of whom declare Gift Aid, with no donor fee covers applied. That’s £1,000 in donations and a further £250 in Gift Aid gross. Incredibly simplistic, but here’s how they stack up.
| 100 donors at £10 each | Give as you Live (Donations) | Give as you Live (Tap to Donate) | JustGiving | Enthuse |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription fee | £0.00 | £0.00 | £15.00 | £24.99 |
| Gift Aid fee | £0.00 | £0.00 | £12.50 | £12.50 |
| Platform fee | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 |
| Payout fee | £0.00 | £50.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 |
| Processing fee | £25.00 | £25.00 | £49.00 | £49.00 |
| Total fees | £25.00 | £75.00 | £76.50 | £86.49 |
| Net Income | £1,225.00 | £1,175.00 | £1,173.50 | £1,163.51 |
A big caveat is that there are of course endless variations to the number, value and frequency of donations a charity could receive in any given month, as well as a variety of pricing plans for different products and different income thresholds. However an initial glance would suggest that Give as you Live’s offering is a competitive one and well worth looking into if you’re looking to diversify and maximise your charity’s donations online and in-person.
Disclaimer
I have no connections with Give as you Live and do not represent them, nor have I been commissioned in any way to write this article. These are purely my own views on their offerings.
