How to streamline your charity donation collection

It’s no surprise that the charity industry is becoming an increasingly digital affair.

While there’s still a place for physical collection, 60% of all charitable donations are now processed online - a figure significantly higher for donors under 45. Furthermore, over 60% of regular donations and 40% of one-off gifts are now made via mobile.

So, as noble as it is to be standing in the supermarket foyer, bucket in hand, you need to ensure your digital storefront delivers and your in-person collections are optimised for mobile payers - with a suitable payment stack to support it all.

This guide covers all of the above, plus all the important stuff relating to your security and compliance requirements. 

Why digital payments matters

Looking beyond the stats, there are four areas you need to focus on getting right:

• Optimising for conversion alongside collection - a big part of that being reducing friction for your donors.

• Minimising donor churn - more specifically involuntary churn through a more efficient payment methodology.

• Managing your transaction costs by steering clear of high-percentage card fees.

• Managing your admin burden with automatic reconciliation, and better visibility on your financials and data through real-time reporting.

That’s the theory. Here’s how to put it into practice.

Maximise your fundraising website’s reach and appeal

Your website should be designed for speed and ease of use. Of course, you want to communicate the message of your cause, but the reality is that most of your visitors already know exactly what you do and are there for good reason.

In marketing terms, they’re “high-intent” users, which is why you want to focus on nailing your onsite conversion elements - and encouraging recurring donations where possible. In this instance, offering simplicity is simply a nod of respect to your donors’ time and generosity.

Building a high-conversion website

Conversion is all about reducing “cognitive load” for users. In simple terms, the more steps - or perhaps in this context, hurdles - there are between your would-be donor arriving on site and completing their donation, the more likely you are to lose them somewhere along the way.

Some conversion-friendly moves you can make are:

• Be mobile-first: with more than six in 10 donors arriving on your site via their phones, your site needs to be built to suit the small-screen experience. Make sure to keep copy to a minimum on your donation landing pages and the routes to making payment clear.

• Try the “power of three”: offer three suggested donation amounts (e.g. £10, £25 and £50) to help your donors avoid decision paralysis. We do this on our Instant Bank Pay page, where you can make a legitimate donation to the Trussell Trust as part of our demo on how instant bank payments work.

• Use Pay by Bank for one-off donations: Pay by Bank allows your donors to make a one-off donation instantly through their banking app, with no card network or data required. It’s as simple as it gets for your donors, and it’s a faster, cheaper and more secure way to get paid for you.

• Introduce digital wallets: for your card-paying donors, integrating Apple Pay and Google Pay will speed up the payment process for a big slice of your users and boost your conversion numbers massively.

• Start with the important questions: your subscription journey should start with two questions: ‘how much?’ and ‘how often?’. Once you’ve got that stated commitment, you can introduce whatever payment form is required. Do it the other way around, and you risk losing people.

• Use your copy quota for impactful social proof: support your donation buttons with information on what that donation amount will do (e.g. “£10 buys a family a mosquito net”). Social proof matters to your donors.

Encouraging subscription donations (recurring payments)

According to the M+R Benchmarks 2025 report, revenue from monthly giving increased by 5% last year, accounting for 31% of all online revenue.

Recurring revenue is key to predictability and sustainability in your operation, so your site’s design should lean towards a subscription model. Some smart things to do are:

• Make monthly donations your default: encourage set-and-forget payments for your donors by having your frequency toggle set to “monthly” by default.

• Make the setup process as slick as possible: if you use a payment provider like us, setting up your Direct Debit mandates is a one-time, single-step digital process. That way, your donors don’t need to worry about filling out a tedious paper form. And because GoCardless links to your donor’s bank account rather than the card itself, you’re protected from the 10-15% of recurring payments that eventually fail due to card expiry.

• Steer clear of “subscription” type language: a “subscription” can sound a bit bill-like. The opportunity to become a “partner” or “champion” of the cause, on the other hand, reflects your donors’ intentions in the right way.

Make your charity payments seamless 

Customer-facing conversion elements sorted, we’re onto the back office upgrades you can make to take care of the other three main areas of concern: cost efficiencies, squashing your admin requirements and reducing churn.

It starts with having your payments infrastructure set up correctly.

Choosing your payment stack

Donor demographics cover a variety of environments and donation preferences. Because of that, you’ll likely want to employ two payment providers into your payment stack.

A specialist like us can manage your recurring payments to arrive on time and without intervention - and we can make your one-off payments instant bank transfers via Pay by Bank. Then, for your card payments, one of the major card processors like PayPal or Stripe will complete your payment stack.

Optimising on-the-go: QR codes, mobile and event

As mentioned right at the start of the guide, physical collections still have a big part to play, however digital collections are steadily taking over. With that in mind, it’s essential you have an efficient digital payment framework set up for your on-the-ground work, too:

• Utilise dynamic QR codes: have QR codes on your signage that link to a pre-filled donation form. These are ideal for the mobile crowd who want quick setup and payment.

• Adopt Pay by Bank at events: if you’re running events where big one-off donations might come in, our Pay by Bank (Instant Bank Pay) solution is the way to go. Donors can pay via their banking app on the spot. The money arrives in your account instantly, and the absence of a card network means you avoid the high transaction fees that would otherwise eat into big donations.

Minimising your transaction costs

According to government research, the number one driver of public trust in charities is whether most of the money raised is spent directly on the cause the charity supports. So naturally, you want to see as much of each donation as possible.

Card networks carry big fees - our cardless payments don’t. GoCardless can manage all your subscription payments via Direct Debit, saving you an average of 56% on your overall payment costs. Likewise, one-off payments are better with Instant Bank Pay, not only because of the lower cost, but the speed, reliability and security of the transaction, too.

Reducing donor churn

One of the big issues with set-and-forget card payments is involuntary churn - that’s when a willing donor’s payments fail due to an expired, stolen or lost card. Charity payments are easy to forget about, and unless your donor remembers to update their details, you won’t see their contributions again. To make matters worse, it’s quite common to only find this out months after payments started failing.

By switching your customers to Direct Debit, you’ll reduce payment failure rates significantly. However, there’s still a small risk of failure due to the donor not having sufficient funds in their account. That’s where our automated payment recovery tool, Success+, comes in. It uses machine learning to execute what we call “intelligent retries”, retrying payment multiple times based on data indicating when the payer is most likely to have the money in their account.

It can help you recover up to 70% of failed payments, bringing in more of your donations and saving you the substantial legwork of manually chasing payments, too.

Made for payment success

Success+ uses recurring payment intelligence to predict and manage payment failures. Recover, on average, 76% of failed payments.

Find out more

Automating Gift Aid

Modern payment stacks capture Gift Aid at the point of donation. If you don’t have this functionality automated, don’t waste any time in getting it sorted.

You can integrate our payments infrastructure with hundreds of partner softwares, including CRMs that have Gift Aid capability, and will sort all the paperwork for HMRC, too.

Build donor trust with efficiency and compliance measures

We’ve already touched upon some of the admin reduction and reporting benefits that come with digital streamlining. These will help you considerably with your data security, compliance and visibility - all of which help you build trust with your donors.

Nailing your security, PCI compliance and data obligations

Data security is a big deal to potential donors. Over two thirds have some level of concern around their information being hacked or stolen when contributing to a charity for the first time.

With a regulated payment provider like us, you don’t handle any of your donors’ data. Take Pay by Bank as an example. There’s no card data involved, therefore no card data to lose. All transactions are handled in the user’s banking app using biometric or multi-factor authentication, and each has its own digital ID. That means it’s the bank that carries any liability, and your Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance burden is greatly reduced.

Being able to talk about having “bank-grade” security for your payments is a major trustmarker for your donation base.

Making better decisions through real-time reporting

Adopting a digital payment stack gives you instant visibility of your payments - who’s paid, immediate payment failure notifications and real-time data on what campaigns are working well - or not so well.

If you integrate your payments service provider with your CRM, you can also say goodbye to manual reporting errors thanks to instant, automated reconciliation. That saves you hours of staff time, and guarantees reliable, actionable reporting that can help steer you in the right direction moving forward.

Charity starts with a seamless payment solution

We’re serious about maximising payment value and success for charities. We’ve helped JustGiving reduce their transaction costs by 70-80%, and we’ve supported Comic Relief to manage 300 donations a second on Red Nose Day.

We’re built for whatever support you need, whenever you require it, so why not sign up today?