Getting Sponsorship for Your Charity Event
The job of collecting sponsorship monies is now easy thanks to the internet, leaving you the time and effort to focus on making your charity event one to remember.
Setting up an Online Fundraising Page
It used to be a pain sorting out sponsorship for your charity event. It usually involved a lot of faffing around with cheques, loose change and forms. Now with the aid of fundraising services like justgiving.co.uk and smartgive.com, event organisers can collect donations from friends, family and colleagues by setting up a sponsorship or donations page online.A fundraising page functions much like the old style paper sponsorship forms except that it is online. This means you can just create a form online, email a web link to it to all your prospective fundraisers, and then donations can be made online using a debit or credit card.
The Benefits of an Online Fundraising Page
An online fundraising page is fast becoming the number one way to collect money for charity events as a result of its many plus points:- It’s fast – You can send an email link to all your prospective sponsors anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds.
- It’s efficient – People can sponsor you immediately with their credit or debit card, and so there’s no need to chase everybody up for each and every penny.
- It’s safe – Payments are collected automatically and securely by the online fundraising service.
- You’re likely to raise more – Its efficiency means more people can get involved and more money can be raised. Also when sponsors pay by credit or debit they are often more generous.
Gift Aid Benefits
As part of the Gift Aid scheme, charities are entitled to claim back 28% from the Inland Revenue for every donation from a UK tax payer. This means that every sponsor’s donation goes that bit further, and at no cost to either the charity or the donator.This is of course not an exclusively online phenomenon, but previously many charities only reclaimed the Gift Aid on larger donations because it was too expensive to process the paperwork. Online fundraising sites have automated the system and thereby negated the need for costly and time consuming paperwork.
Transforming the Face of Charity Donation
The online sponsoring service Justgiving is widely credited as having revolutionised the face of charity donation in the UK since its foundation in 2000. It now boasts having more than 3,000 UK registered charities on its electronic books and 300,000 fundraising user fundraising pages, and been responsible for the collection of over £150 million.Justgiving has attracted some criticism for not being a ‘charitable’ organisation itself, but a private profit making enterprise that takes a cut of 5% from every donation. By deducting this fee to cover running costs, it could be argued that people are profiting from the charity donations.
