Typically, a small charity will wait up to six months for the collection of sponsorship monies if carried out on paper. By allowing people to donate online, fundraising website JustGiving has cut this waiting time to a few days. And managing director Anne-Marie Huby says it reclaims Gift Aid faster than anyone else in the UK, taking on average just two weeks. It's no wonder 9,000 charities have signed up.
"There are hundreds of millions of pounds in unclaimed Gift Aid because small charities, in particular, don't have the resources to reclaim it," says Huby, explaining that you need a legible Gift Aid declaration from donors for reporting to Revenue & Customs. "When you compare this method of fundraising with traditional forms it's a no-brainer," she says.
The website, which allows charities to create a fundraising page where sponsors can donate online, was originally the idea of former investment banker and JustGiving's chief executive, Zarine Kharas. Her view was that if business was being changed by the internet, why not charities? "Charities are technology-poor and it's hard for them to harness the resources to build complex systems," says Huby. "We have enabled lots of small charities and ordinary people to punch above their weight." Twelve million people have backed charities through JustGiving, raising £700m.
With no charity experience, Kharas realised she needed to build a team and in 1999 she met Huby, who was then UK executive director at aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières. "It was the most powerful idea I'd ever heard," says Huby, who joined JustGiving the following year.
JustGiving has 50 staff—from designers and developers to Gift Aid gurus and social media experts. While Kharas focuses on international expansion, Huby runs UK operations.
A key challenge was finding investors who believed raising money for charity was more important than profit. Although JustGiving broke even in 2005, the shareholders, described by Huby as "extremely unusual", are yet to make a penny.
JustGiving is a private, for-profit company that charges a £15 monthly membership fee and five per cent plus VAT on each donation, including Gift Aid. Huby explains that having a sustainable business model allows the company to reinvest in the business to make both fundraising and donating even easier—for example, developing tools such as its new iPhone app. Huby says JustGiving wants to make the user experience smooth. "The stuff that keeps us awake at night is reducing the time it takes the user to donate from 22 seconds to 17 or making sure more people post their donation on Facebook." By Christmas JustGiving will enable people to donate within Facebook.
The company aims to be not only a website but a platform on which people outside JustGiving can create new applications—for example, allowing larger charities to create customised versions of the site. "This will enable us to create partnerships with other brands that will make giving part of the everyday," says Huby.
