List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK

“Fundraising is a very rich and beautiful activity. It is a confident, joyful and hopes –filled expression of ministry. In ministering to each other, each from the riches he or she possesses we work together for the full coming of God’s kingdom.”

                     -Henri Jozef Michael Nouwen, Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer,and theologian. 

Organizations and Individuals have always applied various methods to collect funds. The common methods were Public collections, door-to-door collections, or street fundraising, street fairs, or advertising on the TV but right now online fundraising has become a big hit. Many nonprofits and charitable organizations are using this online platform to arrange money to support their specific causes. There are a few things you should know before launching your campaign online so you do not repeat the mistakes often committed by other nonprofits while asking for online donations.

First of all, give your donors a strong and worthy reason to donate to your organization. Give them a clear value that they can consider to be important enough for them to spend money. Make sure you differentiate yourself from other organizations and clearly tell your donors about your specialty and uniqueness. Building and gaining trust is important. So make sure you maintain transparency in every step of your fundraising and provide honest information about your expenditures for charity.

Use powerful images that can communicate with your donors on your behalf. Use precise captions for the images that highlight the intensity of the problem or need. Images should be compelling enough to create a sense of urgency so that the donors are moved to make a contribution. You can try the same with videos. A lot of studies have shown that donors prefer short high-quality videos compared to text. Make an engaging video and post it on your Crowdfunding page to entice the people to make a contribution.

Fundraising online is an easy and simple method that can be used to fulfill a wide range of purposes. All you need is to launch your campaign with a strategy and effective planning so that it takes less time to collect the required funds.

List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK

1 – Transparent Hands

2 – Indiegogo

3 – JustGiving

4 – Kickstarter

5 – Funding Circle

1 – Transparent Hands

Quick and Easy Way to Save Peoples’ Lives

Transparent Hands is in first position in our List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK. Transparent Hands funds surgeries of poor patients using a global Crowdfunding platform. The platform provides visibility of poor patients and builds a personal and trusted bond between patients and donors while ensuring complete transparency.

Where Is the Problem?

More than 70 million people in Pakistan are living below the poverty line due to which they are unable to undergo proper health treatment if they experience any disease. Estimated amount of surgery backlog in Pakistan is in millions every year.

• There are not many health insurance plans for underprivileged community. They have to pay out of pocket if they need any medical treatment but due to the limited or no resources, majority is unable to undergo surgical treatment.
• Beyond the cost of the surgical procedure, they might have to pay for pre and post-operative expenses which includes medical tests, medications, hospital stay and other expenses. It is almost impossible for someone who earns less than $2 a day to pay hefty amount for medical relief.
• There is lack of advanced medical facilities and medical professionals due to which lower middle class families are unable to avail treatment facilities.
• There are a limited number of beds in hospitals but the number of patients visiting these hospitals is a lot more.
• Every second patient including a child is put on a long waiting list and during the waiting period, the patient’s health further deteriorates. In most of the cases, patients expire until their turn comes.
• There is no advanced healthcare services in slums due to which majority of people have to rely on quacks in their areas.
• Private hospitals are out of reach for deprived community due to the high costs of consultation fees and surgical procedure.

Our Role

Committed to Provide Free Surgeries to Those Who Cannot Afford

Transparent Hands is a non-profit organization which is tackling this major healthcare issue of Pakistan with the help of fundraising through its unique Crowdfunding platform. It is registered under Trust Act 1882 as a Trust Organization with a Tax Exemption status under the article 2(36) in Pakistan. Transparent Hands is  registered in USA EIN assigned: 47-3564801 as Transparent Hands Foundation US, Inc. with tax exemption status 501(c)3.

Transparent Hands conducts the surgeries of deserving patients free of cost at private hospitals with the help of donations and charity. Donors from all over the world can use our online Crowdfunding web portal if they wish to donate. They could select any patient, fund the surgery and receive regular feedback and updates until the patient is recovered completely.

Our user friendly online fundraising work as follows:

• Choose the patient whose surgery you want to fund.
• Choose from a number of payment methods as per your convenience.
• Donate to that particular patient and get tax exemption.
• Get regular updates of that patient until he/she gets fully recovered.

What makes us unique is; our transparency level that means donors will be ensured that each penny they are giving will be spent on the needy patient. We do this by uploading all the hospital bills and other documents of our patient after his/her surgery is successfully conducted. Donor can see that the exact amount hospital has charged against the surgery of that particular patient.

2 – Indiegogo

About

Indiegogo is in second position in our List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK. Millions of people around the world visit Indiegogo to find clever and unconventional things that solve everyday problems large and small. By giving entrepreneurs everywhere a platform to launch new and groundbreaking products, They help surface innovations in tech, design, and much more, all before they go mainstream.

The Indiegogo Community

Powered by curiosity, the Indiegogo community has helped bring more than 800,000 innovative ideas to life since 2008. Today, their group of backers is more than 9 million strong, representing 235 countries and territories. Always on the lookout for new solutions to everyday problems, their community thrives on making clever discoveries before everyone else. From live campaigns to ready-to-ship tech, curious humans rely on Indiegogo to find the latest innovations in tech and design.

Get the tech that gets people talking

With both live crowdfunding campaigns and innovative products shipping now, there’s no better place to start the hunt for cool and clever innovations that surprise and delight. Indiegogo is where new launches.

Be a part of emerging tech, design, and much more

New to crowdfunding? Welcome! With Indiegogo’s crowdfunding and InDemand campaigns, there’s no better place to discover ingenious products just as they emerge from the minds of creative entrepreneurs around the world.

By contributing to campaigns — around here they call it “backing” — you’re joining a group of insiders and early adopters that add momentum to great projects in various stages of development, from early concepts all the way to ready-to-ship products.

Your place to shop innovation – guaranteed

Just like with Indiegogo’s crowdfunding campaigns, you’ll find heaps of inspiring, surprising, and clever products in the Indiegogo Marketplace. And just like with crowdfunding, the products come straight from entrepreneurs and their teams all around the world.

Marketplace orders have guaranteed shipping – if a seller doesn’t stick to their shipping schedule, they’ll refund your purchase. Most products are hot off successful crowdfunding campaigns, so there’s no better place to find cool innovations before they go mainstream.

 Equity crowdfunding

Invest in companies you love

Find innovative startups and growing companies to invest in, from software to hardware, film, restaurants, and more. Anyone can invest as little as $100, and no accreditation is necessary.

3 – JustGiving

JustGiving is the world’s most trusted platform for online giving.

JustGiving is in third position in our List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK. Their mission is to ensure no great cause goes unfunded. They are enormously proud to have helped people in 164 countries raise over $4.5 billion for good causes since they were founded in 2001.

For profit and for good

They are a tech-for-good company. They charge a fee, all of which is re-invested into building innovative new tools to make giving better for everyone.

Innovation

They think of ourselves as the R&D team for every cause in the world. They are building on their 15 years of social giving history to create more intelligent and powerful ways of connecting causes with people who care, which are open to everyone and every cause, however small.

Doing the decent thing

They believe it’s not just what you do but how you do it. Their users trust us because they do not share their data with anyone without their permission. Uniquely, they never sell or trade personal information with third parties, or try to ‘upsell’ other services on the back of people’s generosity.

Their founding team

Zarine is the founder and CEO of JustGiving

Zarine is the founder and CEO of JustGiving. Together with Anne-Marie Huby, she launched the UK’s first online fundraising platform in 2001. A former lawyer and City banker, Zarine holds a BA in law from Cambridge University and was awarded the RSA’s Albert Medal in 2009 for ‘democratising fundraising and technology for charities’.

MD Anne-Marie Huby co-founded JustGiving

MD Anne-Marie Huby co-founded JustGiving in 2001, having made her name in London as UK head of the international charity Médecins Sans Frontières. Read Anne-Marie’s thoughts on building a great culture on the Girls In Tech blog.

4 – Kickstarter

Kickstarter is in fourth position in our List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK. Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects — big and small — have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.

Kickstarter is an enormous global community built around creativity and creative projects. Over 10 million people, from every continent on earth, have backed a Kickstarter project.

Some of those projects come from influential artists like De La Soul or Marina Abramović. Most come from amazing creative people you probably haven’t heard of — from Grandma Pearl to indie filmmakers to the band down the street.

Every artist, filmmaker, designer, developer, and creator on Kickstarter has complete creative control over their work — and the opportunity to share it with a vibrant community of backers.

“Kickstarter is one of those platforms that gives you space to work with people who know you, love you, and support you.”

 They built Kickstarter to help bring creative projects to life. They measure their success as a company by how well they achieve that mission, not by the size of their profits. That’s why, in 2015, they became a Benefit Corporation. Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals.

When they became a Benefit Corporation, they amended their corporate charter to lay out specific goals and commitments to arts and culture, making their values core to their operations, fighting inequality, and helping creative projects come to life. You can read their commitments in full below.

 They’re an independent, founder-controlled company of 118 people working together in an old pencil factory in New York City. They spend their time designing and building Kickstarter, connecting people around inspiring creative projects, and having a lot of fun doing it.

They’re developers, designers, support specialists, writers, musicians, painters, poets, gamers, robot-builders — you name it. Between us, they’ve backed more than 34,000 projects (and launched plenty of their own).

 Every Kickstarter project is an opportunity to create the universe and culture you want to see. The games you wish you could play, the films you wish you could watch, the technology you wish someone was building — on Kickstarter, people work together to make those things a reality.

Take a look around: right this minute, thousands of people are funding their creative ideas. Feel like joining them?

Kickstarter  Benefit Corporation

Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. They measure their success as a company by how well they achieve that mission, not by the size of their profits. That’s why they reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015.

Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals. When a company becomes a Benefit Corporation, it can choose to make further commitments. In their new charter (shown below) they spell out their mission, their values, and the commitments they have made to pursue them.

They will deliver a benefit statement annually that will measure the results of their efforts to promote these public benefits.

5 – Funding Circle

They’re here to help you thrive

Funding Circle is in fifth position in our List of Top 5 Online Donation Websites in UK. With a quick application, dedicated account manager and fast decision, you can stay focused on your business while they focus on your loan. Taking your business to the next level has never been easier.

Revolutionising a broken system

When Funding Circle was founded, they could see that businesses weren’t being given the finance to grow, while investors were making poor returns. They had a simple idea — let them support each other.

By lending directly to businesses through Funding Circle, investors can now earn attractive returns to better provide for their future. Businesses get fast, easy access to funding to grow, create jobs, support local communities and drive the economy forward. They believe it’s better for everyone.

They Believe In Those Made To Do More

Business owners and investors share a common thread. They’re forward thinkers. They’re determined. They stand up to make a difference and work hard to make it happen.

That same thread runs through everyone at Funding Circle. It’s a shared mission that inspires us – they help you as you change the world.

So whether you’re a business owner who aspires to more, or an investor who wants your money to go further, they believe in you. You’re the ones they built Funding Circle for.

They’ve helped 40,000 small businesses across the world

From accountants and jewellers to bakers and film makers, they’ve helped thousands of businesses in the UK, US, Germany and the Netherlands to take their next step forward.

The world’s leading platform for small business lending

One of the best capitalised lending platforms in the world, they have raised approximately £250 million of equity capital since 2010 from some of the largest and most sophisticated investors around. Providing guidance and support as well as capital, they share their mission to build a better financial world for businesses and investors.

Their backers collectively manage over $5 trillion and are the leading firms behind Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Betfair.

Their current equity investors are Accel Partners, Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, DST Global, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Sands Capital, Temasek and Union Square Ventures.

Conclusion:

The fundraising process is not the same as it was before.Crowdfunding websites are giving charities new and exciting opportunities to reach their supporters and increase donations.There are numerous online donation sites and services available for nonprofits and charitable organizations to use. In order to utilize these opportunities at its best ,charitiesneed to have a strategy beforehand they launch their campaigns.

Encourage your donors to take part in your campaigns and help you to solve the issue at your hand whether it’s about raising money to support the education of poor children or able to provide them meals or fund the medical treatments of poor patients.Whatever your cause is,make sure your donors know how their donations are going to make a difference.Use captions incorporated numbers:

 “$ 200 can provide 50 meals for the poor children”

“$ 400 needed to save a 5-year-old boy”

“$ 4000 can save a 2-year-old to recover from cyanotic heart disease”

Here  the numbers are going to speak louder than words.Many donors  love the notion that they can save a baby boy from premature death and help him recover from the deadly heart disease.Somedonors are  appealed with the fact that their donations will provide 50 meals for the poor children.By using numbers you are actually talking about human-sized problems which could easily be resolved.. This will help your donors to make a quick decision.

Even if you are fundraising online you will be held accountable to UK fundraising laws as a registered or unregistered Charity. Make sure you comply with the fundraising laws and regulations in particular areas such as data protection and licensing laws. You should also follow the recognized fundraising standards in the UK. According to Code of Fundraising Practice in the UK, fundraisers are bound to follow legal rules which demand that yourfundraising methods should be open and accountable. Your organization should be well run and must comply with the statutory accounting and reporting requirements. It is always better to consult an experienced lawyer to guide you through the legal procedures and help you to avoid legal problems in the future.