Online donations service for small and medium charities

The Charities Aid Foundation has launched a new service to help small and medium-sized charities process donations by card and direct debit.

The donations processing platform, entitled CAF Donate, is intended to ease the administrative burden of processing both online and offline donations, making it easier for charities to take both regular donations and one-off gifts.

The new platform is set apart from existing sites such as JustGiving and BT Donate, because it can be run in a charity's own website rather than that of a third party.

Charities can choose between a basic profile or the full service, with the basis profile providing charities without their own website with an online page to fundraise through, and the full service giving charities the tools to fundraise through their own website and via mobile phones and Facebook.

According to the fee schedule, for charities with the full service, charges include 3.6 percent of the gross donations on one off payments by card and PayPal, and a collection fee of two percent of the gross donation on direct debit payments.

With a basic profile, a transaction fee of five percent is charged on gross donations made through CAF's website by card and PayPal.

Around 1,000 charities have had access to the platform since its soft launch last year, and it is now being made generally available.

For further information about CAF Donate visit www.cafonline.org/charity-finance--fundraising/fundraising-services/multichannel-fundraising.aspx.