Future for charity donations is electronic card payments
The recent 2018 UK Payment Markets report shows that in 2017, 13.2 billion debit card payments were made compared to 13.1 overall billion cash payments. The publishings show that more people spend their money with card payments instead of having cash in hand.
UK charities must start thinking about adapting to this approach of payment, in fears of missing out on potentially a large percentage of donations. Contactless payment, credit cards and bank transfers have all increased in popularity throughout the years, with no sign of stopping the easier it becomes!
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Rick Lay, head of fundraising at Sue Ryder, explains, “This is something that charities need to sit up and be paying attention to if they’re not already. The trend is obviously towards people not carrying cash, and fundamentally, if charities that rely on cash donations aren’t thinking about this already, they’re going to be massively behind the curve.”
“We’ve been talking about taking contactless payment machines to funeral collections because people don’t have cash with them anymore but would clearly like to make donations in memory of someone. So you can have a laborious process of filling out their details on paper forms or they can swipe or tap and donate.”
Although the idea has faced some criticism from charities saying that people might take card machines instead of collection buckets as ‘callous’. For the older generation, it could be more complex to make a card payment instead of cash, but these factors seem small in contrast to the potential of increasing payment alternatives. All businesses throughout the UK need to be brainstorming on how to adapt to new audiences and customers. For most people it’s not an unwillingness to donate to charity, it’s just they simply do not have cash on them and are in a rush. If charity members had card machines with them, it would cater to this very large percentage of people in busy cities such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh.