We've gathered some of the more frequently asked questions here. If you can't find what you're looking for, please get in touch.
Fees on fundraising platforms are understandably a contentious issue, so we aim to be as transparent as possible about how we work. When you place your sponsorship challenge, you will be shown a breakdown with two different fees; a platform fee and a payment processing fee. The payment processing fee is fixed at 1.3%, and represents the cost of transacting using a debt/credit card. This charge always exists on all purchases you make using a card, however, it is normally hidden by the retailer who absorbs the fee as part of their margin. Rather than deducting this fee from the amount received by the charity, we prefer to split this out so that you can know your full donation amount will arrive at the chosen charity. The platform fee is the amount we use to provide our services. The main costs we cover with this fee are our platform overheads (running our servers and software tools) and human costs (paying for our team to provide support, keep our platform secure, fix bugs and build new features). In the aim of maximum transparency, we have chosen to make this fee discretionary - similar to a service fee at a restaurant. The default setting is 10%, but you can choose to increase or decrease this amount as you wish. You can remove this fee entirely if you prefer. However, we can only offer our service while we are able to cover our costs, so we encourage you to please support us if you are able to.
No, we charge no platform fees or subscription fees to any charity. All funds that are raised on the platform are sent directly to your chosen charity with no deductions.
Not yet - but watch this space! Gift Aid has enormous value to charities so we are working hard to add this feature to our platform. However, the integrations and administration required to get this up and running will take us some time (our resources are very limited!) so we’re not quite ready to go yet.
When you place your sponsorship challenge, unless you select the ‘Taking Part’ option, your total donation amount will not be calculated until the event is completed and results have been submitted. When you place your sponsorship, we will collect your card details, which will be stored securely by Stripe (FCA regulated). After the event results are submitted, we will calculate the total amount of your donation and send you a summary via email. Your card will not be charged for another 3 working days, which means that after you receive the email, you will be able to login and change/increase/cancel your donation if required. For example, if you have set an aggressive challenge but your fundraiser didn’t quite make their target, you may wish to login and offer your original amount as a conciliatory prize!
If you wish to close your account, please contact us and send us a note with your account email address. We will close your account for you and remove all personal data as per our privacy policy
Yes. When you set up a challenge, you will be asked if you are raising for a charity at step one. Simply select “ No, donations will be transferred to your selected bank account”. You will be asked to enter your bank details after submitting your event results and your raised funds will be transferred to you.
Don’t worry - as part of the challenge creation process, you will be offered the options to enter a missing charity or create a missing event. Once your challenge is published, our curation team will check the new details you have added and verify them on our system. If you have any difficulties with setting up your custom challenge, contact us with details and we can help you out by adding the charity or event for you.
Sponsivity is not registered with the charity commission, since the platform primarily transacts on behalf of charities and we do not accept donations ourselves. The company has launched as a private company limited by shares, and we are beginning the journey of registering as a Community Interest Company (CIC). A CIC is a special type of limited company which exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders. This would ensure that we are working towards our community interest statement, and that our assets can only be used for these social objectives.
These things happen! For security reasons, you cannot automatically connect your guest donation to your account. However, if you reach out to our support team at [email protected] with details of your account and your donation, we should be able to help you out.