Alternative to cash collection for a charity

unlucky67

I'm involved with a charity and we normally have a small Christmas fundraiser/activity where we sell something for £2.50. The main aim is to provide a service to our community, we make very little on this - the reason we charge is to cover our costs.

Usually we take this in cash as we see people in person but obviously things are a bit different this year. We will probably have about 35 people who will want to buy.

We have free banking and online access so we can ask people to make a transfer to our account but we have quite a bit of activity on the account anyway and these payments will fill up our bank statement. In addition apparently there is supposed to be a limit to how many transactions we can have on our account before we start having to pay bank charges (we sometimes go slightly over the limit but so far we haven't been charged, but I don't want to push things)

I'm sure there must be a way of collecting payments online -bank transfers rather than card payments to save on fees  - to a single pot and then making a single transfer to our bank account.  

I was thinking paypal but I know even as a charity we will need to pay fees. We did have a my donate account but haven't replaced it with anything yet. (It isn't worth us using something like just giving where we need to pay a monthly fee  as we don't get regular donations)

Can anyone suggest/ recommend somewhere/something?

Savvy_Sue

Yes, there will be fees with PayPal, and there are fees with some of the charity donation sites, but bear in mind that you are asking people to entrust their card details to a 3rd party, so it's not entirely unreasonable to pay for that to happen safely. 

I can't speak for the reliability of any of the platforms mentioned in the article I'm linking to below, but the source is one I'd trust. There appear to be some platforms which don't charge, and others which have a one-off fee. In some cases you'd have to sort out the Gift Aid yourselves (which again, is something which needs to be done right, so having it done for you can be a real time and money saver). 

https://charitydigital.org.uk/topics/topics/the-best-online-fundraising-platforms-for-charities-5324