We recently wrote about our experience in setting up an Amazon Smile account for a charity we work with – Arts Derbyshire. As a charity, every single penny raised counts and so we wrote our previous blog on Amazon Smile to help others quickly and easily navigate how to do set this up for themselves.
For Arts Derbyshire, we also set up a Give As You Live account to help them bring in further donations this way. This blog will go through the steps you need to take to set up a Give As You Live account for your own charity.
First launched in 2010, Give As You Live allows people from all walks of life to create fundraising campaigns for their favourite charities. This is not too dissimilar to a JustGiving page, and can run alongside any other donating opportunities you offer to your audience.
Give As You Live provides a service where you can create a series of fundraising initiatives through one page that showcases your charity. It is simple and easy to do, and though there is a 1.9% platform fee and 2.9% payment processing fee that is taken from the amount raised, donors can, if they wish, choose to cover that cost.
There are plenty of ways to encourage people to raise cash for your charity through the Give as you Live platform. People can “give as they shop” by registering for an account and then switching to their Give As You Live profile before they go shopping on their favourite high street store websites. When logged in, Give As You Live detects that you are visiting a participating website and will interrupt with a pop-up that asks if you want to donate a percentage of your shopping basket from your current shopping session.
Clicking the ‘yes’ button will then log the user into the participating website via their Give As You Live account and enable them to make up a shopping basket on the website as usual, safe in the knowledge that they will be donating to charity whilst they shop. There is no extra charge to the end user for this service and some websites offer generous donations of up to 20%, and we have even seen a 40% donation too.
There are a number of admin tasks to attend to once you have signed up with Give As You Live. You will be taken to an Admin dashboard that will guide you through the process of setting up your profile, adding your logos and other details associated with your account.
There is also a handy Marketing Toolkit section that allows you to create buttons and forms that you can embed on your website to encourage people to donate direct from the embedded form, or that will take the website visitor (or email reader if you add a button to your newsletters) straight to your charity page on the GAYL platform.
Your Admin login is where you also access reports on how much you have raised via this platform, and where you can download financial reports to help reconcile the money that is auto-transferred to your bank account once the payment threshold has been met.
In your Admin interface you will also find under the ‘Finance’ section a tool to help you claim Gift Aid on donations made via the donations tools. It’s important to note that Give As You Shop donations don’t qualify for Gift Aid, but GAYL direct donations do.
You will need to go through a separate HMRC Gift Aid application process before you can switch this facility on within Give As You Live. It usually takes about 6 weeks to complete and must be done by the Chair or your charity’s Finance Director.
Once you have applied, you need to check back in this report to download any Gift Aid reports that need to be submitted back with your accounts to HMRC.
Unfortunately this and many charitable fundraising options require that you are set up as an official charity and are registered with the Charities Commission.
If you have a donations page on your website, you can embed a form provided by Give As You Live that enables you to collect donations from within your website. It’s easy to use for your website visitor, which is always a great way of ensuring nothing gets in the way of them completing the task. So make sure you do this!
Give As You Live also have a marketing suite that you can access via the Admin section whilst logged in. You can download donate buttons, registration buttons and other collateral that you can embed on pages within your website and will encourage people to click through and take action. You can also put these buttons in the footer of your emails as well as feature them in your newsletters and social media feeds.
Keep on folding in donation requests like this into your regular marketing messaging to ensure people are fully aware that you are asking for money, and you are providing them with a really quick way of them doing it. Setting up a Give As You Live account is a really simple, effective way of bringing in more donations for your charity with a simple click of a button, so add this to your fundraising channels to get started.
We hope you found this guide useful. We’ve also put together some other articles on digital fundraising for charities that you might want to read:
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