Change Please Foundation Homes in on Cashless Donations

The pandemic has been a big catalyst for the Change Please Foundation to move to cashless, both for their cafes but also for donations. The charity supports people experiencing homelessness back into employment through training as baristas who work at Change Please cafes and concessions.

100% of Change Please profits go to the cause and the Foundation additionally relies on donations to deliver the valuable services including its Driving for Change programme, which provides access to free GP consultations, haircuts, dental care, digital and financial literacy training and other essential facilities.

Crystal Mcfarlane, Team Administrator at Change Please, explains: ‘When COVID hit, I started to research cashless donation options as we could see from our cafes that people were moving to card only payments. I really liked the CollecTin donation kits as they look nice and they are really versatile and not bulky. You can also get them with 4G, which is great as we are often out and about at festivals and events. We currently have 15 CollecTin donation kits, which use Give A Little software, located at our flagship London cafes and also in many of our concession cafes at David Lloyd gyms.’

On what she likes about the Give A Little point-of-donation software platform, Crystal continues: ‘Many of our CollecTin donation kits are left unmanned at our cafes so the Give A Little campaigns that run on them are really self-explanatory for donors. Creating and personalising different campaigns that tell a compelling story for our supporters with engaging images and videos is really easy to do through Give A Little and it’s incredibly useful that we can set different donation amounts as well as an option for donors to choose their own amount.’ 

‘I also like the reporting on Give A Little. It’s easy to navigate and it’s all broken down really well and I can see how well each campaign and location are performing. I love that I can also see if a campaign isn’t active as I can then speak to the cafe to find out if there is a problem and help them resolve it.’

‘I recently did a presentation to colleagues at David Lloyd to show them how to use the CollecTins and Give A Little and they found it really easy. All the staff need to do is login and select the relevant campaign and that’s it. They were really impressed and loved the fact that they can be competitive with each other and check how they are performing!’

Crystal is now looking at expanding cashless giving into other countries that Change Please operates in: ‘It’s great that Give A Little allows you to collect cashless donations in different currencies and I’ve also just discovered that you can download QR codes that link to online campaigns through Give A Little so I am looking forward to trying that out as another option.’