Cash for Kids empowers its regional offices to collect contactless donations with Give A Little’s Group model

Cash for Kids is also the official charity of the Bauer Media Group and each of the charity’s regional offices is located at a local Bauer radio station across the UK so you will often hear the charity talked about on stations like Absolute Radio, KISS and Magic Radio. 

Give A Little Group model

Give A Little’s Group model works well for Cash for Kids’ structure as the Group allows the head office to have an umbrella Give A Little account, which has oversight of all of the 23 Group members’ fundraising. Each member can view its own fundraising and funds are paid out into the regional charity’s bank account.

Before deciding to go ahead with the Group model, the charity opted to run a pilot with a single Give A Little account and Stripe as the payment processor.

James Blanchflower, Digital Services & Data Manager, Cash for Kids explains: 

“The pilot went really well and because of that, we decided to fully commit to Give A Little and go for the Group model. This allowed us to invite our regional members to sign up via a special sign up link and integrate Stripe as the payment processor, which is what we use as an organisation and another reason why Give A Little works for us. Previously, we had to manually distribute funds to each region, so being able to automate this was a big selling point for moving to Give A Little. The head office finance team really appreciates the reports that Give A Little provides, including the payout report that shows the amount raised minus the transaction fee, as they allow for easy reconciliation which is particularly handy.”

Contactless Donation Boxes

On which contactless donation device the charity chose, James continues: 

“We chose to go with the CollecTin More contactless donation box, which uses Give A Little software, because we needed something portable that could also be used to take donations offline. We now have 50 CollecTins and the teams really love using them. The ability to add a custom device name in the Give A Little account and identify which device was which was incredibly useful as we got all 50 CollecTins delivered to our offices at once!”

The devices and Give A Little have been used for a wide array of fundraising events and campaigns including a live podcast event; golf days; charity balls and awards dinners; concerts; festivals; a santa’s grotto; pantomimes and supermarket collections.

According to James, the teams really like the list of campaigns feature too which allows you to display a list of campaigns on the device screen for the donors to choose from:

“We held some events last year where we had an auction and fundraising games and the teams could pre-select the suitable campaign before the donation so the correct campaign and the custom amounts were displayed, which was really useful.”

Testimonials

Here are some testimonials for the Cash for Kids staff and volunteers on what they enjoy about using Give A Little and CollecTin More contactless donation boxes:

“It worked great!! We had so many compliments on how snazzy it looked too!!“

 “Ahhh it was fab… everyone commented on how fab the screen was all branded up”

“They are brilliant! Very easy to use and we didn't encounter any issues at all. Set up was very straightforward”

“The CollecTin devices have genuinely transformed how we fundraise in public spaces. They're so easy to use, eye-catching, and Give A Little makes it simple to customise campaigns and track donations. We've seen a real uplift in contactless giving since introducing them!”

James does all the Give A Little campaign creation for the regions himself:

“It was our choice to set up all the campaigns centrally as we wanted consistent branding on the devices so it looked professional. Creating a campaign in Give A Little is extremely easy - it’s a 30 second job so it’s not like I’m going out of my way as it’s so easy. I’m a bit of a perfectionist about it and always want to display the same amount of buttons! I like that you can add a video as the background too which is really cool. Our branding team has put together standard designs for the donate now screen, thank you screen and list of campaigns screen and then we updated them for Christmas time. We will look at doing some internal training at some point to allow the teams to create campaigns themselves. I also really like the ability to collect email receipts and the fact that it remembers your card so you don’t have to add your email address again after the next donation.”

On what’s coming up next, James adds: 

“Cash for Kids Day is coming up on the 1st May and we already have requests coming from the teams to create campaigns for that. We anticipate large usage of the devices and Give A Little over the next two months as a result so watch this space for more!”