Jersey Poppy Appeal raises £4k through Give A Little web campaign and QR Codes

Poppy Appeal organiser, Alison Opfermann, explains why she was looking for a cashless donation option and why she chose Give A Little: ‘As a result of the pandemic and the fact that people were nervous about handling cash and we could see that people were carrying less cash, we wanted to find a digital way of collecting donations. We were unable to use the payments system the Royal British Legion head office were using as it wasn’t available in Jersey. We started using SumUp but found that their app was more aimed at retail and didn’t provide a great experience for our donors. Then we discovered that Give A Little was partnering with SumUp and I thought, crikey, that will be much better as it’s charity focused.’

Alison also wanted to use QR codes on the 800 collecting tins as well as on poppy boxes which are located at a variety of locations and are often unattended. Alison wanted to be able to identify how much was raised at each location so she contacted Give A Little to find out whether it was possible to create QR codes with a unique identifier. The Give A Little team were happy to help and worked with Alison to update the platform to allow Alison to add a tag to her QR codes. By generating a QR code with a unique tag for each donation point, she was then able to identify which donation point each donation came from and how much was raised. Give A Little also made adaptations to support Jersey’s Gift Support scheme.

Alison was really pleased with the results: ‘I was so impressed by the responsiveness of the Give A Little team. It took a bit of back and forth to come up with the solution I was looking for but it’s worked exactly as I intended. Being able to tell which location generated the most donation revenue or the most donations, is really useful. The three locations that drove the most donations included a coffee morning at St. Peter’s Parish Hall, the window of our pop-up shop and a partnership with eVie bikes where they placed wallets containing poppies and QR codes on all their bikes. The average donation value was also really good with QR codes raising £9.11 on average per donation and web donations £69 on average.’

On what she likes about Give A Little, Alison said: ‘The way you can set up a campaign on GIve A Little is really flexible. It looks good and it’s easy to navigate and it’s reliable. The reporting structure is also very intuitive and gives me the information I need quickly and easily. It’s also really easy to make a change to a fundraising campaign. I was given a last minute opportunity to raise some funds from five special coins that were donated for raffling  and I had just five days to set it up. I needed to check the law with our gambling commission but setting up the campaign on Give A Little took no longer than an hour! If you need to set something up on the hoof, it’s incredibly easy to do. I am looking forward to using Give A Little even more next year - I’ve already thought of more locations for QR codes and I am also keen on exploring collecting contactless donations using the Give A Little App and SumUp card readers!’

For more information about the Jersey Poppy appeal, please visit https://rbl.je/poppy-appeal/ and you can donate here.

Sign up to start fundraising with Give A Little: https://givealittle.co/sign-up