I completely agree with Martin and Anon2's comments. Perhaps the scheme was not communicated as effectively as it could have been, but threats of court action (and even the presumed press release to 3rd sector) demonstrates that the charity has not got its priorities right. Also, reading the post from frustrated fundraiser made it seem that his/her charity was lumping all their eggs into one basket. Phoning up lots and lots of donors to alert them about a matched giving scheme run externally seems a bit like overkil - sure include it in an e-newsletter perhaps but don't the staff have better/more profitable things to do with your time? Just like the current economic situation has shown us (again) the risks of trying to get something for nothing, so we as fundraisers need to remind ourselves that the best way to raise sustainable income is through the hard slog rather than hoping for easy wins.

From what I see, no charity itself lost out over donations by their supporters. Or am I missing something?
They may or may not have lost out over donation match funding by Alec Reed's donation.

I note however that both organisations talking about court will have received donations by match funding. Just not as much as they wanted.

Well, I certainly won't be donating to either organisation. I daresay other funders will be wary of Christian organisations for a while in case any other complete idiots get it into their heads to go to court over receiving less money than expected.

Alec Reed is quite within his rights to limit donations as he wants. The fact that some charities got lumped together? Hey, thats life.
I lump charities together in my mind all the time - many within a category do similar work.

Martin

I have just read about those charities willing to take the Big Give to court because of il-defined match funding guidelines. I am really surprised and quite sad that charities would even think of doing so. They know there is no way they will win the case in the end, the only thing they are sure of - and they know it, some of them even mention they know it - is it will be really damaging to the charitable sector in the UK and especially to us fundraisers.

I agree with Dave and we were all buzzing by the prospect. We got our small but enthusiastic donor base motivated by phoning them around the clock in the build up to the event. Our donors got online and gave generously,£12,000 in the first couple of minutes, with dozens more continuing to try and give later. Some definately were giving more than they would have as has been suggested. The web site crash was bad enough but the trouble didn't stop there although Zoe, conveniently left the other difficulties out of her comment.

What the Big Give failed to say was in spite of publicising very clearly that £20,000 was available to every charity, in fact when it came to it, they grouped charities into 'like' causes and made £20,000 available to the entire cause. Everyone knows that "each Charity" means one thing and "charities working toward similar aims" means another. If they had originally meant that £20,000 was available to every cause, they could have said that easily enough.

The majority of our donors had their donations returned with only about 25% of donations going to us being matched.We now have the difficult task of trying to track all the donors and would be donors and bring in their donations (hopefully) through another route. After that it will be a case of rebuilding donor confidence in the accuracy of our future communication.

Why wasn't this approach published ahead of time?

One possible but obvious reason is that Charities wouldn't be nearly as keen to take part to try for a small share of £20,000 as they clearly were in going for an exclusive £20k. We wouldn't have been. Donors wouldn't be motivated by a slim chance of doubling their own donation and would just give through the usual channels at the usual times.

Yes it got donors out (689 apparantly) during difficult financial times and no doubt many projects benefitted greatly which is brilliant. Next time let's hope they make things clear from the start and actually let donors decide where to give rather than manufacturing the results after the fact.

I have some early feedback from the £1m matched funding scheme which you may be interested in.

Interestingly, less than 1% of the £1m fund went to charities in the Guardian's list of top 10 UK charities. It looks like it is the smaller charities who have received most of the funding.

We have also had a number of emails from donors who, encouraged by the matched funding offered, decided to donate more than their usual amount. One donor has told us that he doubled his normal donation, meaning that the charity is now 4 times richer!

We did take steps to try and avoid the technical problems, migrating our website onto a new cluster server prior to the promotion. The unprecedented volume of traffic felt a bit like the rush for Glastonbury tickets! We'll know what to expect next time...

Dave's stats show that lots of people are interested in matched giving, and we are hoping to use the success of this scheme as a springboard to encourage other high level donors to offer matched funding through the website. We'll keep you posted!

 Zoe

The Big Give

Indeed, powerful database-driven websites exist, but making a few tweaks to them to "double donations" would be doomed without user research and a carefully created user experience based upon it. My initial user research for example showed that the major donors would be easily put off if addressed in anything like the same way as regular donors. In my job as an online content consultant I see great ideas destroyed by thoughtless implementation on a depressingly regular basis.

You may be interested to know that I presented the Double Your Donation concept to all the usual suspects including JustGiving and CAF but none were taken with the idea.

...Doesn't it (albeit with slightly beefier servers needed). And JustGiving or Charities Trust could add it to their existing routines too, I should think; if they can reclaim a given %age via Gift Aid, they could easily reclaim another %age from the challenge donor, couldn't they?.

The trickier part is rationing isn't it? The major donors are unlikely to have enough to match all donations made, and may want to limit their giving to a certain area (arts, relief, education) or type of project (capital, revenue, disaster), and chasing these requirements to get the 'easy money' could distort their fundraising elsewhere. And if the schemes become more frequent, the cost of marketing any individual one will rise. 

Having spent 5+ months full-time working on the concept for a 'Double your donation' website I can say with some authority that:
1. It pulls in around 40% more donations than regular appeals (Google: Dean Karlan and John A. List for the research).
2. There are plenty of people willing to front a 'Challenge funding' appeal (for that is what The Big Give event was) - not least because it means these major donors double their own donations.
3. Every fundraiser I spoke to (from huge to tiny charities) was instantly enthusiastic about the idea and wanted to take part in a pilot. They all had anecdotal evidence to back up the concept.
4. I have seen it work with my own eyes at Funding Network events.
5. Nonetheless it's bloody difficult to raise cash to create the vehicle, a la JustGiving, which could open it up to all charities.

Dave, Intelligent Giving trustee

Whilst I thought this was a generous offer and a very tempting proposition for our charity, the reality was that several donors tried to give through the Big Give at the appointed time but the donation facility crashed several times and was generally unavailable during the brief 28 hours it all lasted. This left some of our donors frustrated and, I fear, has damaged our chances for the next time we ask. I'm a bit frustrated that they didn't anticipate the obvious demand that this was going to put on their services.

I have to agree with Martin.  In fact, I've been trying to persuade a few possible people of this idea for a while now.  No bites.  Maybe the success of this site will help me out, but I'm hoping you aren't pushing this as 'evidence' of how charity websites raise cash.

Being entirely honest, if your last question is genuinely a question, I have to wonder (again), how much of a grasp of the realities of fundraisnig you have.  I'd do it every bluddy day if I could.

Its good for charities to do this.

Not so easy to find someone willing to match-fund.

How many of us have ever offered to match-fund donations to a charity? And would we do it on a large enough scale to generate interest?
This is a story because of the size of the funding. It is also very unusual. Thats why charities don't do it more often - because its unusual.

Alec Reed's (very very generous) £1m was coming to the sector anyway. And to have matched it in minutes suggests that a number of charities have alerted regular donors who would have given anyway to donate via this scheme. (is this what you did, Adam?)

So it would have affected the timing and method of receipt, but not necessarily the total amount to be received by the sector as a whole. 

One other potential effect is that charities that benefited the most were those with (1) donors in place and (2) fundraising departments to alert them and encourage them; to them that hath it shall be given. Is this what the Reed Foundation intended? 

 But again, it's very generous and imaginative of the Sir Alec to allow others to decide where his money goes.