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Bmycharity scraps all fees and charges

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 1 Oct 2009

Bmycharity has scrapped all fees and commission charges on its fundraising pages, making online sponsorship entirely free to charities.

On the day that the ballot opens for next year’s London Marathon, for which Virgin Money Giving will be the official affiliate sponsorship site, Bmycharity has announced that from midnight last night it will not charge anything to process sponsorship donations to charities.

Ben Brabyn, managing director of Bmycharity, told Professional Fundraising that the site had been waiting to see whether Virgin Money Giving would make its own service free, but that the company had been working on the idea “for quite some time”.

Brabyn said Bmycharity wants to encourage other players in the market to scrap their fees also to make online sponsorship fundraising a more “morally attractive” in a campaign the company is dubbing ‘free my charity’.

“We wouldn’t want to see a monopoly,” he said. “There’s been something too close to a monopoly for far too long.

“This is about an inflection point in the market. There is no longer any need to structure models this way,” he said, adding that “as soon as you remove the sense that there’s a cost to what you’re doing, you massively increase use.”

He said that the value of online sponsorship has been stymied due to charities’ unwillingness to “line the pockets of a third party” and “donor gut-feel that it’s somehow wrong”.

In a recent analysis by Professional Fundraising Bmycharity ranked as the second most expensive of the online platform options, only cheaper than Justgiving.

Brabyn asked whether fundraisers could now justify spending a proportion of every pound raised to a third party when it was no longer necessary.

Bmycharity saw a 40 per cent rise in revenue last year, and Brabyn admits that the move will result in a cut to revenue, but argued it would be better for the market in the long term.

New revenue streams

The website will now survive on carefully selected corporate partners being able to advertise to donors and fundraisers on specific pages. Brabyn said that the company is working with Acevo and is in discussion with a number of companies, but would not allow any advertising by companies with a poor ethical record. The company is not yet revealing which and how many advertisers are on board, nor when they will begin having access to the site's users.

In addition, Bmycharity is planning to partner with other fundraising companies offering services such as affiliate marketing and search engine fundraising.

Brabyn said that the majority of visitors to fundraising pages do not make a donation, but that the average donation is £39. Allowing users the option to raise money for the fundraiser by either searching, using an affiliate credit card or shopping through affiliate sites would broach “the divide between nothing and £39”. Bmycharity would then share the profits gained by the associated companies by directing such traffic. Brabyn said the appearance of such services would be pre-determined by the charities involved.

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