The Alzheimer’s Society, Paypal and Jadu have today launched a free mobile app creation platform that allows charities to create a donation app, which they hope will “transform mobile donations” for the sector.

Weejot Donate is free for all registered charities for the first year, after that it will charge £100 per month up to three apps, £200 for up to six and £250 for up to nine but smaller charities (income less than £5m) may be eligible for a further free year.

Suraj Kika, chief executive of Jadu said: “With Weejot Donate, we aim to transform mobile donations in the UK. By providing a strong mobile donating platform for charities to take advantage of the rapid uptake of smartphones and touch screen devices, we hope to give the UK charity sector access to the rapidly growing mobile payments market.”

He said that ahead of today’s launch, about seven major charities including Oxfam and the Blue Cross had signed up.

Charities can create mobile apps, which live on the web browser rather than being downloaded from an appstore (bypassing Apple's ban on donation apps), and users are then redirected to the Weejot page when they click ‘donate’ on the charity's website when using a mobile device. Jadu promises that personalised apps can be built by fundraisers with little technical skill in “less than an hour” and work across all mobile devices. Charities can also have more than one app linked to different campaigns.

The three partners began working on the platform last September - Jadu built it based on its Weejot mobile app platform for businesses. It already provided the Alzheimer’s Society’s content management system and the charity said it wanted to do something with mobile.

Once the app had been created it was decided to release it for the whole sector, Liz Monks director of fundraising at the charity said she hoped it would “benefit the whole charity sector”.

She said: “We’re hugely excited to be the first charity to benefit from this app. There is not doubt that the current economic climate has made fundraising more challenging. However we can’t ignore the fact that technology is changing and now is the time for us to consider how we can adapt to these changes.”

Monks added that in the last couple of years the charity had seen an increase in the number of people visiting the Alzheimer’s Society website from mobile devices. The charity estimates that the figure is 10 per cent but that one of the key things the app will do is enable the charity to track traffic from mobiles more accurately.

The charity also has a long standing relationship with PayPal - last year £130,000 came to the Alzheimer’s Society through PayPal. A couple of years ago PayPal released its API to make it easier for easier for third party developers to integrate its platform into new services. PayPal also provided technical support to the Jadu development team.

PayPal’s standard payment processing fees for charities, 1.4 per cent plus 20p apply to donations made through Weejot apps.

PayPal’s global director of developer network, John Lunn described the platform as “breakthrough” and added that: “Almost 60 per cent of PayPal donations to Comic Relief this year were from smartphones and tablets.”

 

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