Microdonation charity Pennies has announced that it has hit its £1m target with a boost in donations coming in the week before Christmas.
At its two-year anniversary celebration last November the charity said it hoped to hit the £1m milestone by the end of 2012. In the week leading up to Christmas the charity raised £32,000 to reach the target. It had taken the organisation 18 months to raise its first half million mark but with new retail partners coming on board it has seen donations double in the last eight months.
Since its launch just over two years ago there have been more than four million individual donations. The average donation is 25p. To date Pennies has supported 50 charities, large and small, and is supported by private sector partners such as Dominos pizza chain and new partners DFS, Monarch Airlines and The Fragrance Shop.
Alison Hutchinson, chief executive of Pennies said: “We have been delighted to see how quickly and easily the public have embraced microdonations and donated via Pennies.”
Give as you Live growth
Meanwhile Give as you Live revealed that it also saw its number of users grow by more than 15 per cent month-on-month in 2012.
When users shop online with retailers who have signed up to Give as You Live a proportion of their spend goes to their nominated charity. So far more than £9m has been spent through the platform, £8.3m of that in 2012, with each user raising an average of £2.10 per month.
Each retailer donates a different proportion so the total amount raised for charity is still being calculated, but a spokeswoman said it was “in the hundreds of thousands”.
Give as You Live founder and CEO, Polly Gowers said: “Well over half (58 per cent) of people who started using Give as you Live when shopping on their laptop or computer in 2011 were still using it in 2012. That speaks volumes about how people want to give to charity.”
