The Stroke Association has been on a cashless journey with Give A Little since 2023. It’s moved between handheld devices, to tapping on staff phones, and more recently giving the tools to supporters with a donation app on their own phones. We have their QR codes on our collection buckets nowadays too.
As I write, our online dashboard tells me that our first donation was on 16 January 2024 and we’ve raised £14,606.90 since. A couple of quick sums later I can tell that, after our testing, the average donation amount has been £27.25, boosted by a couple of huge nights at corporate partner events. Taking those events out of the mix, it’s £12.26.
But why would we want to take corporate events out of the mix?!
That’s where the tech has really come into it’s own. A captive audience, ready to give, but if you don’t have the right options for them it’s a wasted opportunity. Our biggest night so far was last November when £7125 came in from 190 donations. That’s an average of £37.51.
Setting your donation amounts is an art in itself and, as with all fundraising asks, you need to consider your audience. We generally offer three donation amounts, and always include the option of choosing “other”. However, in an early test at Tesco Knocknagoney, we discovered that nobody donated below the lowest default amount of £5. Since then, we follow a rule to never suggest a lower amount on screen.
We took £508 in cash and £205 cashless that day, which is a 70/30 split. However, we nearly always see a higher amount donated when it’s cashless. It’s about offering different options for different audiences. If you can’t meet the donor on their best terms, you might just miss out.
We’re all time poor, so it’s also important to us that the platform offers easy opt in to further contact and can send a receipt straight away. It also captures Gift Aid declarations and to date we’ve had a 20% uptake. The challenge there is that entering details takes time, so we often enable a quick tap and go option in high footfall areas.
I’m writing this in January 2026, and in the coming year we want to get this technology into the hands of the supporter. Pre-pandemic, supporters took their sponsor form into work or down the pub. We want to see more of our supporters do that with their personal mobile phones. To date, twenty two London Marathon runners have the app on their phones. Six of them have started using it. Between them, they’ve taken 33 donations at an average of £12.
What might that look like by marathon day in April?
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