Charity is broken. Here’s how we can fix it.

£10bn is donated to charity by individuals every year in the UK, and £280bn+ globally. This is achieved without any significant consumer-focussed innovation having happened in the sector for decades. It’s spread across a large number of conflicting mediums using old technology and failing to successfully tap into the regular giving potential of people worldwide.

By building the Regular Pledge platform, we believe that we can make these numbers seem like a drop in the ocean by making charitable giving an easier and more delightful experience for everyone.

This post outlines some of the problems I’m tackling by building Regular Pledge. Please skip to the end to see how you can help me turn this vision into a reality.

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I believe that charity is a user experience problem, not a disposable income or altruism problem.

This is good news, because user experience is in fact becoming an increasingly solved problem. When startups obsess about user experience as an industry-first, a paradigm shift tends to happen. The likes of Monzo (retail banking), Moneybox (savings), Citymapper (city travel), Deliveroo (food delivery), Confused (insurance comparison), and Uber are born.

So much software is being built to help out charities and businesses when it comes to the third sector. Wonderful solutions are built like charity CRMs, marketing automation for charities, corporate volunteer time-tracking tools, and so on… but they’re looking at it from the wrong angle.

Very few people are tackling this problem from the user’s perspective — the donors and the non-donors — which presents a huge opportunity.

The last big shift in the charity sector happened more than 20 years ago when JustGiving brought charities online in 2000.

Regular Pledge’s mission is to get more people donating more money to charity on a regular basis, in a more equitable and delightful way.

Problems

I believe that most people could have a bigger impact with their existing donations, and that people who do not currently donate would so provided a good enough product (👉 Regular Pledge!). There are many significant problems from the average consumer’s perspective…

People without a cause

Most people don’t resonate with any specific charity enough to actually donate, and therefore donate little or nothing (sometimes to a JustGiving raise for a friend?). Fortunately most people haven’t had a terrible disease or experienced homelessness, and hence many don’t feel strongly enough about supporting them with money.

Charity is polarising

People who do donate often have their one “token” charity. Charity is polarising, so these people will say “I’ve already donated to charity X this month” when prompted (fair enough!). Few “average” people regularly support multiple charities, let alone causes.

Actually getting around to donating

The journey from being happy to donate to actually having the impetus to choose and donate to a charity is full of friction. It requires time and many small decisions. Many people think they’re happy to donate and vow to on the next payday, but don’t actually “get to it”.

Too much choice

If you don’t already support a specific charity, then you probably won’t bother researching charities supporting causes that you care about, scrutinizing which is the best to donate to, then actually creating an account and going through with it.

Very few will ever do this for consecutive months, let alone years.

The entire decision is expected to be made by the donor. Recommendations are all around us, except in the charity sector. When was the last time you went to Netflix and were forced to search for something in a specific genre? How often do you visit LinkedIn and manually search for people with a specific job title from a specific company in a specific location simply to grow your network? When you want to save some extra money, do you manually round up each transaction yourself and make a bank transfer into a different account, or do you just let Monzo, Moneybox, or Chip do it for you?

Few people know how to maximise their impact

Expecting the average person to know which charity will have the biggest impact for their desired cause area is futile. Most people simply donate to charities they’ve had first-hand experience with, or charities that they’ve seen advertised on TV that resonated with them.

Imagine the same was true with personal finances. If the only way for the average person to grow their savings was by investing in the stock market themselves, then there wouldn’t be much success or growth going on. No, instead they delegate to financial and robo-advisers who take the heavy lifting and experience requirements completely out of the equation. Or they can choose an investment portfolio or index fund that aligns with their investment goals.

Difficult to manage

Anyone that does donate regularly to multiple charities has to manage many individual charity website accounts, and keep track of multiple direct debits.

The problem charities face

There are ~200,000 charities in the UK alone. Close your eyes for 30 seconds and think about how many you can name.

Now imagine the extent to which most charities struggle for funds, constantly having to hit the fundraising trail. Fundraising is very difficult, and making matters worse charities are facing an existential threat during Covid.

Media consumption is changing rapidly, and at a faster pace than charities are able to keep up with, especially the smaller ones. The delayed pay-off of investing in innovation means that few charities are incentivized to keep up. Paying bills and research products are a more appealing way to spend money when everything is viewed in a short-term lens. The fact is that charities, big and small, are competing on the same playing field as every other company you can think of for attention. Think of the ads you’ve been exposed to recently — TikTok, Argos, Amazon, insurance products — the difference in budget and skillset in these examples is orders of magnitude different to that of the average charity.

Regular donations are the holy grail of funds for charities. They enable predictable and sustainable revenue, allowing organisations to effectively forecast and allocate resources more effectively. Unfortunately, however, they make up only a very small portion of overall funds. 98% of donors offer one-off donations only, meaning just 2% of donors are subscribed to regular giving (source).

Creating awareness is a luxury in the world of charity. Not every charity has the budget of Save The Children or The Red Cross.

What the future looks like

Imagine living your life knowing that you’re having a constant and significant impact on the world through your charitable giving.

How many causes do you genuinely care about but not donate to? Climate change, child poverty, third world hunger, animal extinction, cancer, homelessness — the list goes on. How many causes do you think exist that you don’t even know about? Yes, there are many.

Imagine you could support them all at the same time with one single monthly donation, or perhaps prioritise certain cause areas at particular times of the year with a few taps.

What if you could be donating to charities that you’re deeply passionate about… before you even realise the charity even exists, because Regular Pledge understands your values and the impact you’re striving to have.

Know that no matter how much you’re pledging each month, Regular Pledge generates the biggest impact possible from your donation according to the causes you want to help.

Imagine seeing a story in the news and having that “I want to help” feeling, and then being able to just open Regular Pledge and let it curate and funnel your money to the most effective charities supporting that cause. Add more to your monthly pledge, or simply distribute your existing cause areas. You won’t have to find and scrutinize charities operating in obscure cause areas anymore.

Imagine bringing a steady flow of regular donations and awareness to charities. Imagine the sense of relief and calm when a charity that’s never had regular donations suddenly has awareness and their first source of predictable revenue.

Imagine how many more conversations about worthy causes that’ll be sparked when people are donating to causes then previously hadn’t realised they care deeply about.

What if The Red Cross didn’t need to create, buy and run TV adverts for their Lebanon explosion urgent appeal? What if the very day it happened, all Regular Pledges had a notification asking if they’d like to redistribute their donations that month, or perhaps top-up.

Timing

The timing is very important. Every single day we are bombarded with terrible news on the TV and across social media… from climate change projections continually surpassing previous worst-case scenarios; to millions dying from preventable causes in the first world; to hundreds of other issues much closer to home like poverty and growing inequality.

Covid has also had a very significant long-term impact on the charity sector. Demand for charities has rocketed, while at the same time donations have dried up significantly.

• ~40% of child poverty charities in London will have to close within 6 months if they cannot raise the funds they previously forecasted to get prior to coronavirus (source).
• For the coming year charities are planning on an average fall of 57% on trading income (source).
• 70% of clinical trials and studies funded by AMRC charities have been stopped, paused, or delayed. Many trials will be literally unable to restart due to insufficient funds, and it’s estimated that it will take 4 and half years for medical research spend to recover to normal levels.

So many people are feeling helpless at the lack of action both on a global scale and micro scale closer to home in some rather disturbing cause areas.

Regular Pledge

It’s a very simple concept but doesn’t exist, yet with it we can solve some of the issues outlined above. Making things simple is counter-intuitively very difficult.

It’ll work like this:

1. Choose causes that you care about. E.g. climate change, animals, children, cancer.
2. Enter a monthly pledge amount. E.g. £20.
3. Distribute your causes. E.g. 50% to climate change, and the rest split equally.
4. Get notified when your money has been donated; to whom, and for what reason Regular Pledge chose those charities.
5. Thumb up/down each charity so Regular Pledge learns more about you and which charities will better resonate with you going forward.

Some benefits of using Regular Pledge:

• Continuous impact — always-on impact in cause areas you care about
• Choose cause areas — no need to pick specific charities
• Easy to setup — no more excuses, charity couldn’t be simpler
• One account and one direct debit — consolidate donations under one account instead of maintaining multiple accounts and direct debits

Next steps & how you can help

In the “startup world”, conventional wisdom is to start by “doing things that don’t scale”. That’s how I’m going to test the Regular Pledge concept on normal people. Doing this allows me to see which parts of the concept resonate, and which parts I can throw away before building an actual product.

Using the link below, people are telling me the causes that they believe in and sending me their donations so that I can donate it on their behalf. I’m then donating for them and reporting back. Taking the friction out of the process whilst learning what product features to include in the first version of Regular Pledge.

There are three super simple ways you can help:

1. Feedback — please fill in this short survey and/or reach out to me directly with feedback
2. Become a founding Regular Pledger — Tell us which cause areas you want to donate to, donate £10, and we’ll process 100% if it into charities that you’ll love and that align with your values. I’ll then report back in November with proof showing where your money has been donated to and the impact you’ve had. Become a founding Regular Pledge here (short survey)
3. Share this post — Help build an early network of Regular Pledgers to revolutionize the charity sector

Thanks!

Joe

P.S. The future of Regular Pledge will include a payroll giving product that companies can provide to their employees as a perk while optimizing donations for tax relief (similar to how pension contributions work). If this interests you (it should! :-))bu, please let me know.