New online donation platform launched
We are pleased to announce the launch of a brand new online donation platform for Devon Mind! The new platform can be found at donate.devonmind.com or in the menu above, and serves as the main way for people to contribute to the charity online with a one-off or recurring donation.
Hopefully you’ll see the benefits of the new platform and find it easy to use. However, we have answered a few potential questions below. If you need any more help or have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to email fundraise@devonmind.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Why have you replaced your existing donation platform?
Our previous online donation platform was powered by Squarespace, our web hosting platform. Originally, if you made a donation through the Devon Mind website, you were sent off-site to a dedicated page to complete your payment. This came with many limitations:
The donations page had very limited branding and no website links
Squarespace charges a 3% transaction fee on every donation made
Donors were unable to set up recurring (e.g. monthly) donations
We were unable to provide customised thank-you emails to donors
Donation forms could not be customised and used in other locations
All donations went into the same ‘pot’ and could not be campaign-led
The new donation platform was designed to be as simple as possible.
How did you create the new platform and how much did it cost?
The new donation platform is powered by a service called Raisely. This brilliant company specialises in peer-to-peer fundraising for charities. Crucially, their donation platform is completely free to use for charities and donors. In other words, there are no subscription fees for us to pay, and no transaction fees are taken out of your donation. This means when you donate to us, you know the money is going directly to help our cause.
We’ve spent the last few weeks working hard to create the new Devon Mind donations page using Raisely’s innovative tools, but we have not paid a penny to set it up. If you like the new platform, please consider ticking the box to contribute to Raisely as part of your donation.
How does the new donation platform improve on the old one?
First and foremost, it’s much more cost-effective. Gone is the 3% transaction fee, replaced by an entirely optional contribution to be made by the donor directly to Raisely. The only part of the donation we don’t receive is the payment processing fee, a small charge from Stripe or PayPal (depending on which payment option you choose) which is present in almost every online donation platform. Our previous platform also contained this.
You can now make recurring donations to Devon Mind and manage them any time!
Aside from the fees, the new donations platform has a lot of other benefits:
It gives you the option to set up weekly or monthly donations, rather than just one-off contributions
It is fully branded to match our website, so you can easily move to other pages and not feel ‘lost’
When you complete your donation, you will receive an individual thank-you email with your receipt
You will also be given the option to share your donation on social media, complete with branding
If you set up a recurring donation, you will be automatically created an account to help you manage it
We can now set up individual campaigns, which will allow us to set fundraising goals and much more!
We really hope you find the new donation platform easy to use, but if you have any problems, remember you can contact us!