Charities

Where should your charity collect online donations?

David Pottrell June 22, 2026 7 min read
Fighting hunger and poverty together - magnific.com

On your own website or on JustGiving? Where charities should collect online donations

“…UK public gave around £14 billion in 2025, down from £15.4 billion the year before and the first fall in total giving since 2021…”

Most charities end up with two ways to take a donation online: a “Donate” button on their own website, and a presence on a third-party platform such as JustGiving, Enthuse or GoFundMe.

The question we are often is which one supporters should actually be pointed towards, and whether it is worth investing in giving on your own site at all.

It matters more than it used to. The Charities Aid Foundation estimates that the UK public gave around £14 billion in 2025, down from £15.4 billion the year before and the first fall in total giving since 2021, driven mainly by smaller average donations (CAF UK Giving Report 2026). There are also roughly six million fewer donors than there were a decade ago. When fewer people are giving, and giving less, you cannot afford to lose someone who has already decided to support you.

A quick word of honesty before we start. We built a donation tool for charities, so we have a view. We have tried to back everything here with named sources so you can weigh it for yourself, and we have been straight about where off-site platforms are the better choice.

What we are really comparing

This is not “your website versus JustGiving” in every situation. The two do different jobs.

Off-site platforms are very good at social and peer-to-peer fundraising: the marathon runner, the office bake sale, the spontaneous response to an emergency appeal shared on social media. CAF’s research found that around two-thirds of all giving is unplanned, prompted by a fundraising page, a social post or a collection bucket (CAF UK Giving Report 2026). If a supporter is raising money on your behalf, a platform like JustGiving is built for exactly that, and you should use it.

What we are really comparing is your own donation flow: the “Donate” button in your header, the appeal you email to your supporters, the giving page you link from your campaigns. For that, the evidence points fairly clearly towards keeping people on your own website.

Every extra click costs you donors

The core problem with sending donors off-site is friction. A supporter who clicks “Donate” and is then bounced to a different website, with different branding and another page to load, has more chances to hesitate, get distracted, or simply give up.

The numbers bear this out. Fundraise Up, a donation platform and so an interested party, ran A/B tests across more than 5.6 million website visitors and found that off-site donation forms cut conversion by at least 8% compared with keeping the donor on the page (Fundraise Up). GoFundMe’s Classy reported a 28% lift in revenue per visitor when giving was embedded rather than redirected (GoFundMe Pro), and Bloomerang has said charities that embed their forms see conversion rates around 2.4 times higher (Bloomerang). These are all vendors with skin in the game, so treat the exact figures with care, but they point the same way, and they match a basic rule of web design: every extra step between intention and action loses people.

Mobile makes this sharper. M+R’s 2026 Benchmarks study, which is US-focused but the most widely cited data of its kind, found that around 11% of desktop visitors to a charity’s main donation page completed a gift, against 8% on mobile, and just 4% on mobile for smaller organisations (M+R Benchmarks 2026). A slow or clunky redirect hurts most on a phone, which is where a growing share of your supporters already are.

Trust, branding and the donor relationship

Two things happen when a donation is completed on your own site rather than a third party’s.

First, trust holds. A donor who stays inside your branding, your colours and your language is more confident their money is going where they intended. Send them to an unfamiliar page and a few will wonder whether they have been redirected somewhere they should not be.

Second, and more important for the long term, you keep the relationship. When someone gives on your own website, you hold the donor’s details and the data around the gift, which means you can thank them properly, report back on the difference they made, and invite them to give again or to set up a monthly gift. Recurring giving is where much of the real value sits. M+R puts monthly donations at around a third of all online revenue, and recurring donors are typically worth far more over time than one-off givers (M+R Benchmarks). On many third-party platforms that relationship is mediated by the platform rather than owned by you.

The Gift Aid and cost question

Money matters too, though it is not as simple as “platforms are expensive”.

JustGiving, the best-known UK platform, dropped its 5% platform fee back in 2019 and now asks donors for an optional voluntary contribution instead (Civil Society News). It charges a payment processing fee of 1.9% plus 30p per UK donation, and if you use its Gift Aid service it takes 5% of the Gift Aid you claim (JustGiving pricing). It also has a newer product, Giving Checkout, with no platform or processing fee at all, so cost on its own is not a knock-out argument either way.

Gift Aid is the part worth dwelling on. It is worth around £1.7 billion a year to UK charities, and CAF estimates that roughly £560 million of it goes unclaimed every year (CAF UK Giving Report 2026). When you run giving on your own site with your own payment setup, you keep all of the Gift Aid you claim, and you control how reliably the declaration is captured. The 5% other platforms take on Gift Aid, plus any voluntary contribution that goes to the platform rather than to you, adds up across a year.

When off-site is still the right call

To be fair about it, point supporters to a platform when:

  • They are fundraising for you, through events, challenges, in-memory pages or other peer-to-peer giving.
  • You are responding to a sudden emergency or a viral moment and need to be where people already are.
  • You genuinely do not have the capacity to build or look after giving on your own site. A well-run JustGiving page beats a broken or insecure donate form every time.

For everything else, your own site is where the evidence points.

What good on-site giving actually looks like

Keeping donations on your own site only pays off if the experience is genuinely good. From the builds we have worked on, the things that matter most are:

  • No redirect. The form opens on the page the donor is already on, rather than sending them somewhere new.
  • Few fields. Ask only for what you need, because every extra field costs you completions.
  • Fast and mobile-first. Most of your donors are on a phone, and load speed has a direct effect on whether they finish.
  • Suggested amounts tied to impact. “£25 funds a week of…” tends to convert better than an empty box.
  • A monthly option, gently nudged. Make recurring giving easy to choose, given how much more it is worth to you.
  • Digital wallets. Apple Pay and Google Pay remove most of the typing on mobile.
  • Gift Aid built in. Capture the declaration as part of the flow, not as an afterthought.
  • A genuine thank-you, and a plan to stay in touch.

The bottom line

For your own appeals and your own “Donate” button, keep supporters on your own website. The conversion evidence, the trust factor, the donor data you keep and the Gift Aid you protect all point in the same direction. Use third-party platforms for what they are genuinely good at, which is peer-to-peer and spontaneous fundraising, and stop sending your warmest, most ready-to-give supporters out of the door for everything else.

This is the thinking behind forGood, our donation tool for UK charities, and it is part of how we approach charity web design more broadly. If you would like a second opinion on your own donation journey, we are always happy to take a look.

Sources

David Pottrell
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David Pottrell

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