Published August 2026·last updated 21 August 2026·crawl of 21 August 2026
A measured census of 1,233 charity websites across the Bristol area - every charity registered in or operating in the city and its fringe. Every figure was read directly from the sites by our crawler, and everything here is aggregate only - no charity is identifiable. This is a pilot: it covers one city. Every detector's error rate is measured against a blind hand-labelled sample - see Validation in the method section. A UK-wide census using the same method is under way.
We fetched 1,233 sites. 287 of them gave us nothing usable because the site was dead, parked, or behind an anti-bot check. Every percentage on this page is based on the remaining 946 sites where a real page answered, unless it says otherwise.
The chart below covers every assessable site. The most common way Bristol's charities take donations online is through somebody else's website.
| Route | Sites | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sent to an external platform | 272 | 28.8% | The donor leaves the site for JustGiving, CAF, Enthuse and the like. |
| A payment button on their own page | 102 | 10.8% | PayPal or Stripe bolted on. They can take a card; there's no donation experience around it. |
| A WordPress donation plugin | 37 | 3.9% | An incumbent. They've already decided they want on-site donations. |
| A hand-rolled form | 12 | 1.3% | Posts to a donation-shaped URL on their own site, with no platform we recognise behind it. |
| Nothing found | 523 | 55.3% | Not on the homepage, and not on the one donate page we followed. |
03 · The platform league table
272 sites send donors to an external platform, and most use one of a handful of big names. Another 18 platforms sit below the chart, each used by 6 sites or fewer.
| Platform | Sites | Share of offsite sites |
|---|---|---|
| JustGiving | 91 | 33.5% |
| CAF | 30 | 11.0% |
| Beacon | 26 | 9.6% |
| Donorbox | 18 | 6.6% |
| Localgiving | 16 | 5.9% |
| GoFundMe | 11 | 4.0% |
| Enthuse | 10 | 3.7% |
| PayPal Giving Fund | 9 | 3.3% |
| TotalGiving | 9 | 3.3% |
| Crowdfunder | 8 | 2.9% |
| Stripe (hosted donate page) | 7 | 2.6% |
| Give A Little | 6 | 2.2% |
| Give as you Live (donate) | 6 | 2.2% |
| Goodhub | 6 | 2.2% |
| Big Give | 5 | 1.8% |
| Fundraise Up | 5 | 1.8% |
| Parish Giving Scheme | 5 | 1.8% |
| Dona | 4 | 1.5% |
| KindLink | 4 | 1.5% |
| Peoples Fundraising | 4 | 1.5% |
| Blackbaud | 3 | 1.1% |
| Now Donate | 3 | 1.1% |
| Stewardship | 3 | 1.1% |
| Wonderful | 2 | 0.7% |
| Raisely | 1 | 0.4% |
| CharityExtra | 1 | 0.4% |
| Chuffed | 1 | 0.4% |
| Classy | 1 | 0.4% |
| Givey | 1 | 0.4% |
| Virgin Money Giving | 1 | 0.4% |
The league counts only sites whose route is an external platform. This counts every signal on every route - which is how the generic gateways become visible: PayPal and Stripe together appear on more sites than any named platform except JustGiving, and neither is a donation product.
| Technology | Route it implies | Sites |
|---|---|---|
| JustGiving | External platform | 91 |
| PayPal (button) | Payment gateway | 82 |
| Stripe (JS on their own page) | Payment gateway | 42 |
| CAF | External platform | 31 |
| Beacon | External platform | 26 |
| GiveWP | WordPress plugin | 24 |
| Donorbox | External platform | 19 |
| Localgiving | External platform | 16 |
| An on-site form we could not identify | Their own form | 12 |
| GoFundMe | External platform | 11 |
| Enthuse | External platform | 10 |
| PayPal Giving Fund | External platform | 9 |
| TotalGiving | External platform | 9 |
| Crowdfunder | External platform | 8 |
| Stripe (hosted donate page) | External platform | 7 |
| Give A Little | External platform | 6 |
| Charitable | WordPress plugin | 6 |
| Give as you Live (donate) | External platform | 6 |
| Goodhub | External platform | 6 |
| Big Give | External platform | 5 |
| Donorfy | Payment gateway | 5 |
| Fundraise Up | External platform | 5 |
| Parish Giving Scheme | External platform | 5 |
| A WordPress donation plugin | WordPress plugin | 4 |
| Dona | External platform | 4 |
| KindLink | External platform | 4 |
| Peoples Fundraising | External platform | 4 |
| CiviCRM | WordPress plugin | 3 |
| Blackbaud | External platform | 3 |
| Now Donate | External platform | 3 |
| Stewardship | External platform | 3 |
| Wonderful | External platform | 2 |
| Raisely | External platform | 1 |
| CharityExtra | External platform | 1 |
| GoCardless | Payment gateway | 1 |
| Chuffed | External platform | 1 |
| Classy | External platform | 1 |
| Givey | External platform | 1 |
| Square | Payment gateway | 1 |
| Virgin Money Giving | External platform | 1 |
| SumUp | Payment gateway | 1 |
The bigger the charity, the more likely it is to have a visible donation route - and to have chosen a proper platform rather than a bolted-on payment button. The large band only covers 21 sites (this run filtered out charities above £3m income), so don't read too much into it.
| Income band | Sites | External | Gateway | Plugin | Own form | None | Any route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Micro (under £25k) | 261 | 40 | 34 | 10 | <10 | 174 | 33.3% |
| Small (£25k-100k) | 204 | 46 | 28 | <10 | <10 | 123 | 39.7% |
| Mid (£100k-2m) | 430 | 174 | 37 | 17 | <10 | 196 | 54.4% |
| Large (£2m+) | 21 | <10 | <10 | <10 | <10 | <10 | 66.7% |
| Income unknown | 30 | <10 | 0 | <10 | 0 | 23 | 23.3% |
Donation plugins only exist on WordPress. On every other platform, a charity can either send the donor to an external site or add a payment button. Squarespace charities take donations at close to WordPress rates, almost entirely by sending donors elsewhere, while bespoke sites are the least likely of all to have a visible route.
| Platform | Sites | External | Gateway | Plugin | Own form | None | Any route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 493 | 154 | 57 | 36 | <10 | 240 | 51.3% |
| Other or bespoke | 175 | 25 | 20 | <10 | <10 | 124 | 29.1% |
| Wix | 109 | 33 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 65 | 40.4% |
| Squarespace | 99 | 41 | <10 | 0 | 0 | 52 | 47.5% |
| everything else (12 platforms) | 70 | 19 | <10 | 0 | <10 | 42 | 40.0% |
WordPress has well-established donation plugins, but most WordPress charities don't use them. Instead they pay per-donation fees to an external platform and hand over the donor relationship at the moment of giving. For some charities that will be the right choice - but the numbers suggest many have never compared the options.
44 sites (4.7%) carry an affiliate shopping scheme - a supporter buys something elsewhere and a commission arrives later. No donor ever gives through these, so they're recorded separately and never counted as a route. 18 of them have a passive scheme and no detectable donation route at all.
523 sites scored none, yet
232 of them mention donating somewhere on the
page. Some of those charities genuinely have no way to donate
online; for others, our crawler simply didn't find it. We won't know the
split until the validation sample is labelled. A score of none only
means we found nothing on the homepage or on the one donate page we
followed - so a form three clicks deep, or a widget drawn by JavaScript,
ends up in this category.
| Verdict came from | Sites | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| No donate link on the homepage | 404 | Weakest evidence - we never looked past the homepage. |
| We followed a donate page and still found nothing | 112 | Strongest evidence - a donate page that named no platform. |
| Donate page already fetched on an earlier run | 7 | Same as above, from cache. |
Feel free to copy and share these. All figures come from our one-city pilot (Bristol, August 2026) - please credit Nebula Design and link back to this paper.
44.7% of Bristol's assessable charity websites show a visible way to donate online - 423 of 946 sites.
28.8% of Bristol charity websites send donors to somebody else's website to give - 91 of them to JustGiving alone.
The top three donation platforms carry 54.0% of offsite giving in Bristol; JustGiving alone is 33.5%.
31.2% of WordPress charity sites send donors to a third-party donation platform, even though WordPress can take donations directly.
8 Bristol charity websites still link to AmazonSmile, which closed in February 2023.
232 Bristol charity sites mention donations on the page, but no working donation route could be found.
Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Webflow, Google Sites and ChurchSuite load Stripe and PayPal for their own shop or ticketing. The first hand-labelled validation case is exactly this - the detector said gateway/Stripe, the human said none, and the human was right: that Stripe is ticket checkout. This is our largest known source of false positives, and we've deliberately not patched it yet: writing a rule now would swap a measurable error for an unmeasurable one, and the validation sample already includes enough of these cases to measure the effect properly.
A page about how supporters raise money links to JustGiving because that's where supporters set up their pages. We use link ranking and a weak_link flag to catch this, and any platform attributed to a flagged site should be treated with caution.
The single biggest limitation on this page - see §8 above.
Every detector behind this page was scored against a blind, hand-labelled random sample of 102 sites (labels fixed before scoring; scored 2026-08-18). A dash means the statistic is undefined on the sample, not zero.
| Detector | n | Score | Statistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress detection | 87 | 1.00 | precision · recall 1.00 |
| Platform identification | 87 | 1.00 | agreement |
| Donation platform naming | 57 | 0.93 | agreement |
| Donation route | 87 | 0.66 | agreement |
| Cookie analytics | 98 | 0.93 | precision · recall 0.83 |
| Cookieless analytics | 79 | — | precision · recall 0.00 |
| Consent tool | 101 | 0.79 | precision · recall 0.83 |
Every figure was computed from pages already in the local cache - at most
the homepage plus one donate link that actually appears in that homepage's
HTML. No path is ever guessed, robots.txt is honoured, and opted-out domains
are never fetched. A site's route is the strongest signal found, in the
order wp_plugin, offsite_platform, onsite_gateway. Affiliate
shopping schemes are recorded separately and never scored as a route.
The population is every charity registered in or operating in the city and its fringe, whose recorded
website answered: 1,233 fetched sites, 946 assessable.
Cross-tab cells below 10 are suppressed. Disclosure: our own
donation product is detected by the same pipeline; sites running it are
counted in the route aggregates like any other plugin, but the brand is
not named or ranked anywhere in this report.
What comes next: we're hand-labelling a 300-site validation sample so that every percentage here comes with a measured error rate, and running the same crawl across five cities.
