Bmycharity blog

Thanks from Ben and Matt

It has been a momentous time for Bmycharity.  Last week we announced the withdrawal of our service, and three days ago we announced that we are merging with Help for Heroes.  Behind the scenes we've been inundated with messages of support and encouragement following each announcement, and we'd like to thank everyone who has been in touch by email, phone, in person, via our blog, on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

There have been some very moving messages indeed - and from some unexpected sources.  We're grateful to everyone who got in touch - and here are some special mentions...

• Those who offered to give to keep us going - most of all the lady who offered to sell her home!
• Those who proposed mergers with their own enterprises
• Those who we've competed with and who were gracious

At a challenging time we've enjoyed an amazing quantity of kindness and generousity and discovered hundreds of friends we never knew we had.  Thank you.

We're really pleased that the future of commission-free fundraising is assured.  But just in case we get complacent, we've kept a copy of an anonymous 4 second shouted voicemail we received that taught us some colourful new language and will keep our feet firmly on the ground :)

Bmycharity commission free service continues in partnership with Help for Heroes

We are delighted to announce that Help for Heroes (H4H) has agreed to join forces with Bmycharity.  All fundraising pages and accounts remain live at www.bmycharity.com.  We will ensure that our commission free service continues for every charity.

Help for Heroes, the strictly non political charity that supports wounded Servicemen and women, prides itself on a no nonsense approach to giving with minimal administrative costs. Together, Bmycharity and Help for Heroes can offer a service that allows fundraisers to donate their sponsorship directly to their charity of choice with no extra costs so everything you raise goes to your charity and that's it.

What do I need to do? Nothing, please just stay with us and we will do the rest. Our service will continue as before and the new partnership will offer the service to all its existing customers.  We will not be withdrawing the service as previously announced and all pages and accounts remain live at www.bmycharity.com.

What do I do if I have already signed up with another charity giving organisation? Its up to you, it's your choice but we would love it if you came back to Bmycharity to ensure that every penny you raise goes to the cause you support!  Your page and account are where you left them and ready for use right now!

What about the data, are my details safe and will H4H be hitting me with special offers and begging letters? No, H4H will not. The data that the new partnership has will be respected as before.

What about other charities, will the service continue or is this just for H4H? The service will continue with all charities who are existing  Bmycharity clients in exactly the same way as before.  Bmycharity and H4H will honour the terms of existing Bmycharity contracts.

I am a charity and would like to be registered with Bmycharity. That's fine, we would like to sign you up but ask that you give us a few days to let the dust settle so we can handle all the enquires from existing customers first. If you register your interest through the Bmycharity website we can get back to you.

Are you committed to 0% commission? Yes, we share the belief that charity fundraising should be commission-free but we are not criticising others who charge - in fact we hope they'll follow our example.

How can you finance and invest in the service when Bmycharity recently failed to raise investment? By coupling Bmycharity's lean, low cost business with H4H's technical resources and relationships with banks and corporate partners, we're able to cover the costs of providing the service to the charity sector commission-free.  H4H's trading company and technology partners will invest in developing the service to remain at the cutting edge of online fundraising innovation.

Is a charity allowed to run a service like this? Bmycharity will be owned by Help for Heroes Trading Co Ltd, a wholly owned trading subsidiary of Help for Heroes. The profits from Help for Heroes Trading are used to cover all the administrative costs of both the charity and the trading company.

Chief Executive of Bmycharity, Ben Brabyn says "Over the last 10 years Bmycharity has helped more than 60,000 people raise over £28 million for UK charities.  To widespread acclaim, we announced that we were dropping all commission charges last October and donation totals and average values have soared since.  However, with a team of only two staff and no external financial backers we were unable to meet demand and reluctantly announced the withdrawal of our service last week.  As former Royal Marines, Matt Cooper and I were delighted when Help for Heroes invited us to join forces with them to keep online fundraising commission-free for charities."

Help for Heroes Chief Executive Bryn Parry says "At H4H, we do everything we can to ensure that every penny we receive goes to the cause and so we want to be sure that Bmycharity can continue to offer their free service to the charity sector. We felt that our supporters should continue to have a choice and are delighted to be able to partner Bmycharity in their fund raising efforts. We admire the ethos of Bmycharity and feel that we are natural partners. We are delighted and hope that our supporters will be as well."

Thank you all for you continued support and we very much hope that you will come back to our commission free service.

For more information or updates, please keep in touch via our blog, twitter and Facebook.  You can also see the latest news from Help for Heroes here.

With best wishes

Bryn Parry and Ben Brabyn
CEO H4H and CEO Bmycharity

Withdrawal of the Bmycharity online fundraising service

Over the next three weeks we will be withdrawing the Bmycharity online fundraising service.

We've had a fantastic response to our commission-free service and have successfully recruited corporate sponsorship.  A queue of charities is waiting to register and donation volumes and average values have surged.  For some time we have been seeking additional resources to help us to develop our system, grow our team and engage with charities and corporate sponsors to support this growth.  We are a two man team with no external investors in a market increasingly characterised by companies with scores of employees and multi-million pound backing.  Our search for investment has been unsuccessful, culminating in the failure of a proposed deal in the last few days, so the time has come for us to withdraw our service.  We regret the inconvenience this will cause to our users and clients.

Since 2001 we've helped 300 charities raise over £28 million.  We'd like to thank the thousands of fundraisers and donors who have encouraged their friends to use Bmycharity, the hundreds of charities that have registered with us, and the many suppliers and advisors who have contributed.  Without additional resources, we've done all we can to contribute to the development of the market for online fundraising in the UK, and now the time has come to seek other challenges.

With Best Wishes

Ben Brabyn and Matt Cooper

Notes

1. All donations processed by Bmycharity are safe.  Donations will be passed to charities in the normal way, with the final transfers taking place in April 2010.
2. Donation and fundraising pages will remain live (able to take donations) until the end of 19 March 2010
3. Fundraising pages will be visible until 31 March 2010
4. Charity reporting services will be available until 31 March 2010 - please ensure all donation data is downloaded by this date since it will not be available thereafter
   
5. No further charity sites will be launched and any fees from unlaunched sites will be refunded

Snowball gifts - gifts that grow in giving

Some gifts make a really big difference, but cost little or even nothing to give.  Just as a snowball starts as a handful of snow but can grow and grow, a gift can become much much more important as it rolls downhill...

Inspired by the cold weather that's sweeping the UK at the moment, we're inviting people to share their ideas of snowball gifts.  Here are a couple from us to get the snowball rolling - please post a comment below to add the snowball gifts you would like to give or receive - or examples you've come across:

• A smile :) - perhaps the ultimate snowball gift - the only cost is a little muscular effort, but the rewards for those around can be enormous - especially if there is tension in the air
• A blood donation - a pin-prick and a few minutes lying down lying down can save lives

Boost your fundraising by £50 each week by spreading the good news

Here's a simple way to boost your fundraising total by £50 each week - and help save charities £11 million in commission charges in 2010 - by recruiting other fundraisers to set up Bmycharity pages.

We're campaigning to eliminate commission charges from fundraising so fundraisers don't have to run 1.3 miles of their Marathon just to pay for their fundraising page (as they do on Just Giving) - and we're asking for your help to spread the word.

Each week we'll add £50 to your fundraising page if you persuade enough of your friends to set up fundraising pages of their own with Bmycharity.  All you need to do is invite them to click your personal competition link, and we'll keep track of how many of them sign up and how much they raise.  If your recruits raise the more than anyone else's in a week, we'll give you £50 towards your own fundraising.

Here's how you create your link: just take the last bit of the address of your own page (the bit after the "/") and add it to the end of this address (after the "=") -

    www.bmycharity.com/home.aspx?a=

So if your page is at www.bmycharity.com/peterexample, your personal recruiting link is www.bmycharity.com/home.aspx?a=peterexample.

If you don't win in a particular week, don't worry because your friends may get much more active later
on...

All you need to do to get started is create your personal recruiting link and then ask your fundraising friends to click on it.  Don't forget to remind them that fundraising with Bmycharity is commission-free.  If you're in a running club, sports team or company fundraising team you can get off to a flying start by asking your team-mates to register through your link.

Each Tuesday we'll post a list of the top recruiters and the leader will get a £50 boost!

Quiet heroes inspire Commando Cops to raise £134,000

Though many of them had swapped their green berets for police helmets more than 20 years ago, 100 former Royal Marines now serving in police forces around the country "speed marched" 13.1 miles around London on Saturday morning to raise money for injured Royal Marines.

Afterwards I sat with one of the men who inspired the Commando Cops.  Matt was shot twice while rescuing his section commander earlier this year in Afghanistan.  His main ambition is to return to his section in 42 Commando, but first he must complete the lengthy and grueling process of physical rehabilitation.

We talked about the campaign in Afghanistan - the difficulty faced by the local people in choosing who to rely on, the value of infrastructure improvement and the challenges for political and military leaders.  Matt showed no bitterness, only a quiet generosity of spirit and the determination to return to duty as soon as possible.

As I listened I was struck how exactly Matt showed the traditional qualities of the Commando soldier: "courage, determination, unselfishness and cheerfulness in the face of adversity".

And as they rallied round Matt and the scores of other Royal Marines who have been injured in recent operations, the Commando Cops confirmed that other dictum "Once a Marine, always a Marine"!

Many congratulations to all involved in an exceptional fundraising effort.

Queen endorses Bmycharity's campaign to end commission charges on donations

"Do good" brands reap commercial and social rewards

According to Aaron Baar, attraction to "do good" brands is escalating.  In a survey of 6,000 people around the world:

"57% say a brand has earned their business because of its works supporting social causes. Furthermore, 61% say they have purchased a brand that supports a good cause even when it wasn't the cheapest option, and 67% said they would switch brands if another brand of similar quality supported a cause they were interested in."

This research reinforces our experience over the 3 weeks since we announced that we no longer charge commission on the donations we process.  We are inviting corporate partners to sponsor the Bmycharity service so that every penny that a donor gives goes to the cause that they care about - and we've had a great response.  A fine example came as an email from Gail Wilson who wrote:

"I have book marked your site and will visit it at least once a week just to see which companies are sponsoring you and will put them top of my list if I need their service or product."

We've teamed up with Richard McKelvey, Head of Commercial Partnerships at ACEVO, to provide specific ways in which the third and private sectors can enjoy mutually beneficial relationships which create commercial as well as social returns, and we're delighted that Quick McMorran - experts in creative commercial sponsorship - have come aboard to help ensure that our partner "do good" brands do well too!

Making giving free - background and vision for the future

We're delighted to be able to offer the Bmycharity online sponsorship and fundraising service to UK charities for free.  We're aiming to help charities save even more money and we hope that other providers will follow our example and eliminate commission charging.  We hope you'll join with us in bringing about this change: online fundraising is much more efficient than paper-based fundraising so more of the money gets to charitable service provision.  Now seems a good time to look back at the evolution of our market and to consider the future - how we can add even more to the bottom lines of charities.  Over £100 million of donations are still lost each year through missed Gift Aid, poor or non-existent data capture and labour-intensive administration and we want to help change that.

Keep the change - the end of commission charging

It's now nearly 9 years since we launched Bmycharity as a sponsorship service for Whizz-Kidz.  Back then the internet bubble had just burst, I had just hung up my boots after 5 years as a Royal Marine and was adjusting to life in London and Matt was a computer consultant with a sideline in filming underwater wildlife documentaries.  We developed the service in our spare time and when it was ready, we offered it first to Whizz-Kidz and then to a range of other charities and we charged 4% on donations (with WorldPay charging an additional 2.5%).  We did this because many charities didn't want to risk investing in case online fundraising didn't take off, and it meant that the risk stayed with us rather than charities.  Around two weeks before we launched, Justgiving went live, charging 5% commission on all donations, plus bank fees.

A commission-based charging model was appropriate back then because it protected charities from the risk that online fundraising would not work.  Now, that risk has passed - online fundraising is firmly established as a key ingredient of the fundraising mix and we believe it's time that the pricing model evolved to reflect this.  We've always argued that online fundraising is good because the commission charges are lower than bank charges and other costs that they eliminate - but we know it feels wrong to many people that a third party is taking a cut out of each donation.  We don't want this to reduce people's willingness to donate and fundraise online.

They need it more than we do

So we've changed our business model so that no part - not even a penny - of each donation stays with us.  When we consider how each penny can make much more difference in the provision of fresh water following a disaster than it can in funding our office costs for example, the moral case for finding an alternative business model is compelling!

Building relationships between charities and the private sector

Our offices costs do need to be covered though, so we've found ways to generate income that don't require us to take a cut out of each donation.  Here are the ways we make Bmycharity a sustainable business without charging commission:

1. Donors are also consumers, and we've invited a selection of suitable corporate partners to advertise to Bmycharity visitors, paying us commission for everyone who signs up.  It's in our interest only to choose suitable partners since if visitors aren't impressed they won't click, and we don't earn any revenue.
2. We also welcome corporate partners who wish to demonstrate their support for fundraising in the UK by sponsoring areas of the site.
3. Where individual charities request specialist support - for example with consulting and technical development, we charge them on a project basis.  Our standard free service includes detailed reporting and analytical tools for charities.
4. We work with a network of businesses that offer tools and services that are useful to charities and compliment the Bmycharity platform.  Where appropriate, we invite these businesses to provide their services through Bmycharity and share their revenues with us.
5. Finally, we keep the cost down!  We minimise the cost of running Bmycharity and work with very efficient suppliers and partners.

Why now?

We've always set out to provide healthy competition in the online fundraising market.  We've raised £25 million so far and over the last year (in spite of the recession) we've increased the amount raised by nearly 40% on the previous year.  We could stick with the traditional approach and continue to grow steadily - but we see an opportunity to drive a change that goes far beyond the reach of Bmycharity.

Just as internet usage blossomed in the UK with the widespread arrival of broadband, replacing pay-per-minute dial-up connections, we think the time has come for online fundraising to blossom and fulfil its rightful place as the most popular and efficient way to support good causes - free from the visceral sense that someone is taking a cut away from a good cause.

For years the market has been dominated by JustGiving, and we've noticed that whenever a new entrant (such as Everyclick in 2008) appears it helps us by encouraging charities to look again at what online fundraising can do - and many choose to sign up with Bmycharity.  With the recent launch of Virgin Money Giving, we've benefitted in a different way, since Virgin have emboldened other corporate brands to consider ways that they too can contribute to the third sector.  Bmycharity's affiliate and sponsorship options offer them a very cost-effective way to do so.

But setting fundraising free isn't something we want to monopolise.  We're encouraging every provider to seek ways to provide these services for free.  After all, the value that they deliver to thousands of good causes is too great to allow donors to be offput by a commercial interest.

A creative future beyond commission charges - filling in the fundraising spectrum

Sponsorship fundraising is one of the big success stories of the last decade, but the future is even more exciting.  We're working with a growing network of creative social entrepreneurs and charities to make it easy for charities and their supporters to broaden the impact of their fundraising activity.  Since thousands of people encounter charities only through fundraising pages, we want to make sure that there are ways that they can engage with causes beyond reaching for a credit card.  Recruiting new fundraisers, volunteers, campaigners and even employees, offering ways to contribute by changing shopping and web-searching behaviour, even providing services to beneficiaries such as video clips on cancer self-checking - all of these are possible through fundraising pages.

Bmycharity's vision for the future is to provide the free, secure, helpful platform on which all of these charitable benefits can be delivered.

Ben Brabyn 1 October 2009

Help us name 4 fundraising stars!

They work 24 hours every day, raising millions of pounds for charity - the least they deserve is a name.

We have a tradition of naming our servers - the powerful computers that make everything work at www.bmycharity.com.  Matt, our technical director, has always made the choices in the past, including Kylie, Brittney, Alicia, Zarine and Nelly.  Now, we've got 4 new servers joining our team and we'd like to invite everyone to help choose their names.

Matt favours Beyonce, Natalie, Nicole and Liv:

While Ben is advocating a reappearance for ABBA - Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny and Anni-Frid:

But we don't want to limit the choice to singers, or actors - or even to people.

So if you can think of any person, organisation or concept that deserves to have a server named after them please let us know by posting a comment below! You can suggest 1, 2, 3 or 4 names and please don't forget to explain why.  Once we've got a shortlist we'll invite everyone to vote for the top 4...