I have an alternative proposition for those clients of BmyCharity who value the ability to be able to brand their own pages and create event pages and fundraising pages that do not all look the same. Everyday Hero cannot match Virgin’s 3.5% including credit card fees in the long-term (much higher on small donations such as £1 or £2 incidentally) but we can offer a 3 month transitional membership of EverydayHero on the same terms that charities would get if they signed up with VMG – ie. 3.5%.

Remember, as you rightly say above, we have no registration fee or monthly charges so this represents a significant saving in upfront fees. We can also arrange for a bulk upload of fundraisers details which will give active fundraisers a new page so that there is no interruption to their fundraising activity. I am confident that I can prove, in the 3 month period, that our approach, which puts the charity brand and messaging first, (similar to BmyCharity) actually raises you more money and pushes up the average donation thereby making it far better value for money than Virgin anyway.

With no upfront costs is there anything to lose? Once we get to the end of the 3 months those who have signed up will be offered the opportunity to transfer to our normal terms or can depart without further commitment.

We currently have around 850 clients and we are the market leader in Australia. We work with charities, trusts and NFPs of all shapes and sizes. If anybody wants to contact me directly then they can; by email at terry@everydayhero.co.uk or you can get my phone number by visiting http://everydayhero.co.uk/contact/contact_us

However, because we are still such a small charity, to find another £117.50 on top of the £172.50 we have already paid is going to be hard to justify to our trustees. I know your hands are tied since you too are non-profit. That is why I am very keen to bring this to the attention of Sir Richard. It would be fabulous publicity for him and yourselves if he could offer to underwrite the £117.50 for any BMyCharity registered charity who chooses to switch to your service.

Just Giving are pushing hard for BMyCharitie’s custom. They are offering to fast track charities and engaging in dialogue to try and justify why it’s worth paying the monthly fee to use their service. If your organisation could secure the 300 BMyCharity charities onto your system, that would be massive.

Other than talking about this all over Twitter and at various related blogs, I personally don’t know what else I can do to at least give Sir Richard the opportunity to say no. That’s why I contacted you via Twitter since I hoped that as an organisation under his Virgin umbrella, somebody somewhere might have the means to talk to him about this.

In the meantime, thank you again for taking the time to get in touch. I appreciate it and I really hope something can be arranged so that Give A Brick can use your service because it looks great. Given the benefit of a time machine, we would do things differently when it came to setting up with a sponsorship company but hindsight is a lovely thing

Eleanor
.-= Eleanor´s last blog ..Give A Brick community video =-.

We have taken some immediate steps to help charities and have streamlined our registration process for those of you moving across from Bmycharity. This means that if you register with us today we will have you up and running in just a few days – helping to ensure that you don’t miss out on any fundraising at this key time.

As a not-for-profit business we do all we can to keep our fees as low as possible. Our £100+VAT set up fee literally covers the cost of putting each charity live on our website – this is a one off charge and you don’t have to pay us a subscription each month. We believe this is the fairest way to charge because it costs us the same to set up each charity, regardless of size and we believe it would be unfair on other charities using Virgin Money Giving to waive our set up fee for those moving across from Bmycharity.

Once you are up and running on our website we charge a 2% transaction fee on donations (you mention in your blog this would be 20p on a £1 donation – in fact it’s just 2p) and we don’t charge anything to collect Gift Aid for you (we currently have a fantastic 87% people ticking the Gift Aid box). So, for each £1 donation to Give A Brick you would receive £1.10 net of all fees and with Gift Aid added.

This link shows how our fees work http://www.virginmoneygiving.com/giving/popup/how-fees-affect-a-donation.jsp

We would be delighted if Give A Brick used our website for fundraising and we would love to help such a great cause.

James
Virgin Money Giving