BT MyDonate (2011 - 2019)

2011 - 2019

dead uk

bt built a donations platform in 2011 and took no commission on it, which in british fundraising was the entire point, because everybody else was keeping a percentage. by the end of 2015 more than 8,750 charities were registered and the sponsored-run economy ran through it every spring. on 21 january 2019 bt announced it was closing, said the market now had plenty of fee-free options of its own, and switched the site off on 30 june. donations kept clearing for thirty more days and then that was it.

» see mydonate.bt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. either way. A phone company built a donations platform and then declined to make money from it. either way. BT put it online on 6 April '11 and charged charities nothing to be on it. That sentence still reads strangely, which is roughly why MyDonate mattered. No setup cost and no commission. What came off a donation was the card fee and nothing else, 1.3 percent on credit and fifteen pence on debit, paid straight through to the processor (dont quote me on that).

this is mostly told from the outside, the rest of the British fundraising market did not work that way. The established giving platforms took a percentage of every donation on top of the card charges, which is a defensible business and was also a permanent low-grade argument between charities and the people who hosted their pages. for some reason. BT arrived with the argument settled, because BT was not tryna run a business here. It was community investment, filed under the same heading as sponsoring a stadium.

It worked for eight years. more or less. Around 12,000 charities passed through it and the platform handled something in the region of 45 mil pounds a year, most of it in small amounts attached to somebody doing something uncomfortable for a cause. really though, that is what a giving page is for in Britain. You run a marathon, you send the link to everybody you have ever worked with. the money arrives in tens of pounds.

The personal fundraising page never became a habit here in the way it did there. back then. Giving in Turkey mostly went through foundations and bank transfers. either way.

the culture of putting your own name at the top of a donation total is not one I ever joined. I have watched British colleagues do it, always slightly embarrassed and always in a running vest. for some reason. The Gift Aid machinery underneath it, where the state adds a quarter to every donation by a taxpayer, has no equivalent I can point to at home.

~ the rap sheet ~

Born	6 april 2011, built with five charities helping to shape it
Peak	more than 8,750 charities registered by the end of 2015
Killed	30 june 2019
Lifespan	eight years
Made by	BT Group
Killed by	a corporate decision to spend the community budget on digital skills instead

~ how it landed ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly. BT did not build it alone. The platform was shaped with help from a handful of charities that would end up using it, which is why the charity-side tooling was better than the free price tag suggested. Gift Aid claiming was automated, the data stayed with the charity. the reporting worked for organizations that had one part-time person handling fundraising admin.

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. in those days. That mattered more than the headline zero, a small charity is not choosing a platform on commission alone. by then. It is choosing on whether the Gift Aid gets claimed correctly without somebody having to understand HMRC forms. myDonate did that part properly.

~ the cracks ~

this part i was not really around for, but anyway, nothing broke (cant remember the exact year). That is the awkward part of this grave. anyway. though, the service was working, the charities were on it, and the donations were clearing. What changed was BT deciding that eight years was enough and that its community money would do more good teaching people digital skills than subsidizing a payments platform.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. anyway. The stated reasoning was that fundraising technology had moved on and the market now had several fee-free options that had not existed in 2011, there is truth in it. in fairness, there is also the fact that the competitors dropped their platform fees partly because a large telco had spent most of a decade demonstrating that the fee was optional.

~ the next chapter ~

this is mostly told from the outside (give or take). The announcement came on 21 January '19 and gave everybody five months. to be honest. Charities moved their pages, fundraisers with live campaigns had to repost links. some money simply did not follow. either way. Donations made up to midnight on 30 June still reached the charities within thirty days. bT kept the accounts readable afterward so the data could be exported (dont quote me on that). As shutdowns go it was handled with more care than most.

i was not paying attention by then. more or less. anyway, what is left is the argument MyDonate settled by existing. either way. Somebody ran a giving platform at cost for eight years and it did not collapse, which means the percentage everybody else charges is a choice rather than a law of physics. either way. Then the company that proved it walked away, and the market went back to charging.

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