Independent Funeral Directors using the “In Memory” cloud based donations management system, transacted 21,096 individual donation entries, in the year to 31st December 2017. Overall the donations raised a total of £1,028,283 for charities and groups across the UK.
The platform saw a massive 89% increase in online transactions to 7,242 in the year which accounted for 40.4% of the total value processed. Online donations overtook traditional donating for the first time (cheques dropping to 31.7% and cash increasing slightly to 27.9%) as donors increasingly get used to donating online, via the funeral directors’ websites.
The power of online credit and debit card donations to attract Gift Aid continues to shine (thus boosting the total raised by 25%). In the year just over 78% (2016 80%) of donors made the single click to add Gift Aid to their card donation, while the equivalent Gift Aid attachment for cash and cheques dropped slightly to just 4.1%
The average donation including Gift Aid during the year increased slightly above the rate of inflation at 2.1% to £48.74, whilst online card donations averaged £55.92 compared to cheques at £37.92
“InMemory”, now entering its fifth year of operation, has now total processed over 73,000 donations via its funeral director customers, which with Gift Aid added, has resulted in donations totalling over £3.25 million being transacted.
The figures continue to show the importance of cash and cheque donations, the most successful funeral director using InMemory, still only sees 57% of donations transacted online, leaving them to still deal manually with 43% via cash and cheques. On average just over a third ( 35%) of the volume of transactions were online with 65% of the transactions by cash or cheque.
Analysis of online donors postcodes continue to show that circa 60% of donors live within the typical trading area of the funeral director and are therefore potential future customers.
Donatis Director, Mark Robinson commented:
“These figures continue to support our assertion that funeral directors need a donation management platform that allows them to manage traditional and online giving together in one system. Whilst online will continue to grow, it will be sometime before the vast majority are managed this way, which remains our objective.
Having said that; we are delighted with the almost doubling of online transactions, resulting in ever more donations going our customer’s websites. The single fact that consistently eight out of ten online donors add Gift Aid, makes this form of donation ever more compelling.
We remain totally committed to deducting nothing from any donation and confirm that our charge of £6 per InMemory page to the funeral director, remains’ fixed for the coming year.”