BT MyDonate

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

~ the obit ~

A phone company built a donations platform and then declined to make money from it. That sentence still reads strangely, which is roughly why MyDonate mattered. BT put it online on 6 April 2011 and charged charities nothing to be on it. 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.

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. BT arrived with the argument settled, because BT was not trying to run a business here. It was community investment, filed under the same heading as sponsoring a stadium.

It worked for eight years. Around 12,000 charities passed through it and the platform handled something in the region of 45 million pounds a year, most of it in small amounts attached to somebody doing something uncomfortable for a cause. 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, and the money arrives in tens of pounds.

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

~ how it landed ~

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, and the reporting worked for organizations that had one part-time person handling fundraising admin.

That mattered more than the headline zero. A small charity is not choosing a platform on commission alone. It is choosing on whether the Gift Aid gets claimed correctly without somebody having to understand HMRC forms, and MyDonate did that part properly.

~ the cracks ~

Nothing broke. That is the awkward part of this grave. 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.

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. 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 ~

The announcement came on 21 January 2019 and gave everybody five months. Charities moved their pages, fundraisers with live campaigns had to repost links, and some money simply did not follow. Donations made up to midnight on 30 June still reached the charities within thirty days, and BT kept the accounts readable afterward so the data could be exported. As shutdowns go it was handled with more care than most.

What is left is the argument MyDonate settled by existing. 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. Then the company that proved it walked away, and the market went back to charging.

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