At Donr, our mission is to help charities use the power of digital to build supporter relationships and raise much-needed funds.

And although our Text Giving platform is the main way we do this, our clever tech team has also been working with a number of large charities and commercial brands to develop bespoke donation tools. 

As we approach Christmas, a time when charitable donations often reach their peak, Donr is powering millions of pounds of donations for two of the UK’s biggest festive fundraising campaigns: BBC Children in Need and the John Lewis and Waitrose Partnership.

BBC Children in Need 

For BBC Children in Need, Donr built the secure online donations platform which handled donations to this year’s appeal made by card, PayPal and Apple Pay.

An incredible £41 million was raised in total, with our platform processing tens of thousands of pounds a minute during the peak of Appeal Night. 

Although Donr has built online donation platforms before, this was definitely the most challenging in terms of volume and reporting demands – but it’s been a challenge we’ve relished, and we look forward to creating more bespoke fundraising platforms next year and beyond.

John Lewis & Waitrose's 2020 Christmas Campaign

John Lewis & Partners approached Donr on the basis of our expertise in text giving, and our solution for their campaign was more closely aligned with our core Text Giving platform.

The brand was keen to run more than just a normal advertising campaign this Christmas, wanting a really simple way to bring the “Give A Little Love” concept to life by facilitating charity donations to their chosen charities, Home-Start and FareShare. 

We were happy to provide a solution that consisted of nine text keywords – which allowed for various calls to action in different places (e.g. on TV, in store) to be effectively tracked  – as well as a bespoke online donation page, accepting donations by card and PayPal. 

“Our 2020 Christmas campaign is like no other, to reflect the fact that 2020 was a year like no other,” said Claire Wilson, Waitrose & Partners.

“Thanks to Donr we were able to create an online and text giving campaign that was fully integrated with the main campaign, with a simple call to action that could be instantly responded to by our community, on a platform that was robust and scalable.

"Donr were collaborative and supportive throughout the entire set up process, and continued to provide invaluable knowledge and advice as the campaign progressed."

Throughout 2021, Donr will be launching new fundraising tools to help deliver digital solutions for a wide range of charitable campaigns. If you’d like to discuss fundraising or campaign ideas, please email hello@donr.com. 

P.S. Don’t forget our Christmas Hub is also up and running, packed with tools and resources to help you raise donations through text as part of your festive fundraising campaigns.