UK Credit card giving up 18%

So it's the middle of a recession right?  doom, gloom, despair...etc...etc..etc...So here is some good news - People gave more last year than the previous year and the trend seems to be going up...not a little more but 18% more.  That's a reasonable figure.  This is according to the UK cards association  who showed that giving to plastic cards reached £1.19 billion in 2008 up from £1.01 Billion the year before.  People are giving more on debit cards which is up by 16% (c/c by 9%) but one of the more interesting findings in this report was that although more and more of us are giving by debit card we're still inclined to give MORE by credit card.

The cards association does expect this gap to narrow as it has done in the retail sector.  However currently people like to give more.  £639.2 Million on Credit cards and £546.9 million on debit cards last year alone.  The number of transactions rose too (16% on debit cards and 9% for credit cards).  Charity Affinity credit cards also saw a rise £6.7 billion being spent on these card and roughly £16.7 million going to charities.

Now here is another piece of good news - more recent figures (First 4 months of 2009) have also seen an increase on 2008 (24% on debit cards and 11% in credit cards). So this is definitely the time to be working smarter to get a bigger slice of this pie.

This is a trend we're seeing at Blackbaud too.  The average UK gift last year according to CAF was between £11 and £15.  Challenge event fundraising had an average gift of £34 (Source JustGiving and BMyCharity) which is mainly credit card based.  Blackbaud's average online gift is higher still at about £64 for our UK charities and about $154 for our US ones (Source: Blackbaud).  So optimising the content and taking the gift by card certainly helps to up the average gift. 

So the question I'd ask is why?...well the card association thinks it's because it's easy to pay by card and easy to pay online and I'd be inclined to agree.  So even more reason to start to monitor not just who is coming to your website but also what they are doing...and why.  Usability is so important on websites nowadays and if you make it difficult to give - folks will go to someone who makes it easy.  So make sure you can take gifts online, make sure you know why people are coming to your site, make sure they know what you are about, get to know them so you know why they came...and, most importantly, why they'll come back.  Get this right and you should be able to get a bigger slice of the one ray of sunshine in these gloomy times...more to come in the following weeks on how to do some of this stuff...

(Source : All figures from the UK cards association except where stated).