The future of donations: Why contactless? Why now?

As we head into 2025, fewer than 12% of donations made in the UK are made with cash, yet 94% of the cards your potential donors are carrying in their pockets and purses have contactless functionality. Here, Give as you Live Donate’s Annabelle Risdon explores why there has never been a more vital time to offer contactless donation opportunities for your charity.

Charities in 2025 face an ever-evolving list of challenges caused by changing trends and popularity right across the scope of fundraising; if it’s not cash reconciliation challenges as a result of the closure of bank branches in the UK, it’s the pressures of compliant data acquisition to build accurate pictures of fundraisers and their behaviours. Regardless of charity size, the financial and technological challenges coupled with the pressure to simply survive can sometimes take up so much time we lose the capacity to modernise.

What does the decline of cash mean for charities?

There is no doubt that contactless is now one of the most resource-efficient ways to collect payments, and Brits are loving it. In fact, in 2023 83% of people of retirement age made a contactless payment at least once a month, and that figure rose to 91% when analysing the behaviours of young adults (25-34).

So, what’s happening to cash? With giving on the street still the most popular method of donating to charity in 2023, what is this rise in digital payments likely to mean for charities?

Well, despite currently being the most popular method of giving, experts are forecasting a sharp decline in cash donations as more Brits switch to digital banking, with a rather bleak 6% of donations expected to be made in cash by 2023. There’s little research to show the average donation amounts Brits give in cash to street fundraisers, but often donations simply equate to the change in a person’s pocket with little thought given to the amount being donated. And it’s here that contactless giving really presents an opportunity to increase average donation amounts.

How do contactless donations differ from cash?

When making a donation using a contactless card, a mobile wallet or smart watch wallet, your donor is presented with a range of options, usually pre-set by the charity. Put simply, contactless donations are larger than cash donations as the amounts suggested are typically greater than the coins in someone’s pocket.

The use of a device to collect donations also gives an opportunity to collect data. Nowadays, shoppers are used to giving an email address to receive a receipt – so why should that be any different when donating? Not only can charities harness this data to build a more detailed picture of in-person donors, but they also now have a second opportunity to thank the giver and present messaging to showcase the difference their donation makes, helping to build a relationship and to develop the supporter experience.

Does contactless giving have other benefits?

It's not just the donor’s experience that we need to consider here either – what about the charity? Between counting cash, transporting it, paying it in, auditing payments and accounting for income, there are thousands of hours lost across the charity sector to resource-heavy processes each year. Contactless donations come with added smart tech – reconciled reports, efficient Gift Aid processing, and supporter data ready to transfer to a charity’s systems could unlock vital fundraising hours.

So, with so many positives, what’s stopping charities making the switch to contactless? Until now, the block for many charities has been the technology on offer; in recent years ‘tap-and-donate’ offerings have required charities to invest money in costly hardware and terminals, and time in learning and understanding how they work, but what if the solution has been right in your pocket all along?

Whilst the scale of in-person fundraising will vary for all charities, the rampant increase in contactless payments in society poses an important question: can your charity afford to alienate would-be supporters, just because they no longer carry cash?