This week, Third Sector has published an analysis of ATM giving, a system recently created by Link to allow donors to give money to charity at cash machines.
It isn’t going very well. Only the RBS group has implemented the scheme, and in six months, only £347,000 has been donated through its machines in 8,051 transactions. Two other ATM giving schemes do exist. One, HSBC, has run an independent scheme, not using Link technology; it has previously said its donation schemes are worth around £120,000 a year. Another, run by the independent operator Bank Machine in places like shops and garages, won’t say how much it’s raised. It looks likely to be very little.
It turns out that some donations were made “in error” – either the donor gave by mistake, or thought the bank was giving the money. It’s even possible that the majority of donations were made in error. Based on figures from Link, it looks likely that the average genuine donation was around a fiver.
In other words, it appears that £40,000 of gifts through RBS were genuine, and £300,000 or so were “in error”, which is actually quite alarming. RBS have tried to error-proof the system, but it remains to be seen if that works.
Some of the genuine giving through ATMs is also likely to be displacement – money people would have given anyway, if this option hadn’t been available. So it’s probably even less useful than it looks.
You could argue that ATM giving is worth having, even if it’s not raising much – that it’s nice to have, and hey, if we don’t try things, we’ll never know if they work. But there’s been a lot of hype from the government, which built this up in its Giving White Paper into a major new scheme.
It looks like far more time has been spent talking about ATM giving than has actually been spent giving. (If we assume it takes a minute to make a donation, 133 hours have been spent giving so far; and I reckon almost as much time might have been spent discussing it in the Third Sector offices alone.)
And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if more money has been wasted exploring and implementing this scheme than has actually been donated – or at least, donated on purpose.
In short, it seems pretty clear to me that the whole ATM idea is a shot duck. It might waddle around for a while, but I doubt it’ll ever really fly.