FAQs

What is Firstgiving?
Firstgiving is a private company that has been bringing the benefits of new technology to charitable fundraising for over 3 years. We are focused on making fundraisers more effective while helping charities reduce fundraising costs and efforts to raise more money. We do this by providing powerful tools and support services. Most recently we helped over 3,000 runners of the London Marathon raise more than $2 million dollars for charity using our tools. We have offices in London, England and outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

What’s the advantage to using a personal fundraising page?
Raising funds with your personal fundraising page helps you reach more people more easily and enables them to donate more easily from anywhere in the world using a credit card. This helps you get more donations with less work. The donations are automatically processed for the charity and are deposited to their bank account electronically. This saves you the effort of collecting checks manually and gets the funds to the charity quickly and efficiently.

Additionally, thank you notes and tax acknowledgements are sent to each donor automatically via email. This saves you and the charity the effort of doing this manually.

The pages are also a very personal and fun way to connect with your friends, family and colleagues to tell them about your efforts and it can serve as a hub for your supporters to monitor your efforts online.

Does this service cost anything?
Setting up the page is free and there are never any costs to you, the fundraiser. Firstgiving takes a small percentage of each donation as agreed to by the charity in addition to standard credit card processing fees.The costs of this service are geared to fall inside the cost guidelines for charities. The service helps them efficiently raise more money with less effort.

How long does it take to set up a page?
Setting up a page is simple, requires no technical skills and typically takes less than 5 minutes.

Can I change my page?
Absolutely, your Account will enable you to personalize and update your page quickly and simply.

Is this a secure service?
Yes. All transactions and data are captured and stored in a secure environment. Firstgiving uses industry standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption certificates from VeriSign, the leading provider of digital trust services.

Can I also take off-line donations?
Definitely! Your personal page is intended to be one part of your fundraising approach vs your entire fundraising approach. You can still solicit donations via mail, phone or in person (Hint: Grandma would love to check out your page but still wants the phone call!). We even provide an area on your page for you to record your offline donations and add them to your total.

Can people donate anonymously?
Yes. Individuals can either donate anonymously and their name will appear on your fundraising page as 'Anonymous'. Please note: their identity will still be passed on to you and to the charity.