A contactless donation device is an investment, and a charity is right to ask what it earns. The honest answer is more than the takings on the screen, because a device pays its way in several ways at once. Measuring the return properly means looking past the headline figure to the full picture of what a device brings in and what it saves, set against what it costs to run.
Start with what it raises
The most visible return is the giving itself. Two figures tell you most: the total raised over a period, and the average gift. The average is the more revealing of the two, because contactless giving with well-chosen preset amounts tends to produce a larger gift than the loose change a cash tin would gather. Comparing the average gift on a device with what the same setting raised before is a fair measure of the difference it has made.
Add the Gift Aid uplift
For a UK charity, Gift Aid is part of the return and easily overlooked. Where donors are UK taxpayers, eligible gifts allow a further twenty-five per cent to be reclaimed from HM Revenue and Customs at no cost to them, and a device that captures the declaration at the point of giving collects this far more reliably than a cash tin, which captures none of it. The proportion of gifts carrying Gift Aid, multiplied across a year, is real income that belongs in the calculation.
Count what it saves
Part of the return never appears as a gift at all. A device that reduces the cash you handle saves the time spent counting, banking and reconciling, and the cost and risk of keeping cash secure. Those hours and that risk have a value, even if they rarely sit in a budget line, and they belong on the return side of the ledger.
Do not forget the cost of downtime avoided
There is a hidden figure that an unmanaged deployment never sees. A device that has quietly gone offline raises nothing while appearing to work, and those lost gifts are gone for good. A managed, monitored device that is known to be online and taking money protects income that a neglected one would silently lose, so reliable uptime is itself a part of the return, even though it is measured in what you do not lose.
Set all of this against the cost of the device, the giving software and any fees, and the connectivity it uses, and you have an honest view of the return. Most charities find that a well-placed, well-managed device pays for itself within a sensible period and then keeps earning, but the only way to know for your own situation is to measure it. The reporting that comes with Give A Little gives you the figures to do exactly that, by device and by location. Our guide to donation kiosk data and reporting sets out which figures to track and why.
Want to understand what a device could return for you? See the reporting on the Give A Little page, compare the range on our comparison chart, or read our guide for charities.