Most charities now have two very different ways to receive a gift. One sits in the room with your supporters, a contactless donation device they can tap as they pass. The other lives on your website, an online giving page someone visits later from a phone or a laptop. Both raise money, but they do it in different moments and for different reasons. Treating them as rivals tends to leave gifts on the table. Treating them as a pair, each doing the job it does best, is where the results come from.
The moment each one captures
An online giving page is built for considered giving. Someone has already decided to support you, perhaps after an email, a social post or a conversation, and they sit down to make it happen. They can set up a regular gift, read more about your work and take their time. The weakness is the gap between intention and action. A supporter who means to give later very often never gets round to it.
Tap to donate closes that gap. When a visitor is standing in your venue, moved by what they have just seen, the device in front of them turns a feeling into a gift in a couple of seconds. There is nothing to download, no form to complete and no card number to type. That immediacy is the entire point of in-person giving, and it is why a well placed device so often does better than a poster pointing people towards a website they will visit another day.
Where tap to donate tends to win
In-person giving suits any setting with footfall and a clear reason to give on the spot. A church after a service, a museum beside the exhibit that tells the story, a charity stand at an event where the cause is right in front of people: these are the moments when a contactless device earns its keep. The gift happens while the motivation is fresh, rather than relying on someone remembering a web address once they are home. Getting the position right matters a great deal here, which is why it is worth thinking carefully about where to place a donation kiosk for maximum gifts.
It is also worth being clear about how this differs from a QR code. A printed code still asks the donor to lift their own phone, open a camera, trust the link and complete a payment on a small screen. A device that the donor simply taps removes those steps. We look at this in more detail in our piece on how kiosks compare with QR code donations.
Where an online giving page tends to win
Some giving genuinely belongs online. Regular monthly support, larger gifts that a donor wants to think about, appeals shared by email or across social media, and anything that needs a longer explanation all sit naturally on a web page. An online page is also the right home for supporters who are not physically with you, which for many charities is the majority of the people who care about your work.
The two channels also reinforce each other. A visitor who taps to give in your venue today is a warm supporter you can later invite into regular giving online. If you want that second step to be a smooth one, it helps to plan for contactless recurring giving and memberships as part of the same supporter journey rather than as a separate afterthought.
How the in-person side actually works
It is worth separating the two layers that make a contactless donation point work, because they come from two different places. The hardware, the donation device itself, its Android operating system, its near field communication reader and its day to day reliability, is the part DonorDynamics builds and supports. The on-screen giving experience, the suggested amounts, the thank you message and the campaign behind it, is provided by Give A Little, whose donation app and payment integration run on the device. Knowing which layer does what makes it much easier to set expectations and to get help quickly if you ever need it.
For most charities starting in person, a compact device such as the CharityTab is an easy first step, sitting on a counter or a welcome desk where people already pause. You can see how it sits alongside the wall mounted and freestanding options on our Give A Little device pages.
Run both, and let each do its job
The honest answer to the question in the title is that you rarely have to choose. An online giving page handles considered, remote and recurring gifts. Tap to donate captures the spontaneous, in the moment generosity that a website can never reach because the donor is not sitting at a website. The charities that do best treat the two as one joined up system, pointing in-person givers towards regular online support over time, and using the web to bring people back to the venues where the work happens. If you would like help thinking through the right mix for your setting, our team is happy to talk it through; you can find us through the charities overview or simply get in touch.