January 10, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
JustGive, a nonprofit portal where people can make online donations to more than 1.8 million charities worldwide, is the latest organization to report a big surge in online giving last year.
Donations grew last year by 70 percent, to $30-million. JustGive officials say that a big chunk of the growth came from the purchase of its gift cards. Donors can give the card to anyone they want, and the recipient chooses the charity to receive the amount the donor has stipulated.
Gift-card revenue grew by more than 200 percent last year, JustGive officials said, spurred by some new offers. For example, when the musician Dave Matthews held a December concert in Seattle, each $135 ticket came with a JustGive gift card that enabled the recipient to make a $150 donation through the portal. Ticketmaster, the online ticket-buying site, also donated the administrative fee it usually charges for each ticket sold to the performance.
Another reason for the boom was a gift offer to donors who wanted to help victims of the Haiti crisis. Nearly $5-million was raised, with some of the money coming from the site’s promise to provide 50 cents for every dollar contributed, from January through December last year, by people who agreed to make monthly gifts of up to $500 to one or more charities working in the beleaguered country. The match brought in $50,000 in gifts and $25,000 from JustGive for the match.
