The online shops pay your cash donation to TheGivingMachine™. We then ensure it is distributed on your behalf to your specified beneficiaries.

All of the participating online shops on our site have agreed to pay a commission in the form of a cash donation every time you click on their link and buy a qualifying product from them. If you do not access the online shop via our links on TheGivingMachine™, then the donation will not be triggered and your nominated charities and/or schools will not get their donation.

Typically, an online shop will be donating in the region of 4-5% of the total bill to participating charities and schools. A small charge for administration will be incurred on each transaction to facilitate, collect and re-distribute the cash donations Givers generate to their chosen charities & schools. Our promise is to ensure that these costs of fundraising (currently 25% of commissions received) are comparable to the UK charities average. As we grow we will be able to reduce these charges to well below the UK average.

As an example, if you purchased an item at £100 via a link on TheGivingMachine™, we would expect to get around £5*, £3.75 of which would be re-distributed on your behalf to your specified schools and charities.

*(Please remember that that online shops set what commissions/donations they are prepared to pay so these numbers may go up or down in practice)

You can nominate a beneficiary either from the drop down lists that we provide or, in the event that your beneficiary is not listed, by filling in as much information on your beneficiary as you can. Every organisation that has charity status can be included as a beneficiary and this includes most schools and of course any charity registered with the Charities Commissioners. We will review the beneficiary that you have suggested and let you know if it is acceptable. We do not charge our participating charities and schools for joining or using TheGivingMachine™.

If you represent a charity or school that would like to participate please use the beneficiary area to register your charity or school.

Our systems are updated once a week - usually on a Thursday or a Friday. Usually, all purchases made since the previous update will show up as pending. However, some retailers may be slow in posting their transactions. Therefore, we recommend waiting for two updates of our systems between your purchase before contacting us with any queries. We have found that this resolves almost every query.

Most online shops generally specify that their payments will take between 30 and 60 days to reach us and these donations are received monthly. To keep our administration costs to a minimum, we plan to re-distribute all donations at the beginning of every month provided they exceed £25. Where donations are less than £25 we will hold them until the total exceeds £25 when they will be distributed.

We can provide you with half yearly reports via email if you require them. We are constantly looking to provide more detailed information via the website, so please check back often.

Alternatively many of the charities and schools have said that they would like to send out ’thank you’ messages to everyone who supports them at least once a year.

One reason that the online shops take so long to pay commissions is that it provides for returns of any faulty goods. In the event that a sale is reversed, the online shop can deduct a previously paid or pending commission off the next month’s payments to TheGivingMachine™. We will do likewise.

In the unlikely event that we cannot immediately match a donation with a specific Giver and their Account, we will investigate the transaction and use our best endeavours to allocate it correctly.

From May ’07, we allocate funds to whatever beneficiaries are assigned by each individual giver at the time of the transaction with the retailers. Prior to this time, we allocated funds based on whatever beneficiaries were assigned by each individual Giver at the time we ran our monthly donation report.

Although we are often adding retailers to the site, some retailers change their marketing strategies from time to time. We therefore have to remove them from our site at these times.

On January 30th 2009 we upgraded our Donation Report to give you a clearer picture of how your donations are helping your chosen beneficiaries. You can now see how much your beneficiaries have actually been paid as well as what is pending from your Giver account.

In our previous reports, we highlighted a status for each donation that showed whether it was “pending” or “committed”. These were provided by the marketing partners of the retailers and were not used in the same way by each partner. Sometimes, Givers and Beneficiaries assumed that “committed” meant that we had received the donations. In fact, “committed” meant that the retailer was committed to pay that donation at some point in the future. Some retailers pay quickly and others more slowly. Secondly, some retailers move donations from “pending” to “committed” very quickly and some move them very slowly.

We have changed your Giver Donation Report to show a total of pending payments from retailers and a total of donations made to your chosen beneficiaries. We found that the totals displayed had previously added a declined or cancelled transaction incorrectly to the totals. Therefore, in a few rare cases, your total may have reduced slightly as a result of on an incomplete purchase with the retailer or an item returned to the retailer during the past.

We hope that you find the updates more useful and informative.