OpenCharities

After the gift

You give… What happens after you've donated?

Most of the time you never find out what happened to your donation. We are changing that.

See the organisations

How it usually goes

The platform receives your money and forwards it.

The charity receives it themselves. We are not on the route.

The platform's fee comes off your gift, before the charity sees anything.

We invoice the charity afterwards. Nothing comes off your gift.

You hear little afterwards, and what you hear carries no date.

Reporting with a date is a condition of being listed here.

The difference is not a promise, it is the route

DRAFT — wording not yet signed off (FEE-1)

OpenCharities deducts nothing from your gift. The charity is the merchant; we invoice them 5% afterwards. The payment provider's own costs still apply.

These are our pioneers

Every organisation here is listed on the same terms: its own name, its own numbers, and a commitment to report what happened to the money.

Our mission

Help us change the way the world gives

We are a startup with one job: to make giving open, accountable and borderless, so that for once you can see your generosity at work. We are looking for people who think giving can be better, and who want to watch it get better.

Become a supporter

Give to a charity here and you are backing more than one cause. You are backing a way of giving where you pay the charity directly instead of paying us, where our costs are invoiced to them afterwards instead of coming out of your gift, and where reporting what happened to the money is a condition of being listed.

See the initiatives

Every gift on this platform lands in the charity's own account, and every charity here has committed to telling you what happened to it. That is the standard we are building, one charity at a time.

The bigger picture

How does it work?

Giving here takes three steps, and OpenCharities is not one of them. You pay the charity directly, the money lands in its own account, and reporting what happened to it is a condition of being listed here.

  1. 1

    You give

    You pick a charity here and pay it directly, from wherever you are. Nothing routes through us.

  2. 2

    The charity gets paid

    The money lands in its own account, with its own payment provider. We are not on the route, so there is nothing for us to hold.

  3. 3

    You see it land

    The charity reports what happened to the money, with a date on it. That is a condition of being listed here, not a favour.

That is the whole route — three steps, from someone in Amsterdam to a charity on the other side of the world, ending in something dated that you can read.

What to expect

What happens to the money gets posted here

Every organisation on this platform commits to reporting what happens to the money, with a date on it. That is the only kind of evidence we can show today — and it does not start until someone gives.

There are no real updates yet; the first one follows the first gift. To show you what you will be reading, here are three made-up cards in the shape a real update has to take: what was done, one concrete detail, and a number.

None of these three are real. They are examples of what an update will look like, written by us and not by a charity. The first real update follows the first gift.

  1. Example

    Day 1

    The gifts arrived

    Example charity

    €1,240 landed in our own account this week, from 31 separate gifts. Here is what we are going to do with it.

  2. Example

    Day 12

    We bought the chairs

    Example charity

    €880 went on 20 folding chairs and two tables for the Tuesday afternoon. The receipt is with our bookkeeping; the room now seats 24 instead of 12.

  3. Example

    Week 6

    What it changed

    Example charity

    Fourteen people came to the first afternoon in the new set-up, six of them for the first time. €360 of the €1,240 is still unspent and goes to the next one.

Swipe or scroll to see all three