Cash for Kids empowers its regional offices to collect contactless donations

Cash for Kids is the official charity of Bauer Media, supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable children across the UK. Backed by Bauer’s radio and media brands, it provides grants for essentials like food, clothing, and heating. Campaigns such as Cash for Kids Day and Mission Christmas raise millions annually, helping hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty or facing hardship.

Background 

Cash for Kids operates across 23 regional offices and needed a simple, scalable way to collect contactless donations nationwide. Already using Stripe as its payment processor, the charity sought a portable solution that could also work offline and integrate seamlessly with Stripe. 

Solution

To test feasibility, Cash for Kids began with a pilot using a CollecTin More with Stripe and a single Give A Little account. The positive results from this trial confirmed the decision to purchase 50 CollecTin units and implement the Give A Little 'Group' model across the organisation.

The Group setup enables the head office to manage an umbrella Give A Little account with oversight of all 23 regional members. Each region has its own view of fundraising activity, with funds automatically paid into its local bank account via Stripe. The detailed reporting gives the head office team good financial data, particularly relating to pay-outs, which show funds raised minus transaction fees, making reconciliation simple and efficient. This automation replaced the previously manual fund distribution process, saving time and reducing errors.

Results

Cash for Kids has used the CollecTin devices across a wide range of fundraising activities, including live podcast events, golf days, charity balls, awards dinners, concerts, festivals, Santa’s grottos, pantomimes, and supermarket collections. 
The regional teams particularly value the ‘list of campaigns’ feature, which allows multiple campaigns to be displayed on the device screen for donors to choose from. This proved especially useful at events featuring auctions or fundraising games, where teams could pre-select the relevant campaign in advance so that the correct donation options and custom amounts were shown automatically.

A year on from their first rollout, Cash for Kids have now added an additional twenty CollecTin More units in time for this year's Mission Christmas campaign. 

James Blanchflower, Digital Services & Data Manager, Cash for Kids comments:

"We chose to go with the CollecTin More contactless donation units with Stripe because we needed something portable that could also be used to take donations offline. We now have 50 CollecTins, and the teams really love using them. The ability to centrally add a custom device name in the Give A Little software to identify each device is incredibly useful."

Testimonials from staff and Volunteers

"It worked great!! We had so many compliments on how snazzy it looked too!!"

“Ahhh it was fab… everyone commented on how fab the screen was all branded up"

“They are brilliant! Very easy to use and we didn't encounter any issues at all. Set up was very straightforward”

“The CollecTin devices have genuinely transformed how we fundraise in public spaces. They're so easy to use, eye-catching, and Give A Little makes it simple to customise campaigns and track donations. We've seen a real uplift in contactless giving since introducing them!”

“It was our choice to set up all the campaigns centrally as we wanted consistent branding on the devices, so it looked professional. I like that you can add a video as the background, too. Our branding team put together standard designs for the donate now screen, thank you screen and the list of campaigns screen, which we then updated for Christmas. I also like the ability to collect email receipts and the fact that it remembers your card, so you don’t have to add your email address again after the next donation.”
James Blanchflower, Digital Services & Data Manager and project stakeholder.