What Will Happen To The Money?
The sponsorship money I collect from this event will be divided equally and donated to The Old Police Cells Museum Society, which runs and develops the museum, and Mind in Brighton & Hove, the mental health charity that provides support, advice and mental health services to the city.
I examined the options for collecting the money and decided on a combination of good old-fashioned local sponsorship forms and the internet. The most effective way to donate is in person – if you’re lucky enough to know me, or have me come and hassle you in person. But otherwise, there’s the web…
There are some big charity collection websites in operation these days. Unfortunately, they either take a cut of each donation collected (5% is typical), or charge a set-up fee to charities for registering with them (£100-£150). This wasn’t going to work out in my case, as far as I could see.
You’ve got to have some kind of web facility, however, because it’s good to get national and international donors involved, yet PayPal isn’t ideal, because they take from your donation a flat fee of 20p, plus 3.4% of the total amount. Not only that, but they also take the same cut from the grand total collected, when it is transferred into a bank account.
On the plus side, however, there’s no set-up fee to the charity from PayPal; they accept all kinds of credit and debit cards; and you don’t even need a PayPal account to make a donation. In any case, I’ll also be able to claim Gift Aid on the final donations to the charities – which means the Government will add 20% to the total, clawing back some of the charges.
A complete (but anonymous) list of donations and charges will be published on this page when the project is over, so that the sums are clear.
