As despicable as this crime is, Google ‘Charity Box Theft’ and sadly there are pages of news articles reporting on robberies all over the country from the last 6 months.
There were 2 charity boxes stolen during December from a shop in Cheshire, November saw one stolen from a Costa in Thornhill and one from a shop in Bicester, and just last month 2 charity tins were taken from a shop in Blackpool. These are just a few from the first page of Google results.
It seems the theft of these charity boxes is not uncommon unfortunately, and this can have 2 main impacts.
- Lost funds. The first is obviously for the charities involved, losing out on the money that people have donated. Every penny counts for these charities who often depend completely on donations for continuing their good work.
- Donor Unease. The second is on the donors themselves – What effect is reading these sort of articles going to have on people? People who have seen in the news that there has been a spate of charity box robberies might think twice about popping a few coins in the box for fear that they won’t actually reach the charity as intended.
It’s time to think outside the [charity] box and that’s where digital donation technology could save the day.
Donater, for example, offers a simple smart sticker to enable donors to send their money digitally using their smartphone. Quick, easy, and secure – No change at risk of being stolen.
We’ve spoken before about the benefits of digital donations on charity fundraising, and one of the great things about this technology is it acts as a fantastic complement to traditional fundraising methods. They don’t take away from or replace more traditional ways of making donations – It’s important that those options remain for those that do want to digital physical coins.
However, one of Donater’s smart stickers could make a fantastic addition to a standard charity box. People could still pop in their loose change if they wanted, but having the sticker on there gives people an option to donate digitally too.
So if they are perhaps a little bit worried that their donation could get stolen in a charity box theft, or even that they don’t have the cash on them but would like to make a donation – A quick scan of the smart sticker on their phone and it’s done! Quick, easy and secure.
If it turns out that more people start to use smart stickers, or other digital donation technology, then the time may come when the donation boxes we see on cashier desks and till points become digital only. This would completely remove the possibility of funds being stolen via charity box thefts.