What happens to a donation

Charities ask people to hand over money on trust and then explain themselves afterwards. That is an unusual arrangement, and it only works if the explaining is done properly. This is ours.

Where a gift goes first

A donation made on this site goes to a payment processor. Stripe for card payments, WhyDonate for the donation widget, and then to Marianco's account. The processor takes a fee, typically a small percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction. That fee is real and unavoidable, and it is the reason a small recurring gift is worth more over a year than the same total given in many tiny amounts.

We do not see or store card details at any point. They go from the browser to Stripe directly. This is not a courtesy; handling them would place us under PCI DSS obligations we have no business taking on.

Restricted and unrestricted

A gift given for a named purpose is restricted: it can lawfully only be spent on that purpose. A gift given generally is unrestricted, and can be spent wherever it is most needed.

Unrestricted giving is less satisfying to make and considerably more useful to receive. Restricted funds cannot pay the electricity bill, the accountant or the safeguarding training, and an organisation that cannot pay for those things cannot deliver the programmes the restricted funds are for.

Who checks

In Sweden, the visible mark of accountability is the 90-konto, a bankgiro or plusgiro account starting with 90, granted and monitored by Svensk Insamlingskontroll. Holding one means an organisation is audited annually, must spend at least 75 per cent of its income on its purpose, and can lose the account if it does not.

It is not the only signal. Membership of Giva Sverige carries a quality code with its own reporting requirements. But the 90-konto is the one the Swedish public recognises, and its absence is a reasonable thing for a donor to ask about.

What the percentage actually means

The "how much goes to the cause" figure is the most quoted and least useful number in the sector. It can be improved by classifying costs differently rather than by achieving anything, and it treats every krona spent on administration as waste.

Some of the best-spent money in child protection is administrative: background checks on staff, supervision for people doing traumatic work, a case management system that does not lose a referral. An organisation with a beautiful ratio and no safeguarding capacity is not a good bet.

Better questions: what did you actually do last year, how do you know it worked, and what went wrong. An organisation that cannot answer the third one is either very lucky or not looking.

Your rights as a donor

You can ask what happened to your money. You can ask to be removed from every list we hold and we must do it. A recurring gift can be cancelled at any time, from the link in any of our emails or by writing to us, no phone call, no retention script.

And you can stop. Giving is voluntary and stays voluntary; a charity that makes leaving difficult has told you something important about itself.