UK is donating more actively with the help of plastic cards

According to the UK Cards Association data, donations to charitable organizations on plastic cards reached £1.19 billion in 2008, that’s up 18% from £1.01 billion previous year. 

Concerning the amount of donations carried out trough the plastic cards total increase of 13% was reflected from 2007 to 2008. Particularly, debit cards donations grew by 16%, from 13 million in 2007 to 15.1 million in 2008, at the same time number of credit card cash contributions showed growth from 9.6 million in 2007 to 10.5 million in 2008, that is a 9% annual increase. 

While more charity payments are put on debit cards people tend to donate more on credit and charge cards. Thus, in 2008 an overall amount donated on credit and charge cards was £639.2 million against £546.9 million on debit cards. One of the main reasons for that trend considered to become the fact that a lot of people donate online and this is one environment where more people prefer to use their credit card instead of a debit card.

Nevertheless, this gap is to become smaller in the future as charitable giving on plastic cards follows the overall trends in the market towards debit cards.

One more way of accomplishing charity is using an affinity card. Last year, the volume of donations via such cards made up £6.7 billion. On average, 0.25% being the percentage donated to charities; approximately £16.7 million will have been raised through the use of these cards.