On the 15th of November 2018 Facebook launched their charitable giving tools in Australia. This involves a partnership with PayPal who at the same launched the PayPal Giving Fund Australia.
The PayPal Giving Fund Australia is GDR Type 2 Australian Charity. That is, a charity approved by the Australian Taxation Office to collect tax deductible donations, but only for the purpose of distributing them to other Australian charities who actually carry out charitable work (these are known as a Type 1 GDR charity). We at the Online Hate Prevention Institute are a Type 1 DGR Charity as our aim it to prevent harm to people as a result of online hate. The PayPal Giving Fund Australia can therefore allocate some of the funds it collects to us.
Facebook post donate buttons
One of the Facebook charitable giving tools, the donate button, allows anyone in Australia to attach a donation button to any of their posts. When you write a post you can see this option as the picture of a coin with a heart on it. After clicking it you will be presented with a list of every eligible Australian charity and search function to find the one you want.
Each post will then have a widget bellow it with a donate button and a message saying the post is raising funds, who the funds go to, and how much has been donated via that post so far.
While anyone can setup a post to support a charity, they must select from the list of approved charities. This ensures that the feature can only be used to raise money for real charities that have the appropriate approvals from the Australian Taxation Office. This protects the public from fake charities and scams.
Facebook Page Fundraisers
This feature is limited to pages that represent charities as well as public figures. It works similar to an Indiegogo, GoFundMe for charities, or other crowdfunding campaign. The charity / public figure can set the amount they wish to raise and the length of the campaign. The fundraiser will show the running total of contributions. All funds will be transferred after the campaign closes regardless of whether or not the goal is met.
Fundraisers come with promotion tools to help share the fundraising campaign with through Facebook, Messenger, Live video and email. When someone donates they are promoted to share their activity with their friends.
See our Page Fundraiser to tackle racism in the lead up to / on January 26th.
How donations work
The donations are not directly made to the charity. This is where the partnership with PayPal comes in. Instead, the donations go to the
PayPal Giving Fund Australia. It is this DGR Type 2 charity which will issue the supporter with a tax deductible receipt. The total raised for each charity is transferred to them as a disbursement of funds from PayPal’s charity once a month.
Neither Facebook nor PayPal are charging any fees for this service. Instead, Facebook will make money from people paying for advertising to promote their fundraising, while the PayPal charity will make money (which it will use to offset its costs) through the interest it makes while it holds on to donations for up to a month.
Individual donors can choose to share their details with the charity they are supporting when they make their donation on Facebook, or they can donate anonymous. Having PayPal in the middle means a donor can remain anonymous to the charity and still get a tax deductible receipt. Given there are no fees deducted, this system is useful for both small and large donations.
Comments and support
You can leave a comment about this article in this Facebook discussion. You can also donate to our January 26 campaign or make a generation donation to support our work.