The journey to Tap for Change

How an initiative to help schoolchildren in Africa led to our creating a one stop-shop for contactless charity donations

‘Lunchbox‘ donations box on the counter at a London coffee shop, using Tap for Change contactless technology

We began our journey into the world of contactless charity donations two years ago with the creation of Lunchbox.

Despite the fact that 80% of people in the UK already give to charity on a regular basis, card payments have now overtaken cash payments in the UK, contributing to an overall decline in spontaneous charitable giving.

The idea was simple: make it easy for someone who’s buying their lunch to do the same thing for someone can’t, with one simple tap of a contactless card.

The concept behind Lunchbox was inspired by the Italian tradition of ‘caffè sospeso’ or ‘suspended coffee’, whereby a person pays for two coffees but only takes one — the second coffee being for someone else who is unable to pay their own.

To us, it seemed like a no-brainer and that all we’d have to do would be to work with an existing contactless collections solution for charities. But there were none, and we had to assemble our own from the ground up. Once we did this, many charities got in touch with us, wondering why no one else had done this yet either.

Beyond the prohibitive cost, voluminous paperwork and complex jargon surrounding contactless donations, there simply wasn’t a single organisation leading the way in making all of this easier and more accessible to charities.

Tap for Change is here to change the way charities take donations

After months of hard work with LibertyPay, our incredible payments partner, we are now able to offer one-stop-shop contactless solution for charities.

Large or small, Tap for Change gives charities a single location for designing, ordering and setting up contactless donation boxes.

Contactless donations are clearly the future of charitable fundraising, so we’ve made it our mission to bring contactless donations fully into the mainstream for charitable organisations and the general public.

We are now having many conversations with charities about helping them to move from collecting coins in a bucket to contactless card donations, and want to talk to many more – so we can help to bring every charity into the future of collections.