A good donation app lets a supporter find your cause, give in a few taps, and trust what happens to their money. For a UK charity, that means quick one-off and recurring giving, a built-in Gift Aid declaration, secure payments, accessible design and reporting that feeds your CRM. Everything else is a bonus that depends on how you fundraise.
This guide sets out the features in the order a supporter meets them, then the ones your team needs behind the scenes. It is written for charities, nonprofits and the agencies that work with them who are deciding what to put in a brief for a custom app.
TL;DR
- Speed and clarity come first: the fewer steps between opening the app and a confirmed gift, the better.
- Support one-off, recurring and custom amounts, with preset tiers to guide the choice.
- Build Gift Aid into the journey, because a valid declaration needs specific information and records must be kept.
- Treat payment security, data protection and accessibility as launch requirements, not later upgrades.
- Choose extras such as QR codes, peer-to-peer pages and event ticketing according to how your charity actually raises money.
Table of Contents
- The core features every donation app needs
- One-off, recurring and custom-amount giving
- Gift Aid: the UK feature that pays for itself
- Payment security, privacy and accessibility
- Features that help supporters find a cause and share it
- QR codes, in-person giving, events and peer-to-peer
- Back-office features: reporting, receipts and CRM syncing
- Which features to build first
- Our perspective
- Plan your donation app with Pocket App
- FAQ
- Sources
The core features every donation app needs
Start with the basics. The Chartered... sorry, the sector's own guidance is plain on this: charities should consider how quickly and easily donors can give, including the platform's usability, according to a practical guide to online giving from CFG. That guide dates from 2014, but the principle has only become more important on a phone screen.
In practice, a trustworthy donation app needs:
- A short donation path. Amount, payment method, confirmation. Every extra field costs you gifts.
- Clear amounts. Preset tiers with a custom option, each tied to a plain description of what the gift does where you can say so honestly.
- Familiar payment methods. Cards and digital wallets at a minimum, with bank transfer where it suits your donors.
- Instant confirmation. An on-screen thank you and an emailed receipt.
- Visible trust signals. Your charity name, registration details, a privacy notice and an explanation of how fees work.
- A way to come back. Saved details, account sign-in or a wallet payment so a second gift takes seconds.
We cover the design side of this in more depth in our piece on essential user experience tips for charity apps, and our guide to enhancing UX for charities goes further on layout and flow.
One-off, recurring and custom-amount giving
Most supporters give once, but regular gifts are what make a charity's income predictable. Your app should handle both without making the donor think hard.
Form-building guidance describes the standard pattern: choice fields for preset amounts, with a conditional field that appears when a donor wants to enter their own figure. The same guidance says donors should be able to choose one-time or recurring giving and pick a frequency. That combination gives you flexibility without clutter.
Behind the screen, recurring giving needs more than a toggle. A payments guide for nonprofits says donors should be able to switch between one-time and recurring gifts, while the platform automates billing schedules, payment retries and card update prompts. Those last three are easy to overlook in a brief, yet they decide how many monthly donors you keep when a card expires.
A few practical choices worth making early:
- Default view. Decide whether the app opens on one-off or monthly giving, and test it.
- Three or four preset tiers. Enough to guide, not so many that the screen feels like a menu.
- Easy changes. Let regular donors pause, raise or cancel from inside the app, so they are not forced to email you.
- Reminders before card expiry. Prompts that ask the donor to update details are kinder than a failed payment.
Gift Aid: the UK feature that pays for itself
If your charity is eligible, Gift Aid support is not optional in a UK donation app. It is the difference between a gift and a gift plus a tax claim.
HMRC's guidance confirms that platforms can offer an online Gift Aid declaration with a tick box, and that charities must keep declaration records for six years from the end of the accounting period they relate to. The same page sets out what a valid declaration must contain:
- the name of the charity or community amateur sports club;
- the donor's full name and home address;
- whether it covers past, present and future donations, or a single donation;
- the donor's wish for Gift Aid to apply;
- an explanation of the donor's UK tax responsibility.
That list is effectively your specification. The app should collect each item, store it against the donor record with a date, and make it retrievable years later. A tick box with no address field, for example, does not give you a usable declaration.
The claim side matters too. HMRC says charities can claim on up to 1,000 Gift Aid donations at a time using a schedule spreadsheet, and that those regularly claiming on more than 1,000 donors could use their own Gift Aid database. If your donations arrive through an app, ask for an export or integration that produces claim-ready data, so nobody retypes addresses.
Payment security, privacy and accessibility
Donors hand over card details and personal data. They need to be able to trust the app before they ever notice it.
The Fundraising Regulator's guidance on cashless donations says UK donation apps should meet applicable PCI DSS standards for card processing, use strong customer authentication where legally required, follow data-protection legislation and consider the accessibility impacts of cashless giving. In a brief, that translates into:
- card processing through a PCI DSS compliant provider, so card numbers never sit in your own systems;
- support for multiple methods, including digital wallets and bank transfers;
- UK GDPR-compliant consent, clear privacy information and sensible data retention;
- a documented process for authentication when a bank asks for it.
Be clear about where the money goes
If your app lets supporters raise money for you through their own pages, transparency rules apply. The Regulator says that where money does not go straight to a charitable institution's bank account, platforms must make clear before the donation that donors give at their own risk. Its code also expects platforms to make information about fees and how they are calculated clear and easy to find. Put both in plain words on the donation screen, not buried in terms.
Accessibility is part of giving
The same cashless-donations guidance asks charities to evaluate the impact on donor accessibility and on donors in vulnerable circumstances before accepting cashless gifts. For an app, that means:
- text that scales and keeps its contrast;
- full compatibility with screen readers and voice control;
- touch targets large enough for people with limited dexterity;
- error messages that explain what to fix, in words, not just red outlines.
One accessibility guide for nonprofits recommends a baseline WCAG 2.2 scan, continuous automated monitoring of preview builds and production, and manual audits by testers with disabilities at least annually. Automated checks catch a share of the problems, and real users catch the rest. Our articles on designing accessible mobile apps and inclusive-by-design strategies show how we approach it from the first wireframe.
Features that help supporters find a cause and share it
Giving is easier when the supporter understands what they are backing. Strong donation apps help people discover causes, read the story behind a campaign and pass it on.
Look at how established fundraising pages work. Cancer Research UK's Giving Pages let fundraisers share their story, photos, target and progress, connect social and fitness accounts, and form teams. The pattern is consistent across the sector: a story, an image, a target and visible progress.
For your own app, that suggests:
- Search and browse by cause or location, if you represent several projects or fund several beneficiaries.
- Campaign pages with a headline, a short story, photos or video and a live progress bar towards the target.
- Updates that let supporters see what their gift achieved.
- One-tap sharing by message, social media, email or direct link, so supporters can spread a campaign without leaving the app.
Email still does heavy lifting alongside the app. A Charity Digital case study on International Justice Mission UK reported that email generated 34% of new online donations and 25% of donation value in the period cited, with survivor stories and a unified donation experience part of the approach. The lesson for an app is to connect it to your email and push-notification plans from the start, instead of treating it as a separate channel. Our guide to donor engagement strategies with mobile apps and our wider look at the role of apps in donor engagement cover this in detail.
QR codes, in-person giving, events and peer-to-peer
These are the features people argue about most, because their value depends on how your charity raises money. Choose them by use, not by checklist.
QR codes
A QR code is a bridge from the physical world to your app or donation form. Charity Digital notes that QR codes can link donors straight to donation forms, petitions, campaign information, stories or FAQs, from social media, email, direct mail, collection buckets, charity-shop windows and event materials. They suit you if you have shops, street collections, posters or events. They matter less if your supporters are mostly online already.
In-person and volunteer collections
If volunteers collect in the community, the app needs to work for them as well as donors. Charity Digital describes a joined-up supporter-led model in which in-person collection, campaign controls, Gift Aid declarations, receipts, tracking and fallback QR-code or email links work together for volunteers and charities. The fallback matters: if a card payment fails or a phone has no signal, a link sent by email lets the donor finish later.
Peer-to-peer fundraising
If your income relies on challenge events, memorial funds or supporters fundraising for you, you need individual and team pages, easy registration, activity tracking and customisable fundraiser pages. Those are the participation features that peer-to-peer fundraising guidance says supporters expect.
Event ticketing
Ticketing earns its place only if you run regular events such as galas, runs or quizzes. Otherwise, link out to a ticketing service and keep your app focused on giving.
Back-office features: reporting, receipts and CRM syncing
What your team sees matters as much as what donors see. A payments guide for nonprofits says fundraising tools should include real-time analytics for donation volume and conversion, CRM syncing without manual data entry, and automatic email receipts.
The CFG guide adds a practical test: check that the platform provides reports in compatible formats such as Excel, CSV or PDF, available on demand or on a schedule. If your finance team cannot reconcile the figures without a rebuild, the feature does not work.
CRM integration is where small teams save the most time. When a gift, a Gift Aid declaration and a communication preference land in the supporter record automatically, nobody rekeys data and nobody mails someone who opted out. If you are weighing up systems, a guide to CRM systems for nonprofits is a useful way to compare what you might connect the app to. We go through the technical side in our practical guide to nonprofit CRM integration for UK charities.
A dashboard should answer a short list of questions:
- How much came in this week, by campaign and by channel?
- How many donors started the form and how many finished?
- What share of gifts are recurring, and how many failed?
- How many gifts carry a Gift Aid declaration?
Which features to build first
You do not need everything at launch. A sensible order protects your budget and your donors.
| Priority | Feature | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | Fast one-off giving with preset and custom amounts | The core job of the app |
| Launch | Recurring giving with automated retries and card prompts | Protects regular income |
| Launch | Gift Aid declaration and record keeping | Required data for claims, kept for six years |
| Launch | Secure payments, data protection, accessibility | Compliance and trust |
| Launch | Receipts and basic reporting | Donors and finance both need them |
| Next | CRM syncing and scheduled exports | Removes manual entry as volume grows |
| Next | Campaign pages and sharing | Helps supporters spread the word |
| Later | QR codes, volunteer collections, peer-to-peer, ticketing | Add according to how you fundraise |
If you want a fuller review list, our fundraising app checklist for nonprofits and mobile fundraising guide take this further.
Our perspective
Most donation apps we are asked to review fail in the same place. The features exist, but they were chosen from a list instead of from the charity's own fundraising. A charity with a hundred shop windows needs QR codes. A charity with a loyal monthly base needs recurring giving that survives an expired card. Neither needs everything.
That is why we start with discovery. Before any design, we work with the team on who gives, where they are when they decide, and what your staff need to see afterwards. With more than 300 projects behind us and a technology-agnostic approach, we recommend the platform that suits the job, whether that is native or cross platform, rather than the one we happen to prefer.
Our advice is to treat Gift Aid, security and accessibility as design inputs from day one. They are far cheaper to build in than to retrofit, and they are what donors feel as trust. Then keep improving after launch: analytics will show where people drop out, and small updates usually win more than big redesigns.
Paul
Plan your donation app with Pocket App
We design and build custom mobile apps for charities and other organisations, taking you from strategic discovery through design and development to deployment and ongoing support. If you already have an app and want a second opinion on its donation journey, our Mobile App Clinics are a good starting point.
See how our discover, design, develop and deploy process works, or get in touch with our team to talk through your fundraising goals. If you are comparing build approaches, our page on cross-platform app development explains how one codebase can serve both iPhone and Android donors.
FAQ
What are the most important features of a donation app?
A short donation path, one-off and recurring giving, preset and custom amounts, secure payments and instant receipts. In the UK, add a Gift Aid declaration and clear information about fees. Reporting and CRM syncing then keep the back office manageable.
Does a donation app need to support Gift Aid?
If your charity is eligible to claim, yes, it should. HMRC sets out what a valid declaration must include, and charities must keep the records for six years from the end of the relevant accounting period. Build the data capture and storage into the app from the start.
How do I make a donation app accessible?
Design for text scaling, contrast, screen readers and large touch targets, and test against WCAG 2.2. Run automated checks continuously and have people with disabilities test the app manually at least once a year. The Fundraising Regulator also asks charities to think about donors in vulnerable circumstances when taking cashless gifts.
Are QR codes worth adding to a donation app?
They are worth it when you meet supporters offline: shops, collections, events, posters or direct mail. A QR code takes them straight to a donation form or campaign page. If most of your giving happens online already, they can wait for a later release.
Sources
- A practical guide to selecting and using online giving platforms, CFG
- How to Build Online Donation Forms, Cognito Forms
- A Guide to Charitable Fundraising Platforms, Stripe
- Gift Aid declarations: claiming tax back on donations, GOV.UK
- Claim tax back on donations using Charities Online, GOV.UK
- Handling cashless donations, Fundraising Regulator
- Guidance for online fundraising platforms, Fundraising Regulator
- Online fundraising platforms, Fundraising Regulator
- For NGOs and nonprofits, Disability World
- Cancer Research UK Giving Pages
- Charity Spotlight: International Justice Mission UK, Charity Digital
- How charities can use QR codes for fundraising, Charity Digital
- The future of supporter-led fundraising, Charity Digital
- Peer-to-peer fundraising guidance