Delivering digital as a force for good comes in many different guises at Caution Your Blast Ltd (CYB): it is in our delivery of transformational services within government; our push to maintain ethics and user-centred design principles when leveraging AI tools; and it is in our delivery of tech for good products.

One of CYB’s most impactful products is Give A Little. 

We started Give A Little in 2019, as we recognised that the cost of entry for charities to adopt cashless points of donation was just far too high. We made it our mission to provide the most easy-to-use, flexible and affordable way for charities to access cashless giving.

Raising cash donations is simple and cheap, all you really need is a bucket.  Accepting card payments is entirely different. Charities need to navigate the confusing world of payment processors and to invest in hardware upfront; their accounting teams need to understand how to reconcile these new payments. So CYB launched Give A Little to make moving to cashless fundraising easier for charities.

Since its inception Give A Little has become one of the leading point of donation software platform for contactless, Chip+PIN and online donations by:

• helping over 8,000 charities transition to cashless fundraising, and

• facilitating over £36 million of donations to those charities

Adopting new ways of working

As a disruptor in the charity fundraising space, Give A Little provides the perfect environment for the wider CYB team to experiment with new methodologies and innovative technologies that can help drive down costs to charities, or provide a better user experience to donors.

For example, from the beginning Give A Little has adopted a product-led growth strategy. Product-led growth focuses on the user experience as the core driver of adoption, rather than marketing or sales teams. Give A Little couples this with a freemium, non fixed term contract business model, which allows users to explore the product without upfront investment or commitment.  

Lean methods 

Similarly, the Give A Little team embraced a lean development methodology during the early stages of growing the product.  

Most people today are comfortable with the agile principles; being flexible, adaptable, and responsive to change through an iterative design and build approach. Lean adopts the same iterative approach, but utilises this to create a system that emphasises value delivery whilst minimising waste.  

Lean development is hard. It requires constant and vigorous prioritisation, focusing entirely on the utility of an experience versus providing the perfect experience. But the benefits are great. If you can succeed in delivering value, users will stick to your product.  

For Give A Little, this means understanding at an intimate level the value that we can create through our software versus value that can be leveraged more quickly and at a far lower cost by partnering with someone else. This can be seen across the Give A Little partner ecosystem. We have partnered with hardware providers, payment processors and CRMs who are better placed to deliver value in their respective disciplines, and who have already invested heavily in doing so. This means that we can focus all of our efforts on making the point of donation experience the best on the market.

This approach maximises value delivery, whilst spreading the work, risk and most importantly, cost across the community - thus avoiding duplication of work, and allowing us to pass the benefit on to our end users.

The result of working in new ways

By experimenting with these innovative models, Give A Little has grown a strong community of customers ranging from household names such as Cancer Research UK, the Church of England and London Zoo to small charities and non profits such as Community Interest Companies and Community Amateur Sports Clubs. These charities and non profits have chosen to use our products because they deem them to be the best in meeting their needs, whilst drastically reducing the cost of growth and reducing churn. This means that we can put more resources into reducing the cost to customers and further improving the product, which is key to delivering our mission. 

Give A Little also acts as an active space where the wider CYB consultancy teams can gain hands-on experience trying out new ways of working. Give A Little has provided a valuable training ground for CYB to understand what works well - and what doesn’t - when delivering transformational software, unpicking complex data, informing design through research, and implementing cutting edge technologies such as AI. This keeps the Give A Little product sharp, as we are always at the bleeding edge of innovation. But it also benefits the CYB consultancy teams who can take these valuable learnings into the consulting practice.  

As always, the proof is in the data. The value of donations being made through the Give A Little platform has grown 50% from last year, and we expect to reach £40 million in total donations by August 2024. Similarly, revenue from charities subscribing to the platform has increased by 186% since last year, whilst driving down the cost to charities.  

CYB will strive to continue pushing innovation through tech for good products such as Give A Little - in doing so, demonstrating the positive impact that software and technology can have on the world, and how solid user-centred design principles can make this a reality.  

For more information on Give A Little and how the platform is helping thousands of charities collect cashless donations, please visit https://givealittle.co/