The company which created Bermuda?s largest online event ticketing service has unveiled a new donor portal for charitable giving.

Donations.bm is designed to increase the effectiveness of collecting pledges, and achieving charitable campaign targets whether charities are involved in fundraising drives, capital campaigns, telethons, walkathons or one-off events. It uses the same secure online payment gateway to accept donations over the Internet as the gateway boxoffice.bm uses to accept online payments for tickets.

Boxoffice.bm Ltd. co-founder Ben Fairn came up with the idea of expanding the company?s online payment system into the charitable realm after recognising a local need. The site operates on the premise that it is most cost effective to facilitate online donations by using electronic fund transfer and electronic communication methods. It is similar to justgiving.com in the UK, however donations.bm is designed exclusively for Bermuda?s registered charities.

?There is need for it,? said Mr. Fairn. ?This is a Bermuda solution to online giving and it is really meant to make it easy for people who want to donate to do it online. If you do your banking online why not donate online?? he said.

Donors, whether they live in Bermuda or elsewhere, can make a single lump sum donation by clicking on the link to the charity of their choice. There is also an option for donors to have small sums deducted from their accounts and put into the charity?s account on a monthly basis.

Besides appealing to the bigger charities, Mr. Fairn expects the site will appeal to people who embark on individual efforts for charity. For instance, a person who bikes around the world to raise money for a particular cause need only send out an e-mail directing potential donors to the site.

Only four charities ? Kathmandu Kids Club, Bermuda Society of the Arts, the ISIS Foundation and Restorers of Hope ? are listed on the portal so far, but with its official launch yesterday the partners expect many more registrants in the near future.

It is free for charities to market their efforts on the site, but donations.bm charges a 7.5 percent fee on any donation. Most of that fee goes to bank fees as well as maintenance of the site and the systems required for its operation.

By going onboard through a single portal, Mr. Watts said charities will be able to keep their costs down.

?Payment processing is quite expensive so this is spreading the cost over many people so each charity does not have to spend thousands of dollars on infrastructure to do what donations.bm is doing,? he said adding that the portal can also reach a much larger group and taken in donations much faster than if donors were to write a cheque and put it in the mail.

The donations.bm site utilises the same security and firewalls that were developed for the boxoffice.bm site. That site has seen more than one million secure ticket sales in its two years of operations due largely to the fact it is is SSL secured with the certificate issued by QuoVadis.