The Charities Aid Foundation has announced that it has now raised over £50m for small and medium charities through its online fundraising platform CAF Donate, since its launch in 2014.

In a statement released yesterday, CAF said its online donation processing platform has now raised £51.4m in donations for the some 2,300 charities which have signed up to use the platform since it first launched in July 2014.

A spokeswoman for the Charities Aid Foundation said that the average, one-off donation made with a card on its CAF Donate platform is £100, more than six times the average donation made in 2014.

Direct debit payments have helped drive this growth, with over 1.4 million of these types of payments having driven £14.5m worth of regular giving year per year, according to new figures released by CAF.

CAF said there has been more than 180,000 one-off donations made via card, PayPal and CAF Account and CAF Charity Vouchers & Cards, 130,000 of which were made by card and PayPal.  

In an update for the 12-month anniversary of the launch last year, CAF said its digital fundraising platform had raised £34.8m for around 2,000 registered charities.

Julie Simpson, product manager for charities at CAF, said: “It is fantastic to see that so many charities are benefiting from the service which has enabled them to accept tens of millions in donations which they might otherwise have missed out on.

“Large charities are often well equipped to innovate and have had the resources to keep up with the steady rise in online donations as well as managing postal and telephone donations.”