Hundreds of charities may have lost the ability to accept online donations after web-based donation service Charity Choice upgraded its website and changed the links from charities' own sites.
Charity Choice, which is owned by publishing giant Wilmington, provides services including an online basic donation facility to more than 4,200 charities across the UK.
But an upgrade to its services earlier this month caused the links from some charities’ websites to the Charity Choice site to break. It appears that only charities that have linked directly to the donation facility page have lost the ability to take donations.
A tweet from literary charity the Arthur Ransome Trust on 9 January suggests that the service has been down for at least a week.
When prospective donors click on the ‘Donate Now’ button on a charity’s website, they are met with a page that states: “Sorry, we can’t find what you’re looking for. Oops! This link appears to be broken. Please use your browser to go back to your previous page or click the Charity Choice logo to go back to the homepage.”
None of the eight charities contacted by civilsociety.co.uk was aware that the link from their site was broken.
Charity Choice upgrade
Gemma Dudley, a spokeswoman for Charity Choice, said the problem had arisen as a result of its recent relaunch to introduce new products and services including new donations functionality.
She said the company had sent a series of emails to all customers over the past year to notify them of the forthcoming changes and invite them to opt in to the new service. About 800 have so far done so.
Those that haven’t yet opted in won’t have been given the link addresses to the pages on the new Charity Choice website and that will have caused the broken links.
Dudley said it was conceivable that a number of the customer email addresses on the Charity Choice database were now out-of-date and so some of the charities hadn’t yet received any information about the upgrade.
Others that had opted in probably haven't yet changed the link URL to the new Charity Choice page, and should ensure they do so, she said.
Charity Choice added: “We’d like to apologise to anyone who has experienced any difficulties connected with the changeover. For more help email: [email protected]”.
Other charities affected by the broken links include the Foundation for Liver Research; Spinnaker Trust; Brent Homeless and Mind in Taunton and West Somerset.
