Fundraisers and donors have criticised Virgin Money Giving after its website went down repeatedly when people logged on to make donations during the London Marathon.
The website was down for large chunks of yesterday and Virgin Money Giving has now said it will boost all donations by 10 per cent to apologise for the issues.
Fundraisers on Twitter described the service as "pretty poor", "appalling" and "shambolic".
Apology
In a statement released on Twitter yesterday afternoon, Jo Barnett, executive director of Virgin Money Giving, apologised for the malfunction on the company’s website which made it impossible for supporters to make donations for much of the morning.
The digital giving platform, which is also the chief commercial partner of the London Marathon, also announced that it would be “boosting all donations made to charity through Virgin Money Giving on 23 April and 24 April by 10 per cent”.
Barnett said: “Virgin Money Giving would like to congratulate everyone that took part in the Virgin Money London Marathon today. It was another fantastic celebration of all that is good about London and the UK.
“Unfortunately Virgin Money Giving was not available for part of the morning and to say sorry we will be boosting all donations made by the charity through Virgin Money Giving on 23 April and 24 April by 10 per cent.
“We hope that this will be well received by all the charities that our fundraisers support”.
As of this morning, Virgin Money Giving have said that their website is still "very busy" and has again struggled to process donations. The giving platform's official Twitter page has sent replies to 35 donors and charities telling them to "keep trying" to make donations.
Website crash 'result of high demand'
A spokesman for Virgin Money Giving told Civil Society News that yesterday's website issues came "as a result of high demand", but said that every supporter who had made a subsequent attempt at a donation "had been able to do so".
"As a result of high demand some people may have had to try more than once [to donate] but our analysis shows that everyone that has come back to make a donation has been able to do so," he said.
The spokesman said that Virgin Money Giving did not have a figure as to how many fundraising pages would have been affected by yesterday’s website malfunction. He also said that the organisation did not yet have an initial fundraising total for yesterday's event.
He did not confirm whether or not Virgin Money Giving would extend its 10 per cent donations boost if problems persisted with its website today.
In Fundraising Magazine
Fundraising pages on Virgin Money Giving raised over £23m on the day of last year’s London Marathon, a 12 per cent increase on the amount raised in 2015.
The total amount raised from the 2016 London Marathon was £59.4m.
A spokesman for JustGiving said the digital giving platform would publish initial fundraising figure's from yesterday's marathon at some point later today.
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