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goDonate, a UK SaaS platform built to simplify online charitable giving, says that integrating specialist address verification technology has had a measurable impact on fundraising outcomes - helping it achieve conversion rates of 30 to 60 percent, compared to a sector average of around 11% on mobile and 12% on desktop.
While the typical charity sees roughly one in ten visitors who click a donate button actually complete a donation, goDonate's users are converting significantly more.
Founder and CEO Vicky Reeves attributes a meaningful share of that to address accuracy - and to what happens when you get it wrong:
There's a mis-conception that if someone wants to donate, they'll go through the effort no matter how bad the experience is - but that's not true. If the process is painful, people drop off. When someone decides to give, they're in that moment of emotion. If you make it easy, they'll complete the donation; if you don't, you lose them.
Built for the moment of giving
Reeves founded goDonate after eight years as a Trustee at the British Museum, where she worked on maximizing digital fundraising. The platform was designed from the outset to make the donation experience seamless - enabling one-click payments via Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, integrating directly into charity websites, and supporting both one-off and recurring giving. Current users include Action Against Hunger, the NSPCC, Marie Curie, Help for Heroes, and Blood Cancer UK.
Six years ago, just before the pandemic, Reeves found the address infrastructure she was looking for in Loqate - a tool that delivers real-time type-ahead address autocomplete, data cleaning, and geocoding across global markets. Originally a San Mateo firm, Loqate was acquired in 2015 by UK-based identity data intelligence company GBGroup, and now operates as GBG Loqate.
The integration works by validating addresses at the point of entry, before any errors reach a charity's back-office systems - reducing rejected claims and the admin burden that follows.
The Gift Aid problem
Accurate addresses are not just a user experience concern. In the UK, they are directly tied to Gift Aid - the government scheme that allows registered charities to reclaim basic rate tax on donations from UK taxpayers, effectively boosting the value of every eligible pound donated by 25% at no cost to the donor. A £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.
The catch is that Gift Aid claims require verified proof that the donor is a legitimate UK taxpayer. And the gap between what's available and what's actually claimed is significant. According to the Charities Aid Foundation, £560 million in eligible Gift Aid goes unclaimed annually. The sector itself reports that 54 percent of non-profits cite incomplete or inaccurate donor data as a major obstacle to effective fundraising.
The problem compounds over time. Consumer data decays at around 20% per year as people move or pass away - business data faster still, at 30 to 40%. Without regular maintenance, donor databases quietly become unreliable.
For charities processing Gift Aid manually, each claim takes between five and ten minutes. At scale, across thousands of donations, that's weeks of staff time - and if claims are rejected due to missing or invalid address fields, the admin load grows further and the income is simply lost.
Reeves says goDonate's use of Loqate can be directly mapped to its 16% year-on-year growth between 2024 and 2025, and characterizes it as a genuinely strategic partnership:
The technology is really easy for us to integrate and really easy to use - it's all about APIs. We also get strong account management despite them being a large global supplier, and the global reach matters too, because while we're predominantly UK-focused, we do work with international non-profits.
Cleaning up legacy data
Reeves sees the next phase of the partnership expanding beyond the donation journey itself. Many charities hold years of legacy donor data - collected through other channels, in various states of accuracy - that sits outside goDonate's cleaned pipeline.
She says:
People come through us to make a donation, but they also come into the charity through other routes, and that data isn't always clean. There's an opportunity for us to work with GBG Loqate and say to charities: the data coming through us is verified, but you've got all this historical donor data sitting there. Maybe there's a role for us both to help clean that up and make it better.