JustGiving pays £25.8m dividend to American owner

The charity platform made the payment to the Nasdaq-listed Blackbaud after revenues rose by 9.7 per cent to £64.5m

Helen Cahill

Monday September 29 2025, 7.53pm BST, The Times

The company behind the JustGiving charity and fundraising platform has paid £25.8 million to its Nasdaq-listed American parent.

Giving.com paid the dividend to Blackbaud, the software company that has owned the UK site since 2017.

JustGiving’s turnover comes from donations, credit card processing fees, charity subscriptions, and fees for processing gift aid, and its profits have been growing since the website introduced voluntary tipping for its service at a rate of 15 per cent in 2019. Donors see the tip added to their final payment on the website unless they opt out.

Charities and organisations using the platform pay a fee under the “growth plan” subscription of £15 per month if they raise less than £15,000 a year, while larger charities pay a subscription of £39 a month. Charities are able to sign up for free for a reduced level of service.

The charity platform saw its revenues rise by 9.7 per cent, from £58.8 million to £64.5 million, for the year ended December 31, 2024, with profit before tax increasing by 11.6 per cent to £35.2 million from £31.1 million, according to accounts filed at Companies House. The company paid a dividend of £25.8 million, having delivered a payout of £24.5 million in 2023.

In its strategic report the company cited “unfavourable media coverage” as a potential risk to its business, warning that negative publicity for its service fees “could have an adverse effect on the size, engagement and loyalty” of its customer base, which may in turn “result in decreased revenue” and may “adversely affect out business and financial results”.

The report said: “Our online social giving platforms receive a high degree of media coverage for particularly news-worthy or controversial fundraising campaigns, as well as for our voluntary contribution business model.

Business newsletter

The business editor’s exclusive analysis of all the latest financial and economic news. Sign up with one click

“Although our terms of service provide express limitations on the platforms’ user-initiated fundraising campaigns, and reserve our right to remove content that violates our terms of service, it may not always be possible to remove such content prior to it receiving attention in the media.”

JustGiving was founded in 2000 by Dame Zarine Kharas, 74, a lawyer, and Anne-Marie Huby, 58, a charity director, and it was bought by Blackbaud for £95 million. The site now hosts more than 25,700 charities, organisations and schools, including Unicef, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation. The group has more than 22 million users across 160 countries and claims to have raised £6 billion. JustGiving has paid out more than £100 million in dividends since it was purchased by Blackbaud in 2017.

Blackbaud is a provider of cloud computing and software for fundraising and the financial management of non-profit organisations, and it generates annual revenues of more than $1 billion. The company’s market valuation stands at around $3.1 billion.

Mike Gianoni, Blackbaud’s chief executive, received total remuneration of about $10.2 million in the group’s most recent financial year. Blackbaud faced criticism when it started charging fees, and for taking a cut of 5 per cent from donations in 2017, including from funds for the families of victims of the Manchester Arena terror attack.

Blackbaud did not respond to a request for comment. JustGiving declined to comment.

Continue to this The Times article CLICK HERE