We have started the week with some very exciting news here at 18a HQ today, which is that we have won a Web Excellence Award for our “things to do” platform activibees.com.

activibees.com is the only place on the Internet where charities can sell tickets for fundraising events completely for free. Normally ticket platforms charge a fee or commission, and payment merchants charge for accepting money. However, thanks to OpenBanking, we built a way for charities to accept payments with no commissions, and we don’t charge anything for them to use our platform.

The project came about when I, Lisa, was tasked with finding the cheapest way for a charity I’m on the Committee for to sell tickets. I was sure there would be someway to do it for free! But after lots of investigations into the sales talk on PayPal and digging into special rates offered by other big platforms I was shocked to find it was actually really expensive! Platforms like EventBrite can charge 6%! Or lower percentage commissions can also come with a flat fee of 20p, which takes a big cut out of a £2 ticket.

Then I stumbled upon an OpenBanking organisation who offer free payment processing for charities – they truly are Wonderful. But whilst they allow people to make donations without the charities incurring fees, that system didn’t quite work for tickets, when you need to people pay a fixed amount, choose how many tickets they’re buying, and enter certain information like dietary requirements. So we worked with the lovely guys at Wonderful to hook their payment option into a ticket selling service we built on activibees.com.

Now, charities can sell tickets and collect delegate info completely for free, and the money goes straight into their bank account. We also hooked up Stripe for anyone who would rather pay by card, and we ask the customer if they’d mind paying a few pence more to cover the Stripe fees. We also – no matter who they’re paying – give them the option to donate more than the actual cost of the tickets if they’d like to (but it’s asked very nicely, it’s in no way rammed down their throat or included to trick anyone).

Award winning innovation

This is the 2nd award activibees has won, having won a Netty Award last year. The Web Excellence Awards is a leading international competition celebrating the best in web development and digital innovation. Established to recognise and promote excellence across the digital industry, the Web Excellence Awards provide a platform for innovation and creativity to be acknowledged globally. We’re delighted that the Web Excellence Awards recognised how great this feature is; despite being relatively new, it’s already saved raised thousands for charity events.

We’re also very proud to have won various other innovation awards over the years, such as in the 2019 AgriTech Innovation Den.

If you would like to speak to us about your next project, or you’d like to sell tickets for your charity’s events for free, please do get in touch.