The fundraising platform, with the strategy in-house
The generosity is already in the room.
We design the whole evening to release it: a live pledge front and centre, an auction built from lots you keep 100% of, and a fundraising platform that is free when Kevin Durham hosts the night.
No auction lots to sell you. No percentage of what you raise. No added payment charges. The only money we take is the fee for Kevin’s hire.
Same guest. Same willingness. Same evening. The only thing that changes is how the money is taken. On a bought-in lot the charity keeps only what is bid above the reserve, which is very often nothing at all. That is why we do not have a catalogue of lots to sell you. We help you secure donated ones, so your charity keeps 100% of what they raise, and we put the live pledge at the centre of the night, so every guest has a way to give.
One engagement, one accountable person
Designed months out. Delivered on the night.
A charity usually assembles its evening from five or six suppliers, and not one of them is answerable for what it raises. We design the whole night, so somebody finally is.
Fundraising strategy
The work starts months before the night, with your team. The target, the giving mix, the running order, and the donated lots that earn their place. Nothing bought in, nothing pushed.
The strategy behind the night →
Live fundraising
The live pledge, the auction and the games, run by the person who designed them. One voice carrying the room from the welcome to the close.
Pledge, auction & games →
The platform
Free when Kevin hosts. Bidding, pledges, tickets, Gift Aid and the gala screen, with guest payments landing straight in your own account and nothing added by us.
See the platform →The platform, free when Kevin hosts
Built to capture gifts, not just process bids.
Most event software is built to sell things. Ours was built around a belief, so the mechanisms other platforms treat as extras are the ones it was designed around first: pledges, Gift Aid, card-on-file and regular giving.
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No added payment charges. Ever.
You plug in your own Stripe keys, so every payment lands directly in the charity’s account at Stripe’s standard rate. We never hold your donors’ money, and we add nothing on top.
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It works when the venue wifi doesn’t.
An on-site event server and offline-resilient bidding keep the room giving when the signal drops. The horror story every fundraiser has, solved.
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Every event becomes its own app.
Guests add your event to their home screen. One tap and a thumbprint to pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay. No card typing in a dark room after three glasses of wine.
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The whole night lives in one place.
Ticketing with per-guest QR check-in, the table plan, silent and live bidding, raffles, pledges, Gift Aid capture and reporting. No stitching five systems together at midnight.
Against the platforms you have heard of
Everything Emma Live and Givergy do. None of the lots, and none of the fee.
The functionality is the same. The difference is what happens to the money, and whether anybody is trying to sell you a lot.
| What you are judging | Generosity WorksPlatform and in-house strategy | A tip-funded platformEmma Live, Givergy and the like, on their published pages |
|---|---|---|
| Silent, live and sealed-bid auctionsMobile bidding, outbid alerts, anti-snipe, bids from the floor | ✓Yes | ✓Yes |
| Live pledge and fund-a-needTiers on the big screen, Pay What You Can, the running total | ✓YesDesigned into the running order, not bolted on | ✓Yes |
| Ticketing, named guests, QR check-in, table plan | ✓Yes | ✓Yes |
| Gala screen, leaderboard, live total | ✓Yes | ✓Yes |
| Gift Aid captured at the point of givingDeclaration, the HMRC split on auction lots, the claim file | ✓Yes | ~VariesCheck how the declaration is taken |
| Keeps taking bids when the venue wifi fails | ✓YesAn on-site event server and offline-resilient bidding | ×Not published |
| Auction lots supplied to you | ×NeverWe have none. Yours are donated, and 100% of what they raise is yours | ~Sometimes offeredConsignment lots carry a reserve that covers the supplier’s cost first |
| Fee on what you raise | ✓NoneNo tip, no percentage, no per-guest fee | ~A donor tip or a percentageOn their published pricing; the tip is asked of your guests at checkout |
| Payment charges added by the platform | ✓NoneYour own Stripe account, Stripe’s standard rate only | ~VariesAsk whose merchant account the money lands in |
| Cost of the platform when the auctioneer is booked | ✓FreeIncluded when Kevin Durham hosts the night. Book him at thecharityauctioneer.uk | ~Not applicableThe auctioneer is a separate supplier |
Benchmarked against the published feature lists and pricing pages of Emma Live and Givergy in October 2026. Their features and prices are theirs to change, so check their sites for the current position. The point is not that they are bad software. It is that the same functionality is available with no lots to sell you and nothing taken from what you raise.
Try your own number
What a platform fee would cost you.
Tip-funded platforms are marketed as free to the charity. The money still comes out of the room, either as a tip your guests are asked for at checkout or as a percentage of what they give. Move the slider to the figure your night is aiming for.
A tip is paid by your guests on top of their gift; a percentage is taken out of it. Either way it is money the room meant for your cause. We take neither, and we add no payment charges of our own. The only money we take is the fee for Kevin’s hire, agreed up front, and it does not move with the total.
Money in the room
Cash handed over in a dark room is the easiest money to lose.
Bids, tickets and pledges are paid online, straight into your own Stripe account. The raffle, the wine wall and the guest who wants to settle at the desk are different: that money is handed over in person, and if it is cash it is counted twice, carried home in an envelope and banked on Tuesday. So the platform works with four card readers, and every one of them can use the phone already in your pocket as the terminal.
Phone as reader
WooPayments
The tightest fit. Every payment lands as a real order in the platform, so the desk and the website produce one total.
Phone as reader
Square
The widest choice of hardware, from a pocket reader to a full register, with stock synced both ways.
Phone as reader
Zettle by PayPal
For a charity that already banks through PayPal. Catalogue and stock synced to the Zettle app.
Phone as reader
SumUp
The lowest rate and the simplest reader for a raffle table. Reconciled by hand afterwards.
Real nights, real numbers
Briefed for £14,000.
The night raised £57,600.
The Jigsaw Trust: the pledge out-raised the auction.
Kevin was briefed to aim for £14,000 from the live auction. The auction alone raised £27,000, then a live pledge, run immediately afterwards while paddles were still in hands, brought in £30,600 more. Paintings by children from the Jigsaw School raised another £4,000.
There was not one bought-in consignment lot in the room.
That is not luck. That is the mix.
A UK health charity’s silent auction was run by an outside company. Ten pence in the pound reached the cause.
Same room, same wallets. A live pledge designed into the evening, given as gifts instead of spent as purchases, so the charity kept every penny.
“Without your input and amazing hosting we definitely wouldn’t have achieved the total. We absolutely smashed our £40k target.”
“He was engaging and helped us to raise over £20K for our cause through our live and silent auction. He introduced games throughout the night which our guests loved.”
Also: three times the previous year’s total for the Manchester Airport Group, under Concorde · over €1 million in a single evening for the Sheba Medical Center in Monte Carlo · a record night, and an invitation back, for Temwa.
and still on the mic
Founder, auctioneer and host
The strategy leads. The auctioneering proves it.
Generosity Works was founded by Kevin Durham, who spent twenty years reading rooms, on stage and on television, before he ever wrote a fundraising plan.
He has raised over £10 million for charitable causes across the UK, Europe and the US, and he built the Generosity Works platform himself, every mechanism in it designed to capture generosity as a gift rather than a purchase. Book him for the night at thecharityauctioneer.uk and the platform comes with him.
Kevin Durham
No obligation, and never a percentage of what you raise
Let’s talk about your number.
Thirty minutes about your event, your room and your target, and an honest view of what the night could raise. Including, if it comes to it, an honest view that you don’t need us.
Or call 07596 851647 · hello@generosityworks.co.uk · Hire Kevin: thecharityauctioneer.uk