You ask the questions

Head to the Discover tab and from here, there are four ways you can discover charities. They are: 

Search

Use the search bar to look for specific charities via name or charity number or cause, location and pretty much anything else relevant to what you’re looking for,

Browse by cause

Every charity falls under at least one cause such as animals or education. Tap the tiles in the app to discover charities that support the causes you care about.

Charities near you

If you’re looking to support charities near you, you can share your location and find charities within a certain distance. This ranges from up to five miles to 75 miles. 

Charities you might like

Once you’ve started browsing, we’ll present you with some charities we think you might like based on your favourites, portfolio and chosen causes.

You can discover charities near you by heading to the Discover tab and scrolling down to Charities near you. 

Share your location with Toucan and the app will find charities near you anywhere from up to five or 75 miles.

These are common terms used in the UK charity sector to group charities based on their annual income. We’ve used these terms to help you filter charities based on their size.

Currently, charities can only be listed in the app if they are registered with both the Charity Commission of England & Wales and Charities Trust.

Very soon we’ll be adding charities from the OSCR (Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) and Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. 

We have plans to display unregistered charities too.

You can start setting up your giving portfolio from either the Home, Discover or Portfolio tabs at the bottom of the main app screen. 

Wherever you start though, you’ll end up in the Discover tab. From here you can discover charities by: 

• Using the search bar 

• Filtering by cause

• Sharing your location to find nearby charities 

• Selecting a recommended charity we think you might like

Head here to find out how to discover charities in more detail.

When you see a charity you like, you can add them to your favourites by tapping the star icon. You can find your favourites in the Portfolio tab and can add as many as you want. 

Alternatively, you can add a charity straight to your giving portfolio by tapping the three bars icon. This is also how you add a charity to your portfolio from your favourites.

You can add up to three charities to your portfolio. 
To set up your monthly donation, tap Set up monthly donation and follow the instructions.

You can view your giving portfolio from the Home or Portfolio tabs.

To remove a charity from your giving portfolio, tap the X in the top right hand corner of that charity’s tile, 

To add a charity, (assuming you don’t already have three charities in your portfolio), you’ll see an Add new icon. Tapping that will take you to the Discover tab where you can find a new charity to support or you can add one directly from your Favourites list.

Changing the charities in your giving portfolio won’t affect your monthly donation.  The amount you’ve chosen to give will simply be split evenly between whichever charities you have in your giving portfolio in any given month.

You can have up to three charities in your portfolio.

You can add as many charities as you like to your favourites. This is just a list of any charity you like the look of and think you may want to add to your giving portfolio. You add charities to your favourites by tapping the star icon. 

Your giving portfolio contains the charities you’re donating to each month. You can select up to three and your monthly donation will be split evenly between them. You add charities to your giving portfolio by tapping the three bars icon.

At the moment, the Toucan app is only available on the mobile app. 

However, impact funds are available on the website where you can make one off donations to those funds.

Spotlight funds are groups of three charities whose work is focused in a specific cause area like climate change or elderly care or animal welfare. They’re created by us, public figures and businesses. 

You can make one-off donations to spotlight funds on our website or by adding the charities to your giving portfolio in the app. They are currently only available online but will soon be in the app too.

If you have an idea for an spotlight fund, please let us know.

You can change your donation whenever you want, right up until 11:59pm the day before your next one is due. 

Go to the Portfolio tab and tap Change in the centre of your monthly donation. This can also be done from the giving portfolio in the Home tab.

You can pause your donation by heading to your settings. These can be found by tapping your initial in the top right corner of the screen. 

Scroll down to find Pause monthly donation.  

We’ll ask you when you'd like us to remind you to restart your donations but you can do this at any time.

If you’ve paused your donation, you can easily restart it by heading to the giving portfolio in your Home tab and tap Restart donations. This can also be done from your settings.

Charities will always receive 100% of your donations. But we also need to make sure Toucan is sustainable so we can improve the app for charities and you. That’s why we ask you to contribute a fee. 

To be as transparent as possible, we’ve broken that fee down into two parts.

Transaction fee

The fixed 50p transaction fee covers the cost of processing your donations to your chosen charities. 

Platform fee

This fee keeps Toucan in flight but we want to give you the choice to select which fee feels right for you. So we ask for 8%, 6% or 4% of your donation to help us develop the app and encourage more people to join our giving community. 

We ask you to pay the fee you can afford and that you think the app deserves but the higher fee you pay, the more we’ll be able to do to develop the app and help the charities.

We like to think of it this way.

4% helps us become a new way to give. 

6% helps us become the way to give. 

8% helps us become the app for all your good deeds and then some.

We believe that £3 is both a meaningful amount for a charity to receive and an affordable figure for most that want to give.

None of the money donated to charities by Toucan users ever passes through a Toucan bank account.  Donations are processed and disbursed to your chosen charities via Stripe and Charities Trust.

Stripe is Europe’s largest payment processing platform and we use it to acquire and process donations. Stripe is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and has an ‘e-money license’

Your donations then arrive with  Charities Trust, a charity disbursement specialist regulated by HMRC, the Charity Commission and the Gambling Commission. Charities Trust sends your donations to your chosen charities.

It will take between 18 and 31 days for your charities to receive your money. 

This does not include Gift Aid, which can take a lot longer. Find out more here.

Gift Aid is a UK government initiative which allows charities to claim back the tax you paid on the money you earned to make your donation.

If you’re a UK taxpayer, Gift Aid effectively allows you to boost your donation to a charity by 25% at no extra cost to you. Gift Aid is reclaimed by Charities Trust (Toucan’s charity disbursement partner) from tax you pay for the current year and passed onto your chosen charities. 

If you are a higher rate tax payer, you can offset the remainder of the tax you paid against your annual tax bill. To qualify for Gift Aid, you need to be paying more tax than the Gift Aid you’ve added.

The processing of Gift Aid is entirely out of our hands and is paid out separately to your original donation. 

It can take up to eight weeks for charities to receive Gift Aid.

Head to the Portfolio tab and tap Export donations to PDF to download your donation history as a PDF.

Alternatively, tap View & export donation history to view and download your donation history as a CSV. You can also do this from your settings.

There are two main reasons for this:

• You will have paid fees on top of your donation, these aren’t included in your impact statement as they don’t go to the charity. 

• You may have added Gift Aid. This boosts your donation by 25% at no extra cost to you, but that extra 25% appears on your impact statement as the charities received the money.

Although we try to be as specific as possible with donation dates, delays in the banking system sometimes cause donations to leave your bank account a day or two later than expected.

This is because we donate to your chosen charities on your behalf.

Toucan is registered with the ICO.

Toucan follows strict GDPR  regulations around your personal data and how it’s used will always be up to you. 

Your data is never shared with the charities or any other third parties.

Toucan is a registered limited company.

We use Stripe - Europe’s largest payment processing platform - to acquire and process donations.  Stripe is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and has an ‘e-money licence’.

And we use Charities Trust - a charity disbursement specialist - to send donations to your chosen charities. Charities Trust is regulated by HMRC, the Charity Commission and the Gambling Commission.

Toucan helps people discover charities and set up regular, flexible donations.

Users choose up to three charities for their giving portfolio and a monthly donation is then split between those charities. Charities continue to receive that amount until a user changes the donation amount or the charities in their portfolio, pauses their donation or closes their account. 

Donations are made from Toucan to Charities Trust who distribute them to our users’ - we call them Toucaneers - chosen charities. This donation will appear as from Charities Trust on your charity bank statement. 

With Toucan, charities will always get 100% of donations and it counts as unrestricted income. 

You can easily see your Charities Trust donation total by heading here: https://charitiestrust.org/services/charities/statement-service. 

Charities registered with Charities Trust are not automatically enrolled in the charity statement service so you will need to sign up if you haven’t. This is totally free.

Currently, charities can only be listed in the app if they are registered with both the Charity Commission of England & Wales and Charities Trust.

Very soon we will be adding charities from the OSCR (Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) and Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. 

We have plans to display unregistered charities too.

Charities don’t need to sign up to be listed in the Toucan app.  They just need to be registered with the Charity Commission of England & Wales and Charities Trust.  If they’re registered with both these organisations, they’ll automatically feature in Toucan.

If a charity is registered with the Charity Commission but not with Charities Trust, then they will need to sign up with Charities Trust. We can help them with this process.

There are none. We don’t believe in charging charities to receive donations. 

Charities receive 100% of their donations and we don’t charge to be featured on the app

Currently, charities can only be listed in the app if they are registered with both the Charity Commission of England & Wales and Charities Trust.

Very soon we will be adding charities from the OSCR (Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) and Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. 

We have plans to display unregistered charities too.

Please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

If you want your charity removed from Toucan, please get in touch and we’ll remove it.

We’re always looking to work with charities directly.  If you’re interested in becoming a featured charity please get in touch.

The charities involved in spotlight funds are currently chosen by either us or the creator of a fund. If you’d like to be involved or create a spotlight fund, please get in touch.