Cancelling a charity donation: how to stop donating for good

Outside the supermarket someone is waiting with a tablet and a story that is entirely sincere. It is about children, or about water, or about a forest that will be gone in ten years. You listen, you nod, and within two minutes you have signed. Four euros a month. You will never notice it.

Two years later you do notice. Not in your balance, but in the four direct debits that come round every month, from organisations of which you can still place only one. You decide to do something about it, you search the website for "cancel", and that is where it begins.

Because cancelling is not organised the way signing up is. Research by the Dutch donor association Stichting Donateursbelangen found that with more than 60% of the charities studied, it is hard to find out how to stop at all. Below is what to do: to end your donation, and to stay free of it afterwards.

What to include in your cancellation

A charity can only process your cancellation if it knows who you are and which account the money is being taken from. So give your full name, address and city, your email address for the confirmation, and the last five digits of the account being debited. If you have a donor number, add it.

State explicitly that you are also withdrawing your direct debit mandate. Cancelling and withdrawing the mandate are two different things.

And if money is still taken afterwards? Open the payment in your banking app and have it returned. You can do that up to 56 days after the debit, without giving a reason and without consequences. A donation carries no payment obligation: you owe the charity nothing.

Why is cancelling made so difficult?

Start with this: a new donor costs money. When a charity recruits on the street or at your door, there is a fundraising agency behind it that earns a commission for every donor signed up. That commission is substantial, and it is recovered from your first twelve to sometimes twenty-four monthly payments. In other words: in that first year your donation goes towards the cost of finding you. What you give after that goes to the cause itself.

A donor who stops after eight months is therefore a loss for the charity. That does not make them villains — they do good work, and nobody is holding up your cancellation — but it does explain why the cancellation details are rarely on the homepage, and why you are more likely to be offered a lower monthly amount than a form to stop. The sector has agreed, through its own supervisory body, that cancelling should be as easy as signing up. There is still work to do.