Facts and Questions

General

SuperKind is a social change and fundraising platform – built to educate, inspire and empower young change-makers to make a difference to the world around them. Our website consists of:

  • Causes: the most engaging, informative and child-appropriate educational content available anywhere (in our opinion!). These pages cover The Problem, The Solution and The Actions that young people can take to make a difference in the most important areas facing our planet.
  • Change-Makers: case studies of incredible children that have invented, innovated, and campaigned for important causes in the world, to inspire the next generation of change-makers to take action.
  • Take Action: 12 step-by-step toolkits to walk young change-makers through exactly what they can do to be the change that they want to see in the world. Plus Change-Maker Badges to earn for completing each action!
  • Charities: a curated list of the most effective and child-appropriate charities in the UK and what young change-makers can do to support them and make a real difference to causes that they care about.
  • Fundraising Platform: the first ever fundraising platform built just for children. Easy to use and loaded with child-safe features to enable parents and schools to let their children raise money effectively and with total peace of mind.

SuperKind’s education platform is owned by a 100% non-profit CIC (SuperKind Education C.I.C). Our fundraising platform is a Social Enterprise (SuperKind Children’s Fundraising Ltd). Both organisations are dedicated to the mission of educating, inspiring and empowering the next generation of changemakers

SuperKind’s education site is a 100% not-for-profit organisation. It is completely free to use and we have 0% platform fees for all users (schools, students, charities). But we have to cover our costs such as our wonderful staff, our website & servers and getting the word out… So our fundraising platform is a social enterprise (a limited company). We ask those making donations on the fundraising platform to consider making an optional contribution to our organisation on top of their charitable donation to cover our running costs. 

As Steve Jobs said, ‘Great things in businesses are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people’. We brought together a team of academics, educators, and editors to curate the content so as to be (we think!) the most engaging, informative, academically rigorous and age-appropriate content for young change-makers available anywhere.

Did you know that there are almost 400,000 registered charities in the UK? That’s a lot! Part of our job at SuperKind is to cut through an overwhelming sector to curate the best and most child-appropriate content so that it is engaging and digestible for young change-makers, and that applies to charities as well. For each Sustainable Development Goal, we have selected a small number of charities to showcase, based on our extensive due diligence of their effectiveness and appropriateness for children.

The global challenges we are facing are constantly changing and we hope to see increasing progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. To that end, each cause page will be reviewed every 6 months to ensure that content is up to date. The ‘Most ‘Important Problems Around the World Today’ will be updated more regularly as they are highly time relevant. Charities will be given the opportunity to update their page as regularly as they like, and we recommend that this is done yearly at the very least.

SuperKind’s education platform makes no revenue and is a 100% not-for-profit. We don’t charge schools or charities or students any fees to be on, or use, the platform.

Our fundraising platform is a social enterprise (a limited company). This means that it is dedicated to a social mission (educating, inspiring and empowering the next generation of change-makers) but that it can make a small amount of profit. This is so that we can attract investors to support the high costs of creating and running a fundraising platform, and offer them a return for supporting us. 

Donations

Over 40,000 charities and good causes are registered on SuperKind. If you would like to raise money for a charity or cause that is not already registered then please give us a shout on hello@superkind.org and we can get it added for you, usually within 4 working days.

SuperKind’s fundraising platform is powered by Charities Trust.
If you are a charity, and would like to join the 30,000+ other charities that can be fundraised for on SuperKind, please email us at hello@superkind.org.
The featured charities are chosen by SuperKind based on a number of criteria. If you think you have a mission that children will engage with particularly well, and would like to be considered, please contact us here.

All donations are processed by our established partners Stripe and Charities Trust. The donations are paid through to Charities Trust on a daily basis and they pay out donations to charities according to their agreed schedule with charities – normally once per week.

Where donors consent to Gift Aid being claimed on their donation, their details will be passed on to Charities Trust, who will process Gift Aid on charities’ behalf. Charities Trust charge a 4% fee for their Gift Aid reclaim service. For more information, please see here: https://charitiestrust.org/charities

SuperKind has a 0% platform fee on donations made through the site. We do not charge charities, fundraisers, schools or anyone else to use the platform. In fact, we cover all the platform fees that are involved. The only exception is the credit card processing fee, which is charged by our payment partner Stripe. Stripe deducts a processing fee of 1.2% + 20p from
all donations made with a standard UK card. This goes straight to them
(not to SuperKind) and is the lowest fee on the market. 100% of the net
amount goes to your chosen charity.

There is an optional ‘tip jar’ for donors to add a voluntary contribution to SuperKind should they wish. Our fundraising platform supports our 100% not-for-profit education side (SuperKind Education CIC) so we rely on this tip jar to fund our platform. We are grateful for every penny that helps us with our mission.

At present we only take donations in British pounds.

Funds are paid out by Charities Trust weekly, on a Monday, for the duration of your campaign (you don’t have to wait until it closes). They are sent via BACS. There is roughly a 2-3 week lag between the donation being paid on SuperKind and it reaching the beneficiary. This is to account for the processing times. Gift Aid is also paid out by Charities Trust once it has been reclaimed from HMRC but this tends to follow a little later, timelines are at the mercy of HMRC!

Schools/PTAS

SuperKind has been built with schools front-of-mind. It is the ultimate tool for schools to support children across every step of their journey towards changing the world.

Our Cause pages for the UN SDGs and Important Problems Around The World Today are an unrivalled educational resource for school children. Plus, we have inspirational case studies and step-by-step Take Action Toolkits. What’s more, we have put together a series of cross-curricular lesson plans, helping to bridge the gap between these important topics and the national curriculum.

Our fundraising platform is built just for children and schools. Schools can set-up school- and class- wide campaigns and fundraisers that are easy for students to use and fully GDPR compliant (and beyond!). This creates a centralised place through which to collect donations, saves the hassle of counting coins, and allows Gift Aid to be claimed.

For more detail on how Schools can use SuperKind, check out our Schools page.

Creating a child safe environment is our number one priority at SuperKind, so that schools and parents can let their children learn about important causes, take action and fundraise with total confidence. Some of the measures we take include: 

  • Never sharing children’s data outside of SuperKind
  • Requiring parents to provide approval at every stage that children share personal data with SuperKind, including: the setting up of an account, creating a fundraising page, to claim a change-maker badge.
  • Password protecting all fundraising pages by default, so that they can only be viewed by those with the password and cannot be accessed through search engines
  • Ensuring that all content on the site is age-appropriate for children
  • Alerting users and asking them to seek permission for any links that go beyond SuperKind.org

Absolutely! And vice versa. Many PTAs will create campaigns independently of their school, but if you’d like to collaborate on a campaign (so that both teachers and PTA members can access the data/collaborate on the campaign and so that it appears on your school’s SuperKind profile page) you can do that too – simply have the school create a ‘School’ account on SuperKind and invite the PTA using the ‘PTAs’ tab in their dashboard. 

No! We find that when young people do have their own pages they tend to raise much more because the page gets shared with the young person’s network (grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours etc) but many schools/PTAs will opt to do all their fundraising through one central page and that is fine too. You will have the option to hide the ‘Join this Campaign’ button when you create your fundraiser, if that’s what you’d like to do. 

It’s really simple for supporters to create their own, connected fundraising pages. Just share the URL/QR code to your campaign page and invite students/families to click the ‘Join this Campaign’ button at the top left of the page. You might like to include instructions along the lines of the below when you send your campaign URL/QR code out:
 
– Click on ‘Join this Campaign’ button at top of the page
– Login (if you’ve used this website before) or create account
– As SuperKind is designed for children to create & manage their own fundraisers, the parent/guardian will need to approve the account and fundraiser via email.
– Create your own fundraising page and share it with friends and family!
If you have any technical issues at all, please email hello@superkind.org, they respond very quickly.

Pages remain live on SuperKind for 6 months after their end date – this is to allow anyone who forgot to donate initially to still make a donation. If for whatever reason you’d like to take the page down before then, you can edit the campaign and set it to ‘Private’. 

Young peoples’ pages can only ever be seen by people who have had the URL to that page sent to them. They do not show up in Google and are not visibly attached to the campaign in any way. This is for child protection and inclusivity reasons. Moreover, all photos and videos are set to be password protected by default. 
The campaign organiser can see who is raising money for their campaign ‘behind the scenes’ with their private account login.

Siblings can either each create their own account and page, or create one account and page with the family name (e.g. ‘The Millers’). 

Parents

Absolutely! SuperKind was created by parents who wanted to give their children the tools and inspiration to make a difference to the world in a child-safe online environment and the platform is widely used by children to learn, take action, earn badges and fundraise, outside of a school environment.

The platform is also used by a range of other organisations working with children such as scout and religious groups.