Powering purpose at scale: how JustGiving optimized global donations with Gr4vy

Discover why JustGiving, the UK’s most trusted fundraising platform, partnered with Gr4vy to modernize its global payment infrastructure—unlocking flexibility, reducing operational complexity, and ensuring donors around the world can give seamlessly, securely, and at scale.

The Challenge

JustGiving initially approached Gr4vy with a specific need: to enable cryptocurrency donations. As crypto giving gained traction—particularly among younger, tech-savvy donors—JustGiving recognized the importance of offering more modern, flexible payment options to meet evolving donor expectations.

While the idea of accepting crypto was compelling, building an in-house solution came with significant challenges. Supporting crypto payments would have required JustGiving to navigate complex regulatory requirements, integrate with volatile blockchain networks, ensure secure custody of digital assets, and manage real-time currency conversion—all without compromising trust or user experience. For a platform focused on maximizing fundraising impact, this level of technical and compliance overhead posed a major distraction from their core mission.

At the same time, JustGiving’s global reach introduced additional complexity. With donations flowing in from over almost every country in the world, the organization needed to support a wide range of payment methods, currencies, and regional compliance standards. Managing disparate PSP relationships and reconciling cross-border transactions created operational friction, while limiting their ability to quickly scale or optimize for conversion across regions. Centralizing their payment operations had become a strategic imperative—yet doing so with legacy infrastructure or fragmented tools would be both costly and time-consuming.

To truly modernize, JustGiving needed a platform that could unify their payments stack, provide seamless control over routing and provider selection, and adapt quickly to new methods like crypto—all without the burden of building custom infrastructure. That’s where Gr4vy came in.

“Gr4vy’s connection capabilities have enabled us to keep up with payment trends and expand our reach making donating simpler for all. “

— Oliver Shaw-Latimer, Senior Director of Payments and 
 Innovation at JustGiving

The industry in numbers

• Digital Dominance in Donations: In 2023, 63% of donors preferred to give online using credit or debit cards, underscoring the importance of robust digital payment infrastructures for nonprofits.
• Surge in Cryptocurrency Contributions: Cryptocurrency donations have exceeded $2 billion since 2018, with over $1 billion donated in 2024 alone, reflecting the growing acceptance of digital assets in philanthropy.
• Impact of Modern Payment Methods: Offering diverse payment options like PayPal and Venmo can significantly boost donations; for instance, repeat donations can increase by 76% when using PayPal.

_{Source: 1. Bloomerang.co, 2. BusinessWire, 3. Bloomerang.co}

The Solution

Gr4vy’s cloud-native orchestration layer gave JustGiving the flexibility, control, and scalability they had been missing. With one centralized integration, JustGiving can route transactions intelligently across multiple providers based on geography, payment method, or business logic, improving reliability during high-traffic periods and unlocking new opportunities to optimize for cost, conversion, and resilience. Gr4vy also enabled JustGiving to unlock a new donation channel through cryptocurrency. By integrating with The Giving Block via Gr4vy’s orchestration layer, JustGiving was able to quickly introduce crypto donations, without the need for a complex, time-intensive in-house build.

Over a short period of time, this capability facilitated approximately US$1,874,000 in additional donations, expanding how supporters can contribute and helping JustGiving reach new donor segments. What began as a targeted effort quickly evolved into a broader transformation. JustGiving migrated its entire card and Click to Pay volumes onto Gr4vy, consolidating payments through a single orchestration layer. This removed the need to hard-code logic or manually manage PSP relationships, saving engineering time and future-proofing their infrastructure. With Gr4vy’s no-code control and built-in tools like 3DS, tokenization, and fraud integrations, JustGiving can adapt in real time and meet donors wherever they are, across card, crypto, wallets, and local payment methods.

Gr4vy platform features

• Multi-PSP & smart routing: Ensure redundancy and enhance authorization rates with automatic failover capability, ensuring uninterrupted service during acquirer outages. Create individual workflows to route transactions and optimize approval rates without having to code.
• Integrated fraud prevention providers maximize acceptance rates and minimize fraud exposure, providing a safer, frictionless experience. Optimize acceptance rates with sophisticated 3DS and Network Tokenization integration.
• Future-proof payment architecture: Instantly add, test, and deploy new payment methods and create dynamic workflows that are directly deployed into your checkout without writing code or having to allocate internal teams.
• Infrastructure as a Service: a dedicated instance that can be deployed and scaled across regions to meet data privacy laws and mitigate the risk of shared servers slowing down your business performance.
• Increase conversion rates: Offering customers their preferred payment methods will boost your sales and increase conversion rates, reducing checkout drop-off. Tailor the payment experience to each shopper based on cart items, shopping history, currency or your own metadata.
• Real time insights: Access real time transactional data to optimize your payment stack. Explore all transactions in one dashboard and gain detailed insights to make data driven decisions, improving your payment processes and strategy for optimal results.
• Own your data: Gr4vy allows any card data to be used across multiple PSPs, enabling seamless provider switching or migration. Easily import and export card data; 3DS configuration and network tokens from any PSP.