In Where Motorsport Funding Really Comes From (And Why You Don’t Need to Pay to Find It) we named easyfundraising as one of the honest routes to racing budget, because it lets people who already want to help do it without spending anything extra. This post covers how to actually set it up, how the donation amounts work, and one eligibility point worth checking before you build a page around it.
How the money actually gets to you
Retailers pay easyfundraising a small commission whenever someone buys something after clicking through from your page, and easyfundraising passes most of that on as a donation. It costs the shopper nothing, the retailer covers it as a normal cost of doing business, in the same way an advert or a discount code does. Some retailers donate a percentage of the purchase, others a flat amount regardless of order size, in the same way TopCashback’s rates split between percentage and fixed offers. You’ll see the exact amount for each retailer before you shop, not after.
Worth checking before you build a page around it
easyfundraising doesn’t require you to be a registered charity, its own site says so plainly. But its terms are built around “good causes,” and the examples it gives lean toward community groups, sports clubs, medical costs and education rather than a private hobby. Real sports clubs, including grassroots teams, do use it successfully. The safest route for a racing family is to set the page up under the team or club name if there’s one attached to the car, rather than as a purely personal page for one driver’s hobby, and to check directly with easyfundraising if you’re not sure your setup qualifies. It’s a five-minute email, and it’s better to ask first than build a page and a following around it only to find it gets queried later.
The two moments worth timing around
Christmas. Family and friends are already doing the bulk of their annual online shopping in November and December. If they’re shopping anyway, routing it through the page costs them nothing and adds up fast, purely on volume.
Insurance renewal. The same logic as TopCashback applies here, insurance and financial products tend to carry some of the highest fixed donation amounts on the platform, because the retailer is paying to win a switch, not a percentage of the premium. Worth flagging to the people supporting the driver specifically, most won’t think to check a fundraising page before renewing a policy unless you remind them.
Don’t rely on people remembering: the Donation Reminder
The biggest reason a fundraising page underperforms isn’t lack of goodwill, it’s people forgetting to go via the page before they shop. The Donation Reminder is easyfundraising’s browser extension and mobile app combined under one name, and it pops up automatically on any retailer’s site where a donation is available, so supporters don’t have to remember your page exists every time they shop. Worth mentioning it by name when you ask people to support the page, since it removes the one thing that actually stops donations happening.
Free for supporters to use, no cost added to their shopping, and a genuine way to turn the family’s existing network into racing budget.
Set up an easyfundraising page
Affiliate link. We earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you.
What it realistically raises
This depends entirely on how many people actually use the page and how often, so treat any number as a starting point rather than a promise. A small, engaged group of family and friends who install the Donation Reminder and genuinely use it for their normal shopping, especially around insurance renewals and Christmas, can raise a meaningful amount across a season. A page that gets set up once and never mentioned again typically raises very little, because nobody remembers it exists. The donations only appear once your cause passes a minimum threshold and are paid out in batches a few times a year, not the moment someone shops, so it’s a background income stream rather than one you can draw on immediately.
TopCashback works the other way round, turning your own family’s spending into cashback rather than other people’s spending into donations. We’ve covered how to actually use it in Turn Your Everyday Spending Into Racing Budget With TopCashback. For the wider picture, see the Racing Sponsorship Guide or every post in the series so far at On Track Marketing’s sponsorship hub.
Affiliate disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link to easyfundraising. If you sign up through it, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we’d genuinely suggest to a racing family.
