Donating with CanadaHelps

It’s simple. Just find a charity you’d like to support and make your donation from its profile page.

You can make a single donation or set up a monthly donation schedule, make a donation of securities or mutual funds, or redeem a CanadaHelps Charity Gift Card you’ve received.

If the charity you choose has set up campaigns to support a particular cause or need, you can direct your donation to the one you care about the most. There’s even an option to send a note to the charity along with your donation.

Would you like to make your donation in honour or memory of someone special? You can dedicate your donation and even send an e-card to announce your gift.

Pay for your donation using a credit card, PayPal™ or a CanadaHelps Charity Gift Card.

You can pay for your one-time or monthly donation using your VISA®, Mastercard® or American Express® credit card.

Search for a charity right from our home page or choose the Donate page from the main menu.

• Use the search field to find a charity by its name, its Canada Revenue Agency business number, or keywords that describe the organization or the work it does.
• Use the category buttons to browse through charities by the kind of work they do or the people they serve.

You can narrow your search results further by using the panels on the left side of your search results page.

If you’d like another view of how donation dollars are supporting good work across Canada, browse through the current set of Charity Campaigns.

You can also find charities by browsing through the current set of Fundraising Pages that other donors have created.

When you make a one-time donation, we ask for your e-mail address so we can send your charitable tax receipt to you. Because CanadaHelps is a registered charitable foundation, we’re able to e-mail your receipt immediately after you complete your donation.

You have the option to receive:

• a separate tax receipt for each donation in a transaction;
• one tax receipt for all donations in a single transaction;
• and if you’ve opened a free CanadaHelps account for donors, one tax receipt at the end of the calendar year for all the donations you’ve made in that period.

With a free CanadaHelps donor account, you can also find all of your tax receipts on our site, so you’ll always have them when you need them.

To make monthly scheduled donations, a CanadaHelps donor account is required.  Receipts for monthly gifts are not created each month. To access a receipt for monthly gifts, sign in to your CanadaHelps account and click the Donations & Receipts section to download your receipt. You will receive an email notification when your monthly donation is processed as well if we encounter any issues processing your donation. You can cancel your monthly gift at any time. Simply sign in to your CanadaHelps account and delete the monthly gift from the Monthly Gift section.

We don’t charge you anything for making a donation or for creating a donor account. You will receive a tax receipt for 100% of your donation.

To cover the charges we incur for processing your transaction and to help with our overhead expenses, we charge a fee between 3.0% and 4.9% per transaction, depending on the type of donation you make and the charity’s agreement with CanadaHelps. Overall, just 1.8% of this fee goes to CanadaHelps to enable us to continue to build new and innovative online fundraising tools for charities at the best non-commercial rates. The remainder of the fee goes to cover costs we incur from credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions for processing donations.

 Click here for more information on our fees.

We send your donation to the charities you support on a regular schedule.

95% of donations made using CanadaHelps are directed to charities that have set up electronic fund transfers (EFTs), and to whom we transfer funds once every week. Donations made from Sunday to Saturday are disbursed the following Friday. It can take a few days to clear in the charity’s bank account, depending on its arrangements with its bank.

For charities that have not signed up for a free account and set up electronic fund transfers (EFTs), we issue a paper cheque. We send those cheques once a month.

Occasionally, a charity will change its address or banking information and forget to update CanadaHelps, which leads to a delay in the charity receiving your donation. As a trusted charity ourselves, it’s critical to us to make all reasonable and best efforts to honour donors’ wishes, so CanadaHelps makes multiple attempts to contact the charity for correct information. If we cannot get updated banking information from the charity to send the funds via EFT, we will send your donation to the charity by cheque.

If we are unable to get the information we need to transfer the funds electronically, and if a cheque cannot be delivered to or cashed by a charity, we will contact you, the donor, for further direction.

In very rare cases (representing 0.007% of the donations we process), we are unable to disburse funds to the intended charity by EFT or cheque, and we are unable to get direction from the donor after multiple attempts. In these cases, after 18 months the funds become undisbursable and are reinvested into CanadaHelps’ charitable operations.

A CanadaHelps Account for donors is a secure way to store information you use every time you donate. Because your account is password protected, we can save you time by safely storing:

• your e-mail and street addresses for tax receipt purposes
• your account settings and preferences
• your tax receipts and a record of each donation
• a list of your favourite charities

In accordance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), we also save an encrypted key which references your credit card information, stored on a separate, secure server. That way, your information is separate and safe, but you don’t have to type it in each time you donate.

Donor accounts are free and only take a moment to set up. Create your account now.

CanadaHelps Charity Gift Cards are a great way to celebrate any occasion with the gift of giving.

You choose a design and a value, then send your card with your personal message by e-mail, or print it out to deliver it in person. It’s simple and makes a wonderful gift. Buy a Charity Gift Card now.

Did you receive a Charity Gift Card from someone? Simply find a charity you’d like to support, then use your Charity Gift Card as your method of payment.

If you’d like to check the remaining value of your card, you can do that on the Charity Gift Card Redemption page.

Making a direct donation of securities or mutual funds can be the most tax-efficient way to support your favourite charities. It will save you on the taxes charged against any increase in value since you first purchased those shares. That means you’ll have more of their value to contribute to charity, and that larger donation will appear on your charitable tax receipt so you will save more at tax time, too.

We’ll ask you some basic information about the shares you’d like to donate and about the financial advisor or investment company which handles your investment. Our financial advisor will take care of the rest.

We’ll notify you when the transaction is complete and send you a charitable tax receipt with final amount. This amount is based on the closing bid price of your shares when received in the CanadaHelps brokerage account.

We will provide you with a tax receipt that reflect the full proceeds of the sale of your stock. The amount we disbursed to the charit(ies), is proceeds of the sale of your stock less 2- 3% which covers the cost of our broker and allows CanadaHelps to continue to fulfill its charitable mission.

If you’re ready to make a donation of securities or mutual funds, start now.

Fundraising with CanadaHelps is a wonderful way to bring your family, friends or co-workers together in support of the charities you care about most.

We make it easy. To set up a Fundraising page, you select the charities you want to support and add an explanation for why each is important to you. You can add photos or videos to your page and chart your progress toward the goal you set.

We’ll assign a unique web address (URL) which points directly to your Fundraising page. Share your page with the world through social media, e-mail or word of mouth, then watch your effort multiply by the number of people in your extended network.

As people contribute to your effort, you’ll see each donation appear with the names of your supporters (when they allow us to display them). That way, you can be sure to thank them for their support.

Birthdays, weddings or graduations are great opportunities to fundraise. Sporting events, reunions and personal challenges can also be easily transformed into charitable events. But you don’t need a special occasion: any day is a good day to help out people across the country and around the world.

See for yourself how easy it is: create a Fundraising page now. 

Yes, you can donate from outside Canada as long as you are using a payment method we support. All donations through CanadaHelps are in Canadian dollars. If your credit card was issued outside of Canada, your credit card statement will show the value of your donation converted to the local currency.  CanadaHelps issues Canadian tax receipts only. As a result, you may want to check with your country’s income tax policies to see whether you can use a Canadian tax receipt when filing your taxes.