Winter charity drive! I need some advice..

Anyone that was here last year might remember that we had a little charity drive around Christmas.  I'd like to make that an annual event if possible.  Last year, I selected two animal charities* and asked people to donate to them via their online forms.  It worked pretty well and we raised about $120.  But it was through small donations from individuals rather than a nice big lump of money from The Flat Earth Society.  Ideally, I'd like them to receive all of the money in one chunk courtesy of the Society.  I think that sort of group donation setup would encourage more people to donate (it feels nice to be part of a group doing something good), which means more money for the recipient charity.. and, as an added bonus, it would create good press for the Society, which is good for us.

Now, one way to do that would be by me using Paypal to collect and then passing along all of the funds to the charity.  This strikes me as a bad idea for a couple reasons:

1) Paypal takes a cut of each transaction.  That's less money that's actually going to the charity.  Not good.
2) It looks like I'm trying to scam people.  Although I'm definitely not doing that, I don't want to risk even the appearance of impropriety.

So Paypal is out.  Does anyone know of a service that lets online communities pool their donations to a charity?  So, for instance, there's a link on the front page that people can click on.  They can donate however much money to the charity.  Then the money sits in a sort of limbo temporarily.  In a perfect world, the site could display an automatically-updated graphic showing the progress.. something along the lines of:



Then, when the drive is over, the charity receives notice that the site/group has donated a grand total of $x,xxx.

So, does anyone know if something like that exists?  Or have any other ideas that would work just as well?  I did a little looking around but couldn't find anything exactly like I was hoping for..


* While there are obviously many, many worthy charities out there that deal with countless different needs, the Flat Earth Society will be working with animal charities.  This is in line with the long-standing tradition of animal welfare and anti-vivisectionist ideals within the Flat Earth movement from prominent Flat Earth advocates such as Lady Blount and Marjory Johnson.

Why don't you take a look at these guys: http://www.charitychoice.co.uk/charitydonationservices.htm

I just did a quick Google search for online charity services and this came up.  I only did a quick scan, but it may be something along the lines of what you're looking for.

There's one my Mom used for a breast cancer run, I'll ask her about it later on.

The best two seem to be justgiving.com and firstgiving.com.  They both do exactly what I was looking for.  I think they're run by the same organization and the only difference is justgiving.com is based in the UK and firstgiving.com is in the US. 

If someone is donating from within the UK, the UK site is much better because there's a gov't-backed scheme called Gift-Aid which matches charitable donations with an extra 25%.  So a ?10 donation becomes ?12.50 and then JustGiving takes their fees from that, taking it to a total of about ?11.90 -- still ?1.90 more than the initial donation even after processing fees and whatnot.  The down-side is that Gift-Aid is only available if you're a UK resident/taxpayer.  Donations from outside the UK don't get that 25% bump.

Donating from the US, FirstGiving is a slightly better deal because their processing fees are very slightly less.  But there's no American equivalent to the Gift-Aid scheme, so there's no donation-matching bonus.

I think I'm going to go with the UK-based site.  Even if only a couple UK people donate (one of which will be me), I think that Gift-Aid bonus will more than offset the fee difference.  Now I just need to decide on a suitable charity that works with JustGiving.  There's about 50 animal-based charities on there, so there should be plenty to choose from.

In case anyone is curious about their fee structuring:

http://www.justgiving.com/how-justgiving-works/ (the UK site)
http://www.firstgiving.com/Statements/about_us/howitworks.asp (the US site)

My sister may or may not be holding that 5k again this year, if you want to do a summer one as well.

Hmph. I vote in favor of supporting a child at Coptic Orphans, Transforming Generations with Egypt's Fatherless.