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.