Charity direct debits

[Sorrento79]

Why is it so hard to cancel a direct debit charitable donation? (Outside of they don't want anyone to stop giving I guess!)
I am trying desperately to trim our outgoings, and between us we are giving around £50 a month to charities via direct debits, which used to feel fine and reasonable but right now less so. If i just cancel the DDs at my end I think they may try and restart them? Do i have to contact the charity and let them know? I can't find any easy ways of getting in touch with the charities in question. It should be easy no?

I had exactly the same problem. I ended up just cancelling on online banking (world vision, action aid, amnesty international)…

Action Aid rung me up and I ended up agreeing to drop the £15 to £3 a month. I’d not answer any unknown calls for a while!

Charities don’t have to be a lifetime commitment and it sounds like you’ve done far more than your bit for a long time. So annoying when I feel they waste soooo much money on sending things out in the post!

Just do it from your end. I did it yesterday 👍

I've cancelled all of ours too

And yes! Some do ring to tell you off!

I've been doing this lately it's impossible to find contact details so I cancelled them on line banking- lo and behold the companies all emailed me to ask if I had made a mistake ! Er that would be No!

If you cancel via your bank it should stop the DD, unless it's within approx 3 working days of the existing gift in which case the data may already be being processed by the bank and it'll cancel for the next month. I work for a medium sized charity and we get plenty of cancellations that way. We never query it as it's not an essential bill like a mortgage, council tax etc.

We would never dream of re-starting a cancelled gift.

The only thing that might make them contact is if it's a charity lottery donation as you might not realise you've stopped then be annoyed if you don't win. But that's a letter in our case.