December is a month of giving around the world, including in Singapore which will host SG Cares Giving Week and The Great Singapore Give campaign. The events are led by the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) and coordinated through Giving.sg, a platform for facilitating volunteerism and donations powered by Stripe.

“Giving.sg’s mission is to bring giving literally to your fingertips by making giving simple, safe, and secure,” said Janet Tan, director of digital innovation at NVPC. “With monetary donations being a large part of what we do, working with a trusted, secure, and reliable technology infrastructure provider like Stripe is imperative.”

On-demand giving

NVPC launched Giving.sg in December 2015 as an easy-to-use online portal where individuals and organizations can donate, volunteer, or fundraise on behalf of registered charities. In its first year it attracted more than 100,000 givers and raised more than S$20 million. It now supports the work of more than 600 nonprofit organizations across 14 causes.

In 2017, NVPC realized that to continue growing, it needed to adapt to new giving trends, like the use of social media to promote public causes. This led the organization to integrate Giving.sg with Stripe’s payments, Billing, and Checkout solutions.

The change gave donors the option to make one-time or recurring contributions in a variety of local payment methods. These include GrabPay, a popular digital wallet that Giving.sg added in 2021, resulting in more than S$2.8 million additional donations for more than 400 charities. That same year, NVPC received a record S$95.5 million in total donations.

Trust and security

Platforms like Giving.sg are frequent targets of online fraud, such as phishing and card testing attacks. They are vulnerable because they’re trusted names accustomed to surges in small donations and typically have limited fraud prevention teams.

To build trust and confidence as its volume grew, Giving.sg turned to Stripe’s best-in-class security tools. Stripe is a certified PCI Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification in the payments industry. All transactions on the Stripe network are 3-D Secure supported, providing an additional layer of security. Giving.sg also relies on Stripe Radar, which uses machine learning to proactively detect and block fraudulent actors.

“By relying on Stripe, we can stay focused on our core work so that together with individuals, organizations, and charities, we can make Singapore a City of Good,” said Tan.