Refund service donations
If you would like the option of repaying donations if you do not achieve your goal and/or your project does not go ahead, we offer a refund service.
You should realise that there are transaction costs involved in both receiving and refunding donations.
There are 2 options:
1. Payout to Organiser has already taken place -> Refund by Organiser:
You pay back the donations yourself. In your Spendenaktion account dashboard, you can view and download a list of donors (name, e-mail address, donation amount). You can find this list via the donations of your fundraiser on your dashboard. You can write the donors an e-mail*, explaining that the fundraising campaign was not or only partially successful and that you would like to refund their donation and whether they would like to send their bank account details.
*Please note: Not possible for anonymous donors who have chosen not to provide their e-mail address.
Recommendation: We also advise you to keep your fundraising campaign online so that donors can still consult it (close your fundraiser for donations on your dashboard: Close or end fundraiser… > Close for donations), read your text regarding repayment and contact you via the contact button on the campaign page.
2. Payout to organiser has not yet taken place -> Refund by Spendenaktion:
Refund of donations can be made to all donors. Our payment service provider Mollie has the bank account details of all donors, including those who donated anonymously.
It is worth noting that there are platform and transaction fees associated with receiving donations and transaction fees associated with refunding donations.
Transaction fees depend on the payment method chosen by the donor. Spendenaktion charges the same transaction fee for refunding donations as is charged for receiving donations. This is a fixed amount of €0.50 (including VAT) per donation plus the variable transaction fees charged by some payment methods. So you pay the transaction fees twice because the transaction is carried out twice. See https://spendenaktion.de/rates for an overview. You will receive an invoice for these costs in advance, which must be paid before we can proceed to refund.
'Refund Validity' period
Donations can be refunded within the so-called 'Refund Validity' period. This timeframe varies depending on the payment method used. While a period of 365 days after the transaction date applies to most methods, there are important exceptions:
- PayPal: maximum of 180 days.
- Belfius: maximum of 6 months.
Please note: Since we only process refunds for entire campaigns (refunding all donations at once), the final deadline is determined by the oldest donation. If a donation was made via PayPal, a full refund is only possible if the first transaction occurred no more than 180 days ago.
Pausing payout
It is possible to not have your donations paid out via the weekly payout rounds (so you can use Spendenaktion's refund service) by switching off Weekly payout at Payout, in the Bank account section, which means that no weekly payouts are made and the money accumulates in your Spendenaktion account. Should your goal/project still succeed, you can switch the weekly payout back on, which means payouts will take place on the first, following Wednesday.