Transparency
Where donor tips go
Shout A Mate takes no cut of any donation. Our only income is optional tips. Some of those tips are earmarked by the donor for something other than running the platform — and that money is not ours. This page is the ledger for it.
Why this page exists
A tip earmarked for anything other than running the platform is money we hold on someone else’s behalf. Saying so is easy; being checkable is the point. Every figure below is summed from the allocation ledger at the moment you load the page. There is no stored total that could quietly stop matching.
Tips for platform operations are not listed here. That money is ours the moment it arrives — it covers card processing, hosting and keeping the platform free for every campaign — so there is nothing owed and nothing to disburse. What it pays for is set out on the about page.
Nothing has been collected yet
No earmarked tip has ever been taken. That is not a rounding-down of a small number — the ledger is empty, and the reason is deliberate: no earmarked option is offered to donors at checkout, because offering a donor a destination we could not yet pay would create an obligation with nothing behind it.
When an option is switched on, tips start appearing here in the month they are collected, and again in the month they are paid out. This page will fill itself in.
Currently offered to donors: none.
How the money actually moves
Pay it forward is pooled and granted to campaigns that are under halfway to their goal, at least two weeks old, and run by an organiser who can receive payouts. A grant lands on the campaign as a donation and then travels the same payout path as every other donation — the organiser requests it, we approve it, one transfer goes out. There is no separate money path, which is deliberate: a second one would be a second thing to get wrong.
Each donor’s tip is granted whole to a single campaign and never split across several. Where the pool cannot be spent without pushing a campaign past its goal, the remainder stays held for the next round rather than being given to a campaign that does not need it.
If a donation is refunded before its tip has been paid out, the tip is cancelled with it. If the tip has already been paid out, it stays paid — money already sent on is not clawed back over a dispute the recipient had no part in, and Shout A Mate absorbs it.