France sees more than €8.7 million raised through point-of-sale microdonations in a year

More than 27 million microdonations were collected at point-of-sale in France last year, raising over €8.7 million for good causes.

The donations were collected by L’ARRONDI, a microdonations solution from MicroDon that lets shoppers round up their payments to include a small donation, with the figures released last month. A record amount, it brings the total raised since its 2013 launch to more than €28 million, donated to nearly 800 associations and foundations.

L’ARRONDI is now used by 37 brands across 9,375 stores in the country, including Franprix, Nature & Découvertes, Sephora, Bonobo Jeans, Maisons du Monde, Monoprix, Celio, Printemps, Orange, Truffaut, Picard, Auchan and Fnac.

Usage has climbed steeply since its launch year, when L’ARRONDI collected 11,000 donations, raising a total of €19,000. This jumped the following year, in 2014, with 194,000 donations collected to a value of €126,000.

The annual amount raised first broke the €1 million mark in 2017, and growth has continued every year since then despite the pandemic, with around 5 donations now being made per second.

In fact, the pandemic years saw many brands use it to support vulnerable groups and respond to emergency situations. Picard, for example, used L’ARRONDI to help students impacted by the crisis, while Franprix, Monoprix or Naturalia chose to direct donations raised through it to emergency funds such as the Fondation Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) and the Secours populaire français during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis, with a  total of €505,730 collected. Today,  Printemps, Citadium, Gémo, Bocage, Eram and Franprix. are using it to help the Ukrainian population.

2021 also saw a further record broken, with €1.5 million collected in December – the highest ever monthly total.

L’ARRONDI’s use continues to evolve, with the first joint campaign launching at the end of 2020, when Mastercard and Cora ran a fundraising campaign for World Food Programme, followed by Henkel and its Diadermine brand joining forces with the Auchan brand at the end of 2021 to support Force Femmes.

According to microDON, this means that L’ARRONDI is likely to become one of the 5 biggest fundraising services in France.

Photo by RODNAE Productions