Donating to a campaign

A campaign is a request for money, published by a verified organization for a specific piece of work — a borehole, a culvert, relief after a flood. You can give to one whether or not you have a CivicOS account.

Before you give anything, it is worth being clear about what CivicOS is in this arrangement. CivicOS does not hold your money. Donations settle directly into the organization's own bank account. What CivicOS provides is a public record: what was asked for, what came in, and what the organization says it did with it. That record is real and it is permanent. It is not the same thing as CivicOS guaranteeing the money is well spent, and this page is explicit about where the line falls.

Finding a campaign

Three routes, all of them public:

• Community funding in the main navigation lists every open campaign. Filter by category, emergency appeals, or campaigns run by a verified organization; sort by Recently added, Ending soon, Most funded, Emergency first, or Near me.

  Two of those are worth knowing about. Ending soon puts campaigns whose deadline is still ahead of them first — one whose date has already passed goes to the bottom rather than disappearing, because it may still be taking money. Near me appears only when you are signed in and have joined a community; it re-orders the whole list so the closest campaigns come first, and does not hide anything further away.

• Discover mixes campaigns in with issues, petitions and everything else near you, ranked by how close they are to your community.

• Search finds a campaign by name — useful when someone has sent you a link or told you a title.

Campaigns still in draft, awaiting review, rejected by the platform, or paused while a concern is looked into do not appear anywhere — and their pages are not reachable by direct link either. If a campaign you had open stops loading, that is usually why.

What a campaign page tells you

• The goal, and how much has come in. Shown even at zero.
• How the money will be spent — the milestones the organization committed to before it was allowed to publish.
• Where the money went — what the organization says it has spent so far, itemised.
• Who is running it — the organization, and whether it is verified.

Giving

1. Open the campaign and pick an amount: ₦1,000, ₦2,500, ₦5,000, ₦10,000, or anything else you type in.
2. Enter your email. This is used to send your receipt. It is never shown publicly.
3. Optionally add your name and a message, or tick Give anonymously.
4. Before you confirm, the page shows you the split — exactly how much reaches the organization, and both fees deducted from it.
5. You finish on Paystack's secure checkout. CivicOS never sees your card details.

Only campaigns that are published or already funded accept donations, and only organizations that have completed verification and connected a payout account can receive them.

The fees

Two amounts are deducted before money reaches the organization, and the donate form shows you both in naira before you confirm:

• CivicOS takes 2.5% — the platform fee.
• Paystack takes its processing fee — currently 1.5% plus ₦100, with the ₦100 waived on gifts under ₦2,500.

Both come out of the organization's share. On a ₦2,500 gift, ₦62.50 goes to CivicOS, ₦137.50 to Paystack, and ₦2,300 reaches the organization. On ₦10,000 it is ₦250, ₦250 and ₦9,500.

Amounts are shown to the kobo, so the figures on screen add up. If they did not, you would be right not to trust them.

Giving anonymously

Tick the box and your name is never shown on the campaign — not in the donor list, not anywhere public. Your email is still recorded, because the receipt has to go somewhere and because a payment nobody can trace is a payment nobody can reconcile. Anonymous means anonymous to other citizens, not unrecorded.

Signing in first

You do not need an account. But if you are signed in when you give, the donation is attributed to you, which is the only way to receive the updates the organization posts to its donors afterwards. Give while signed out and the record is still complete — you simply will not be told what happened next.

Your receipt

When your payment settles you are emailed a receipt showing the amount, the campaign, the organization, and the fee split.

It is not a tax receipt. The organization received your gift, not CivicOS, so any tax documentation would have to come from them.

What happens afterwards

The organization publishes what it has spent, against the milestones it set out. The campaign page shows three figures: what was received through CivicOS, what has been reported as spent, and what has not yet been accounted for.

CivicOS cannot verify any of those spending figures. The money went straight to the organization's bank account; CivicOS never held it and has no way to check a receipt or visit a borehole. Reported spend is a claim by the organization, published under its own name, and the page says so. What CivicOS does guarantee is that the claim is on the record, dated, and cannot be quietly revised later.

For the same reason there is no "remaining balance" anywhere on the page. CivicOS knows what came in through the platform. It does not know what is left in an account it cannot see.

The final report

When the work is done the organization files a closing account: what it achieved, with supporting documents.

If money was still unaccounted for at the moment the report was filed, the page says so and names the amount — and that figure is frozen at filing time. If the organization publishes more spending afterwards, the live accounting above updates, but the verdict on the report does not. A thin report cannot be made to look complete after the fact.

If something looks wrong

Be honest with yourself about what CivicOS can undo here, because it is less than you might assume.

You can raise a concern about a campaign, from the bottom of the campaign page. Two groups can do this, and nobody else:

• People who donated to it. You paid for something; you are owed an account of it.
• People who live in the LGA the campaign serves. You can see the site. An admin in another state cannot.

That restriction is deliberate. A campaign was reviewed by CivicOS staff before it published and is locked afterwards, so a concern is not an appeal against the approval — it is a report about conduct since, from someone in a position to know. Leaving it open to anyone in the country would make it a convenient tool for a rival organization or a political opponent, which is the opposite of the point.

You will be asked to describe what you have actually seen. A reason on its own is not enough to send.

Nothing happens to the campaign automatically. A concern never pauses a fundraiser, never hides anything, and is never counted by a machine into an action. A member of CivicOS staff reads every one. If several unconnected people report the same campaign, that is treated as a stronger signal than one person reporting repeatedly — but it still takes a person to act.

You can also report an individual update an organization has posted, if a specific claim in it is false. The report control sits under each update.

There is no refund mechanism. Once a payment settles it is in the organization's bank account. CivicOS never held it and has no power to reverse it; a refund would have to come from the organization.

What CivicOS can do is pause a campaign. Only platform admins can do this. It stops new donations immediately and takes the page down, so it protects the next donor — not the last one. Separately, every settled donation is checked against the payment provider on a schedule, and any disagreement — money credited to the wrong organization, an amount that does not match — is raised for an admin to investigate.

This is the honest shape of the thing: CivicOS makes it much harder for an organization to take money quietly and say nothing, and much easier for you to check what they said. It does not make giving risk-free. Give to organizations whose record you can read.