Operational costs, salaries, rent, audit fees, marketing none of it touches your donation. They're funded separately by a permanent endowment, board-restricted gifts and fundraiser margins. That's the policy. It is in our charter, reviewed every quarter, and reconciled every month.
When you donate $100, $100 goes to the program you nominated. The card-processing fee (typically 1.6 – 1.9%, depending on country) is the only deduction. There is no platform fee, no admin fee, no overhead allocation, and no implicit ratio.
Our salaries, rent, audit, technology and marketing are funded by a separate endowment, by board-restricted donors who explicitly designate to operations, and by margins on our fundraising channels (TCG Vault, branded merchandise). Those numbers are also published.
"100% to programs" is not a marketing line we apply retroactively to a flexible budget. It is a structural rule. The Donor Pool is a legally segregated bank account at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Funds enter, sit briefly, and exit only as a program disbursement to a vetted partner never as a transfer to operations, ever. The Treasurer reconciles this account line-by-line each month and the reconciliation pack is published with the Annual Report.
If you'd rather your gift help cover the people and systems that make the programs possible, you can explicitly designate it to operations. About 4% of donors do, and we're grateful. But the default is, and will remain, 100% to programs.
Hearts of Hope runs three financial pools, kept legally and operationally separate. They never mix. The Treasurer reconciles the separation every month, and an external auditor will verify it at our first statutory audit.
Public donations. Restricted by donor intent (e.g. "for clean water"). Held in a segregated bank account, distributed to programs within 90 days, less only card-processing fees.
Pre-launch · pre first AISFunded by board-restricted gifts (donors who explicitly mark "for operations"), endowment income, and TCG Vault margins. Funds salaries, rent, audit, technology, marketing.
Pre-launch · pre first AISPermanent capital base. Principal never spent. Conservative investment yield (target ~4% p.a.) flows annually into Pool B. The endowment is a planned vehicle to be funded by board-restricted gifts as the Foundation grows.
Pre-launch · pipelineA policy that lives only on a website is a slogan. The 100% promise is enforced by five distinct, overlapping mechanisms each one designed so that a failure in one is caught by the next. Every mechanism produces a public artefact (signed minutes, signed opinion, ledger entry, board memo) that you can read.
Pool A (donor), Pool B (operations) and Pool C (endowment) sit in separate, individually named bank accounts at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Inter-pool transfers are forbidden by treasury policy and require a unanimous board resolution to override (which has never been issued). Reconciliation is run daily and signed off by two officers each morning.
The Treasurer formally attests, under a written representation letter, that no inter-pool transfers occurred in the preceding quarter. The Audit Committee reviews the underlying ledger before signing. Both the attestation and the meeting minutes are published on the Governance page within five business days of the board meeting never edited, never redacted.
The Treasurer and Director of Operations reconcile all three pools each month against bank statements, the donation gateway and partner invoices. The pack bank reconciliation, donor-pool aging, and partner disbursement schedule is shared with the board before sign-off and made available to donors on request via the Financials page.
Donor-pool balances are published on the Financials page within 24 hours of any movement greater than $10,000. Every entry shows date, counterparty (anonymised for individual donors, named for institutional ones), amount, program designation, and a unique entry ID that ties through to the audit trail. Anyone donor, journalist, regulator can verify a specific gift landed in a specific program.
Any staff member, donor, partner or beneficiary can confidentially escalate a suspected breach of the policy directly to the chair of the board, bypassing the executive team entirely. Confirmed breaches trigger mandatory board notification within 48 hours and a written disclosure to all donors of record within 14 days. Zero confirmed breaches since registration.
Each mechanism is independent. A failure at the bank shows up in the daily reconciliation. A failure in reconciliation shows up at the quarterly attestation. A failure of the board shows up in the public ledger. A failure of all four shows up in the whistleblower channel. The 100% policy is not a hope. It is a stack.
No. It is a contractual policy in our governance charter, reviewed by the board each quarter and published in full on the Financials page. The exact language is reproduced inside every Annual Report.
Card processing (~1.6 – 1.9% per transaction) is paid to Stripe / PayPal, not to us. We disclose the rate at checkout and donors can voluntarily cover it (and most do). Net of donor coverage, ~94% of donations leave us untouched by any deduction.
Three sources: (1) board-restricted donors who explicitly designate "operations", (2) yield from the Foundation's planned endowment as it is built, and (3) margins on TCG Vault, branded merch and licensed products. All disclosed in the Annual Report.
It would require unanimous board vote and 90-day public notice to all donors. The policy is hard-locked into the charter and was adopted at registration. No board has tabled a change.
Our financials page hosts the latest statements Pool A, Pool B and Pool C broken out, every program line itemised, with the supporting reconciliation packs attached.
