About us

We're giving thousands of New Zealanders the power to do good, with donations to causes they care about, instead of unnecessary gifts.

If every person in New Zealand replaced one $10 gift with a donation to a good cause, that would be $49 million of goodness (as well as less packaging and wrapping going to landfill, less stress for gift buyers and less clutter in our homes).

We have created two simple ways to give more joy - not more stuff:

• Create your own Good Gift Registry for a special event (e.g. a wedding, a child’s birthday, a milestone birthday) and ask friends to donate to a charity you choose, instead of buying gifts.
• Give Good Gift Cards instead of traditional gifts, to enable others to make donations to charities they care about.

Our team

The Good Registry was co-founded by three Wellingtonians who are all passionate about doing good things: Christine Langdon, Tracey Bridges and Sue McCabe. Christine is our Chief of Good (aka Chief Executive) and Tracey and Sue are directors.

Our Wider team includes Trustee Rebekah Swan, communications whizz Ainsley Harris, and a small army of generous volunteers and pro-bono partners.

Our core pro-bono partners include Deloitte for financial services, MageBinary for IT, Duncan Cotterill for legal, and the BizDojo for office space.

You can see a full list of our supporters here.

How we cover costs

Creating and operating The Good Registry comes with the costs of website development, hosting, maintenance, administration, marketing and community engagement.

We deduct 10% towards operating costs from the total donations made each month before paying out donations to your selected charities.

There are two parts to these costs:

• Card processing/transaction fees (paid to our payment service provider Stripe).
• Cost recovery for administration and management costs, including the ongoing development, hosting and maintenance of The Good Registry website, processing and record keeping for payments to charities, receipting, auditing, user support, marketing and community engagement.
• The 10% is deducted from total funds donated to each charity, after we’ve aggregated all of their donations. The total amount donated to the charity, and the amount they will receive after the 10% deduction, is clearly and transparently communicated to each recipient charity when payments are made.

We are not making a profit yet, but when we do, we will reduce the administration fee (our aim is to get it to 5%, over time), and we will always reinvest at least 51% of any profit that we do make to do more good.

Our Business Model

The Good Registry is a social enterprise: a business, with a social-good purpose at our heart. We exist to simplify giving and do good. That goodness is two fold: as well as helping good causes, we’re helping to reduce waste.

All donations to The Good Registry are handled by our registered charitable trust (CC54846). The Good Registry Trust receives your donations and and then pays forward donations to your chosen charities, less the service fee.

A New Zealand registered company, The Good Registry Limited, provides all of the technology, marketing and administration to sustain and grow our community and our platform, and levies the administration fee that covers those costs.