Donating to ACAT

Access is threatened or prohibited at many crags and we need your support to continue our efforts. The more you give, the more we are able to do. You can use the donation form on this page or any other page to make a donation.

Frequently asked questions

Why should I make a monthly or yearly donation?

Regular donations from the climbing community provide ACAT with the reliable funding we need for salaries, forward planning and significant access projects. Guaranteed income is crucial to our financial sustainability, and allows us to focus on critical access work rather than more fundraising.

What will my regular donation contribute to?

Regular monthly or yearly donations support our work with DOC, land owners and iwi to ensure ongoing access to our favourite climbing areas. ACAT has already saved several crags from the brink of closure – your regular donation will help supercharge our access and advocacy efforts across New Zealand.

How can I cancel my regular donation?

The confirmation email we sent you when you started your regular donation contains a cancellation link. So does the reminder email we send if your payment is failing. Click that cancel link – it will take you to our website where you can confirm you wish to cancel. Easy! If you can't find your email with the cancel link, contact us for assistance.

How can I update my card details?

We will send you an email if your regular donation is failing (perhaps because your card has expired, been lost, stolen or cancelled, or does not have enough funds). This email contains a renewal link. Click that renewal link – it will take you to our website checkout, where you can check your contact details and add your new credit card number. This will pay the outstanding donation, and be used for future payments.  If you can't find your email with the renewal link, contact us for assistance.

Can I make a large one-off donation or bequest?

Yes! As well as ongoing work to promote climbing access, ACAT is building its Trust fund to enable the future legal protection or acquisition of high-value crags (if this is the only way to keep climbing open). Making a significant one-off donation will contribute to our Trust fund and empower us to save crags when access crises occur.

If you are interested in making a donation of over $1,000, please get in touch so we can arrange a bank transfer that avoids any credit card processing fees. We will respond by phone or email.

Can I claim a tax refund?

You can claim a personal tax refund of up to 33% of your donations for each financial year. You can even re-donate this tax credit back to ACAT to increase your impact! Find out more about how to claim or re-donate your refund.

If you donated on behalf of an organisation, see our advice on tax incentives for company donors and sponsorship.

We will email you a tax summary download link each April for all your donations made before the end of March each year, with instructions on how to claim your tax refund. Contact us if you have not received your tax summary by 30 April, or if you need us to re-send your tax summary.

How can I help minimise transaction fees?

ACAT does not receive the full amount you donate. Our card processor Stripe charges us a fee of 2.5% plus 30 cents per transaction. So the overall percentage of fees is higher for small donations like $5 (where the fees would be $0.43).

Consider donating just a little more to cover fees – you can use the “custom amount” option.

If you are donating under $10/month, you could make an equivalent higher yearly donation rather than a low monthly donation (ie $60 a year rather than $5 a month).

What email will I receive if I donate?

Email relating to your donations will be sent by www@acat.org.nz. If you do not receive these emails, please check your junk/spam mailbox, and check any spam-filtering rules you may have set up. You may wish to whitelist acat.org.nz as a trusted sender, to ensure your email provider does not block any email from us.

We will send you a confirmation email when you make your initial donation. This will contain a link to download a PDF receipt, and a link you can use to cancel repeat payments.

We will also sign you up to our occasional email newsletters. These contain an unsubscribe link, which will unsubscribe you from the newsletter only.

At the end of each tax year, in early April, we will email you a link to download a full PDF tax summary for the year.

We will not bother you with further emails unless a repeat payment fails – ie if your card has insufficient funds, has expired, or been lost or replaced. If that happens, you will receive an email each time we retry the payment (up to 5 retries). This email contains a link to renew your failing donation – use this to update your credit card details if needed – and a link to cancel repeat payments.