Gift Aid

Francesca Taylor

Hi,

Does anyone process their Gift Aid claim (R68) through RE? We are just starting the process and are keen to see how other organisations deal with lots of paper sponsorship forms?

Thanks

Austen Brown

@Francesca Taylor - In addition to asking this question here, I recommend you check out the UK Raiser's Edge User Support Forum on Facebook. There is a great group of users who can assist with Gift Aid questions.

Rachel Cavalier

@Francesca Taylor

We go through the paper sponsorship forms checking for everyone who has filled out their details for Gift Aid correctly, noting whether they have paid online (or if a parent has helpfully paid all of the donations on that form online) rather than their donation being sent with the form (so we don't count their donation twice). Then after taking note of any cheques or charity vouchers that have been sent with the forms, we attribute the cash payments to those people.

Usually we would go through activating one-off Gift Aid Declarations manually and adding a copy of the form to the person's record, but our last event like this had a LOT of forms so we're in the process of allocating the cash amounts and then will be importing the Gift Aid Declarations all in one go.

Inevitably we get a bag of forms and loose change/notes with some cheques handed in whenever we have an event with sponsor forms like this and it's always a time consuming process - particularly when you have to be aware of variations on “Grandpa Smith” and “Granny Jones” in different languages to filter out.

We're hoping to encourage the schools who have these events for us into using JustGiving or donating online more using the QR codes we print on the forms (this was really popular this year). We're also thinking about instead of the paper forms for our young supporters to take to their family and neighbours, if giving them cards with a QR codes and website URL might work as well.