Thames Hospicecare - Just Giving

In preparing for the year's fundraising campaign I asked Sue what was the best way to make donating easy, below is her reply:

The very best thing will be to set up your own on-line electronic web site with www.justgiving.com. You load up your own image and story, you can also set your links to it off your site. Friends/colleagues sponsor you direct on the site. At the appropriate date the money is taken off their credit cards and the donation is automatically gift aided (if they have agreed.)

It is a really good way of dealing with sponsorship, people can use credit cards (which always seems popular) the gift aid (28p, in the £) is collected and you don't have to go round afterwards and collect the money! If you have companies paying you they may prefer to pay by cheque as they claim gift aid in a different way that benefits them.

You may also like to note that gift aid for individual’s is paid at the basic tax rate. If you have friends on a higher rate tax they can claim the difference back through their tax claim. There is an option at that point to gift aid that too or keep it.

Gift Aid makes a real difference and it works like this:

Gift Aid is worth an extra 28p on each £1 donated.
This is because a basic rate taxpayer needs to have earned £128.20 on which they will have been taxed at 22%, in order to take home £100.
If the taxpayer then donates £100, we can reclaim the tax payment of £28.20 form HRMC.

This mean that the donation can be increased by nearly 1/3 for free.

Higher rate taxpayers.

They pay 40%and are entitled to claim back the difference in tax paid (40%) and tax reclaimed by the charity (22%). The difference of 18% is reclaimed simply by inserting details of their charitable donations in their tax return.

Using the example of £100 donation/sponsorship, the taxpayer simply calculates 18% of the value of the gift to charity (£128 x 18%), reclaiming £23.00. In short, higher rate taxpayers benefit from a return of 23p for every £1 donated. He can either retain the £23.00 reducing the actual outgoing to £100 - £23.00 = £77 or pay it to the charity making a total gift of £100 + £28 + £23.00 = £151.00

Apologies if this is too much information but I know you are talking to a lot of people and the difference that gift aid makes to charities is huge AND £6m goes unclaimed each year!

The changes to the gift aid rules in the last budget won't hit us for anothe three years, phew! So whilst the rate has changed from 28p to 25p from April 2008 the government will make up the shortfall and it won't affect you or THc.

Cheers

Sue Lindsey
Fundraising and Marketing Manager
Direct Line - 01753 848955
Fax - 08456 128712
E-mail: sue.lindsey@thameshospicecare.org.uk

P.S. It took me 5 minutes to set up my Just Giving account and I’d never used their site before… excellent.

Justgiving.com

http://www.justgiving.com/businessinberkshire

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