Recently we’ve been working with a client to review their historic donations, leading us to identify a significant chunk of claimable Gift Aid that was sitting unclaimed.
We were able to build a workflow that empowered staff to spot where Gift Aid declarations were missing and fill those gaps by collecting new declarations without interfering with their donation or membership payments.
What is Gift Aid and why is it relevant?
For UK charities, Gift Aid is a powerful way to increase the value of donations at no extra cost to your supporters. When a donor completes a valid declaration, you can reclaim the basic rate tax on their gift, typically boosting income by 25%. But this only works if the declaration is present and in date. Over time, data quality drifts, contact records go out of sync, and donations that should be eligible for Gift Aid simply aren’t being claimed.
Our client had been using the UK Gift Aid extension for a number of years. We found that some contributions had been created without an accompanying Gift Aid declaration, and others had declared their donations were ineligible at the time of donation. In both instances no Gift Aid could be claimed for these donations.
Building a manageable Gift Aid workflow
Search Kit allowed us to build flexible, dynamic searches that pull across contacts, contributions and declarations in ways that weren’t previously possible with basic searches. For example, we could identify:
- Donors that have indicated their donations are not eligible for Gift Aid within the last 4 years. (We decided not to include anyone with a declaration made within the last 6 months to avoid chasing recent donors unnecessarily)
- Donors with no Gift Aid declaration
Once we had those cohorts in view, it became a much more straightforward exercise to start cleaning the data, re-engaging donors for updated declarations. Ultimately maximising Gift Aid claims that were already right there in the system.
Thanks to Form Builder, and a few tweaks to custom field settings we were able to whip up a new public Gift Aid declaration form that allowed contacts to record a new declaration separate from the contribution form and opt in to claiming Gift Aid on their donations dating back four years and into the future.
Turning the process into reusable tools
The handy Search Kits that we used in order to identify potentially “missed” Gift Aid are now included in the latest release of the UK Gift Aid extension. For example:
- A search that highlights individuals with a contribution history but no Gift Aid declaration stored on their contact record.
- A public form that can be used to manage the declaration updates independently of any contribution workflows.
Now we're at the end of this project, our hope is that we’ve been able to unlock some extra income for our client with the backdated claim. But more than that, longer term we’re confident that there are ways to keep on top of their Gift Aid potential moving forwards.
One of the things that keeps us excited at Third Sector Design is spotting things hidden in plain sight.
You can read more about the steps we took in this blog post on the our website.
And if you are interested in learning more about how we’re helping organisations make the most of Gift Aid using CiviCRM get in touch.
