I brought together a host of individual spreadsheets of previous supporters, potential supporters, football clubs and sponsors into the new system which then gave me a better picture of those we were going to ask for help and what their potential to give or get involved may be.

As it turned out, an extra, unexpected benefit of seeing all our supporters history in one place was being able to quickly calculate the total of what they had given over their lifetime. I also noticed that I didn’t have gift aid declarations in place for many of them. I immediately wrote to our previous donors thanking them for their support over the years and included a message about treating their donations as gift aid eligible unless they told us otherwise. By doing so, we were able to claim around £35,000 worth of unclaimed gift aid dating back 4 years. It was a huge boost to the start of our campaign and only took a few days of focused work to achieve, with the help of our new CRM system.

Since joining BTA, much of the work that I have done as a consultant has focused on working with charities to ensure that their databases are well organised, segmented and set up to highlight gift aid opportunities. Some issues I’ve spotted, resulting in charities losing gift aid money, include: gifts being recorded to events when in fact they were donations given in lieu of the donor attending the events; gifts not being treated as individual donations i.e. donations that accompany membership; and gift aid not claimed on donations that were given more than 2 years ago because there was not a gift aid declaration in place at that time for the donor. Most CRM databases now come with the capacity to record whether or not a donation is gift aid eligible. A gift aid report can then be drawn from the system, highlighting all the eligible donations that have not had gift aid claimed against them in the last four years. This simple exercise, as demonstrated above, can bring in thousands of pounds for your organisation!

If you’d like support in unlocking your gift aid, please contact me: [email protected] or telephone 01786 542 224.