Reflections on how CiviCRM can help UK charities uncover missed Gift Aid and reconnect with donors.

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.

Once we understood the problem, our next step was to create a reliable way for staff to identify affected donors. And for those donors to be able to update their declarations without interfering with their donation or membership payments. 

Identifying where Gift Aid had been missed

SearchKit 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 formbuilder, 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.

Our brief was to keep the public declaration form as simple as possible, whilst ensuring all the necessary details were collected to make it usable. In practice this meant collecting a declaration from the user alongside confirmation of their name and current address and postcode. These fields are required on a submission to HMRC, and are therefore stored together on each declaration. 

You can benefit from our experience

There are other clever searchkits we’ve been able to build in order to identify potentially “missed” Gift Aid, tools that are now included in the latest release of the UK Gift Aid extension. For example:

• A packaged search that highlights individuals with a contribution history but no Gift Aid declaration stored on their contact record.
• A formbuilder template that can be used to manage the declaration updates independently of any contribution workflows.

In this story we dug a little deeper and adapted these tools to identify individuals with a contribution history and a Gift Aid declaration updated within the last four years, excluding recent declarations dated within the last year. And created an email template to help fundraisers reach out to donors and supporters that may be eligible for Gift Aid.

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.

Read more about this project on the CiviCRM blog.