Charitable Solutions

Supported giving helps charities optimise gift aid collection and in driving cashless donations

Supported Giving, through its solutions arm InverOak is a leading provider of smarter communications and payment solutions to businesses and charities.

Through our charity arm – Supported Giving we have been developing specific solutions for the charity sector focusing on two key areas:

Optimizing gift aid with donations and recovery Supporting cashless donations by using mobile payments

Claiming gift aid as a charity

This is a complicated process for a charity to track Gift Aid Declarations from donors and then make the subsequent claims to the HMRC, but is an invaluable way of increasing the overall donation from a donor by at least 25% of the donation amount. In the FY 2014/15, Gift Aid to charities amounted to £1.19 bn.

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21% of all on line donations were made using a mobile device but Gift Aid has not been claimed on one third of donations – costing the sector £540m in 2017.
GASD launched in 2013, provides a way for charities to claim on small cash donations but uptake has been lower than expected.

Did you know that you as the charity can go back up to 4 previous tax years for a donor? We believe that many charities currently do not take advantage of this, which could considerably add to your fundraising and provide substantial benefits for the charitable cause.

So if a donor, (who is a standard rate taxpayer) had made donations of £300 in the past 4 tax years, this could be worth another £100 to the charity if one could seek the donor’s permission to go back 4 tax years. With an average donation of £40 per annum, that nearly equates to two and a half years’ worth of donations.

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How supported giving can help

Supported Giving is focused on working with leading charities to help you recover, with the donor’s permission, any previous years’ donations where Gift Aid had not been previously claimed.

Supported Giving can help your charity by:

Contacting Previous Donors

Contacting previous donors by ‘phone, text, email, mail, (where under GDPR you have their permission to contact them) and gaining their permission to recover the Gift Aid elements from donations made within the past four tax years.

(You would provide electronic access to your donor CRM database, which then ingests the donor data into Support Giving’s charity portal for processing.)

And we take all the leg work away from you re-contacting donors to get their permission. Any concerns about this being intrusive marketing, potentially in breach of GDPR regulations is unfounded, The ICO have confirmed that these communications to past donors would constitute service messages rather than marketing messages.

Declaration

We would contact the donor and create a record of their Declaration.

Managing Donors & Historic Claims

An easy to use online portal would be used to ingest past donor data where it will be processed by the Supported Giving team to provide a list of eligible historic claims for sending to the HMRC.

It would also show individual claims successfully lodged and the current status on these claims. Graphical representations would show the status of the outbound communications to contact past donors by email, SMS and calls out, and the overall percentage success rates of attempts by Supported Giving to recover Gift Aid elements on past donations.

What Will This Cost?

The charity will not be charged anything up front – Supported Giving will take its fee as a modest percentage of the additional Gift Aid payments, only when they are processed and approved by the HMRC.

So it’s a “win -win” for all parties:

The donor’s happy, (as they are effectively giving more but it’s not costing them anymore).
The charity gets a sizeable percentage increase in donations – by at least 25% and it’s costing you nothing up front – you only pay our fee when the Gift Aid is clawed back.

Driving cashless donations

Did you know that nearly 80% of people donate by giving money to collection tins or buckets – which are not normally eligible for Gift Aid?

And approximately 21% of all online donations in 2017 were made using a mobile device ? In 2006, 62% of payments were made in cash, compared to today, where 40% of payments are made with cash. By 2026 this figure is expected to drop, to just 21%.

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With Supported Giving, and our experience in mobile optimization and payments, we are ideally placed to help you optimize your cashless donations – whether it be facilitating donations from a billboard site, (where a donors sees your emotive charity advert), or off the magazine page; or from seeing your appeal for donors at an outdoor event or through a street charity street collector, who has a QR code displayed.

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How can we help you increase your volume of cashless donations?

It’s all about creating frictionless payments – making it as easy as possible for the person to make that donation and claim Gift Aid, making their declaration at the time of the donation.

Using QR codes, clearly positioned on a poster, collecting tin or even a tee shirt, a person could go up, take their iPhone or Android device and simply point their camera at the QR code.

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(On iPhones, since the release iOS 10 in September 2016, there is no need to download the QR reader software that was necessary to read a QR code. We believe with this development on iOS, that this will see an increasing adoption of QR codes to launch content, through mobile optimized web pages and payment pages.)

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Text2Donate

Supported Giving can also off a Text2Donate service, either on a dedicated charity code or on a shared charity code with keyword, which identifies the charity.

How it works

Payments can then be made through Apple Pay or GPay, for the required donation amount. (Note – these are not subject to the current £30 contactless scanning transaction limit.)
As anyone signing up to either of these two payment methods will have already provided their email and postal address – one could automatically send back a confirmation of donation made, with acknowledgement for a Gift Aid donation.

An additional payment option could also be added using Supported Businesses Merchant Payment Gateway, supported by Worldpay, (both GDPR and PCI / DSS compliant) or the charity’s merchant account could be added as an option on the payments page.

Explore an actual live application of this service

View our solutions

Testimonials

We were looking to implement solution to as to how to maximise fundraising income from audiences at our ‘Live at Chelsea’ concert series. Traditionally income would be generated through bucket collections but this year that was no longer an option so we need to find a solution quickly.

Supported Giving quickly set up a ‘text to give’ number and QR based mobile site to receive donations, working with our internal team throughout the lead up period and during the concerts. They were always available and I am delighted to say against our initial expectations income generated actually exceeded previous years bucket collections. The data collected offers us the opportunity for a conversion rate to yield additional life time value. I have no hesitation in recommending Supported Giving.

Allan McLaren, Head of Corporate and Fundraising, Royal Hospital Chelsea

Greenhouse Stores are the leading online retailer of greenhouses in the UK – we have been working with InverOak for 5 1/2 years. As a company they are incredibly flexible, providing a seamless secure payment solution for our online and telephone trading. They handle the PCI compliance and data protection rules, so that we can focus on building our business.

We are able to access order information remotely via their online CRM portal – allowing us to assist our own customers instantly, even when out of the office. The InverOak team are enthusiastic and proactive – building integrated services to meet our requirements whilst responding to our requests promptly and efficiently. Choosing to work with InverOak was a great decision for our company, saving us both time and money.

Chris Mossom, Owner, Greenhouse Stores

Michele Knight commented “InverOak are one of the best in their field. Since starting with InverOak my turnover has increased literally tenfold. I owe much of my success to Roger Bigwood and his excellent, innovative team.

They have zero competition in this industry as they are always creating new features and lead the pack in all areas. I have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone. Not only are they brilliant they are also charming, patient and always available if you have a problem”.

Michele Knight, Owner, micheleknight.com

Quality Telecom is an established provider of telecoms and digital solutions to companies in Spain. We then had a specific customer service solution requirement for a major travel company, using 0800 and call routing through IVR to our SIP gateway in Spain, which we needed to get up and running quickly for the UK market.

Supported Business responded quickly to our needs and had the solution tested, up and running in days. We are happy to count them as our partners and first point of contact if we need any telecoms or digital solutions, in the UK.

Tony Esturrica, Sales Manager, Quality Telecom