Thousands of UK charities benefit from the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) each year. Many organisations continue to look for ways to make the most revenue from it. This article will outline some strategies for ensuring your charity claims as much of its yearly GASDS allowance as possible.
Recent research by Third Sector revealed some shocking results with regard to payroll schemes within charities: although 7 out of 10 large UK charities offered payroll giving to their employees, average employee participation was only 1.7%. How can this be? Charities cited several reasons; some placed more importance on staff effort than staff donations, while others opined that it was the pennies that mattered, and not the regular revenue.
Facebook’s new “donate” button promised to make it much easier for people to donate to their favourite charities. According to one test, however, the results were not as positive as was hoped. A UK Facebook page having over 400,000 likes and 100+ new likes weekly reportedly didn’t generate any donations in the first month of displaying the button, nor did it receive many clicks.
The support of a philanthropic billionaire can completely transform the work of an organisation. If a billionaire makes your charity their pet cause, then you can expect an immediately raised public profile, critical injections of funds and committed support for your projects, not to mention the strong possibility of a generous legacy.
The proposed Fundraising Preference Scheme has been a hot topic of discussion among fundraisers across the charitable sector, and is now the subject of a paper produced by the Charity Commission working group tasked to consider the subject. The proposals have met with a mixed reception from fundraisers and, if implemented, will certainly affect the way supporter data is managed and fundraising campaigns are conducted. There is currently a consultation running on the details of the scheme until 31st March 2016. This blog briefly goes into the details of the proposals and how fundraising professionals may have to respond to its challenges.
Many charitable organisations are now using CRM software, or customer relationship management software to manage their fundraising efforts. In fact, using this kind of software has become ubiquitous in the fundraising realm over the past few years.
The last 20 years have seen huge changes in the way that charities conduct fundraising campaigns. The third sector has become far more professional, focused and targeted in the way that it fundraises and manages donors. For large charities, such as Shelter, Macmillan, RSPB and Oxfam, this is resulted in a massive increase in income through fundraising, and a subsequent expansion of their operations. Much of this has been made possible by specialist fundraising CRM software packages that are tailor-made to meet the needs of charities.