Each year, you must send an email or letter to every donor who’s donated items have generated £20 or more of sales (and each 3 years for those who have sales but not £20 or above).
At the end of the tax year, we will send you a spreadsheet which will include a list of all the people you need to contact with email addresses and postal addresses, and the amount to add to the letter – you can then use this for email/mail merging the letters (you can also optionally get us to do this step for you).
You can use either HMRC’s letter template (provided by HMRC charities) or your own modified template, and mail merge the spreadsheet that we have supplied. There is a guide from Microsoft on using mail merge here. Once you have posted your letters, please reply to the email you received from us that included your spreadsheet. You must do this the same day the whole mailing has been sent out.
We will then email you after 21 days to inform you that you can go ahead and make your Gift Aid submission. Do not make a submission until we email you after the 21 day period has ended.
If you do get someone replying to you during the 21 days who states they are no longer happy to Gift Aid, you need to edit their record to state this, and no further submissions will be made for that donor. You can do this in both tengoPOS and tengoCloud – in tengoPOS, you may have a ‘donor lookup’ or ‘find customer’ button. You can also access this function by typing in \\FCUS and pressing ENTER on your screen or keyboard. In tengoCloud, you will find the same under CRM > Constituents. In both cases, search for the donor in question, select them, click edit, and on the Gift Aid tab, un-tick ‘Gift Aid’. The tick box is shown below circled in green. To be on the safe side, if the donor is already un-ticked you should first tick the box and click save, and then un-tick it again and click save. It will ask you for the audit how the instruction was received.
After the 21 day preiod has ended, and we have emailed you recommending you complete a submission, all donors where you have not manually registered a response will be eligible to be part of a Gift Aid claim.
During the 21 day period you should get on top of your Gift Aid failed list. Here you can correct any post code/name errors etc. You should then clear any errors on the failed report. There’s a guide here to help you with this process.
You should then make your submission as soon as possible after we have emailed you with the go-ahead to do so, which can be done in the normal way. The guide on making submissions is here should you need it.