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The Future of Gift Aid

An industry-wide collaboration to automate Gift Aid and unlock over £564 million for UK charities every year.

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Swiftaid mascot Swifty holds a flag, an outline of the UK is in the background. The UK is covered in hearts and the flag being held by Swifty says Gift Aid it
Logos of Future of Gift Aid collaborators including Streeva, University of Surrey, JustGiving National Trust, Cancer Research UK and more

The Project

Imagine a world where Gift Aid just happened; no guesswork; no paperwork; charities simply received an extra 25% from the government every time a UK taxpayer donated.

The Future of Gift Aid is an industry-wide collaborative project dedicated to automating the entire Gift Aid process across all methods of donation. The solution is set to operate within the current Gift Aid policy whilst increasing the amount of funding that reaches charities. It will help reduce what goes unclaimed; reduce the £180 million claimed in error and help over 126,000 charities that currently do not benefit from Gift Aid finally take advantage of the valuable tax relief.

Swiftaid mascot Swifty looking sad

Charities miss out on £564 million every year in unclaimed Gift Aid and right now they are struggling more than ever!

The Technology

The technical aspect of the project is being led by Streeva through technology that already exists in their launched product: Swiftaid. In 2018, Streeva and the University of Surrey, co-funded by Innovate UK, developed Swiftaid. The project resulted in a pilot with Visa and the Natural History Museum where Swiftaid was recognised by HMRC as the first solution to automate Gift Aid on contactless donations. The innovative development methods used within Swiftaid can be found in an academic paper published in the journal ‘Formal Aspects of Computing’. See the integrators already consuming the initial tech developed from this project and further progressive developments.

The corporate logo of both Streeva and Swiftaid
Symbols for contactless payments, direct debit, SMS and web payments whirl around the giftaid it logo

The Strategy

With involvement of key industry members in the project, the technology can be developed and applied through integrations covering a wide variety of donation methods. As solutions are established and fine-tuned within each workstream, they will be made available to a wider audience of integrators across the charity industry.

Key project objectives

👤 Demonstrate the ability for HMRC to use an individual’s tax status to determine if a declaration is valid.

👯‍♀️ Demonstrate integrations to aid donor acquisition.

⚙️ Demonstrate automated Gift Aid across a number of different donation methods.

📒 A report that captures the work done, providing suggested revisions to Gift Aid policy.

Agreed workstreams

The collaborative project is broken down into 6 workstreams with involvement of key stakeholders from the charity and finance industries, academia and government.

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1. HMRC

To demonstrate an API integration with HMRC to determine the tax status of an individual to endorse Gift Aid declarations they create.

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2. SMS

To demonstrate an automated solution for text donations that meets HMRC requirements, with the aim to support both retrospective and ongoing Gift Aid claims.

A shop
3. Retail

To identify methods of attributing Gift Aid within retail giving.

A money bag with wings
4. Policy/Commercial

To capture and address any compliance/commercial issues, focused on keeping a clean separation between technical feasibility.

A donor smiling
5. User

Focusing on the user experience to understand why Gift Aid is missed and what can be done to ensure Gift Aid is applied where possible.

A bank
6. Banking

Focusing on identifying the best use cases in which someone’s bank account can be used to automate/simplify the Gift Aid process.

Collaborators

Logo of Charity Tax Group

“The power of people coming together sharing individual expertise is something quite incredible.”

Richard Bray - Charity Tax Group

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