I was trying to think who would have good ideas about this and figured who better than the tech-savvy peeps of the Monzo community!
I’d love your advice on how you’d to go about getting a donor to link their payment card to enable Gift Aid before they tap on a contactless terminal to donate to charity.
We’re working with TAP London, they currently claim £0 of Gift Aid because of the nature of their fundraising. Donors do have the option of donating on their website also but they receive the majority of donations on their contactless terminals based all around London.
The startup I’m working for are helping them with a Gift Aid solution and I would love to hear any ideas you have of how you’d get a donor to link their card to enable Gift Aid before they tap on a contactless terminal. The bigger picture is that once they have signed up for free and linked their card, any future donations to any charity using the same service will also automatically receive Gift Aid.
The only good ideas I’ve had to help TAP London so far are having the donor come from another charity being already signed up or signing up on their website when they donate.
How would you capture the audience pre donation?
The aim is about building a network of donors that are eligible for Gift Aid, make a one-time declaration that applies to all charities that are signed up. So whenever they donate to those charities the declarations are automatically made, claims sent to HMRC and the GA is sent directly to the charity.
Your help is so very much appreciated, thanks in advance guys!!
This isn’t a Monzo specific request and you would need a much larger solution here.
You would need some form of client database to record the information and consents for Gift Aid. You would then need to tie this into your merchant systems for customers making a payment at the POS.
You would need a lot of infrastructure for this one.
There’s already systems like in store cashback companies where they see all transactions made to specific merchants by a specific card, that’s the sort of tech you need I’d say.
(Btw your post is probably flagged as you’re a new user and it should get approved some time)
It’s certainly something that banks could potentially look into adopting into their systems one day but yes you’re right it’s not Monzo specific and I hope it’s ok for me to ask this here!
@kolok and @StuartMac you’re both pretty spot on! But I wasn’t clear; let me explain a bit better, I just began working for a startup that has a solution which uses tech to automate Gift Aid and we’re starting with contactless donations. We’ve just signed up a new charity that has contactless terminals positioned all around London. They rely on donations from the public to tap and donate £3 when they pass a terminal and that money goes to lots of charities in the UK with a shared focus of helping the homeless.
What I thought I’d ask here is how would you feel about linking your card to a solution that won’t charge you a penny but will automatically add an extra 25% in Gift Aid to any donation that you make to a charity that has signed up to that same service. The donor pays nothing ever and the charity don’t need to do any processing or admin, everything is taken care of they just wait for the Gift Aid to arrive directly from HMRC.
We’ve got the system all set up and in place and are now bringing charities on board, all that needs to happen now is for donors to sign up and I would love to hear thoughts from tech-savvy Monzo users as to what would make them feel comfortable signing up to a solution like this? If they ever would and any ideas of how to help charities that aren’t donor-facing (like TAP London) encourage sign ups! I hope that makes sense! Happy to clarify further if needed, it’s not the simplest thing to explain hence the search for insights! Thanks so much!
Personally, the big thing for me is that I wouldn’t want a third party seeing all my banking transactions and then I assume you’d need to share that with a lot of other companies too.
I also don’t like gifting money to charities as I feel that only a tiny percentage of what I give actually goes to the cause after everyone else has taken a cut. I’d much rather volunteer my time, donate some unwanted items etc.
Hi Ordog,
Thanks so much for your feedback! Yeah that’s a good point! The great thing about this solution is that we’re working with the terminal providers themselves and so will only see the donations that you make to charities that have signed up. All other transactions won’t be shared, only those that can have Gift Aid added to them, would that make a difference with you?
I see what you’re saying about how you’d rather give your time, I guess this would be more suitable for those that wanted to give but couldn’t spare their time. Would transparency around pricing be a big help with your decision as a donor to go for something like this?
Thank you again for your response! It’s so lovely to hear some fresh thoughts on this and get some external, useful input! Very much appreciated!
This is probably the most important thing to emphasise to encourage signups. Can you automatically apply Gift Aid to any historic donations?
I think it would be good to offer additional incentives. The only one I can think of offhand would be to potentially provide a service where you automatically send a list of transactions (if you’re able) to help with tax reporting.
Awesome! You’re so right! It’s like their whole lifetime of future giving will be automatically boosted
We will be able to soon! At the moment it’s just donations made after sign up but once we have the correct requirements covered we will be able to back claim up to 4 years… really excited about that part!
Yep we do exactly that! Basically any donations that they make that we Gift Aid on their behalf will be recorded in their dashboard along with dates and the charity that they donated to, this will help them with their tax reporting. We see this being really beneficial particularly for High Rate Taxpayers.
Yep! We have a close relationship with HMRC and you’re so right it does make things easier, there are a lot of issues with the current Gift Aid systems so they are welcoming some innovations in this department.
It’s so great to hear how well you understand it! It’s not a simple solution to get your head around, a lot of policies and tech and human habits. We’ve been working on it for a while and are in a great place but it’s now the donor incentives to encourage! Along with people experiencing the product which we hope goes down well! Getting the word out in the correct way with the right message is so so important so I truly appreciate your thoughts! Thank you
I think the concept is a interesting one, but the logistics would be terrible?
First you would have to convince people to register a card with a 3rd party which will be an uphill battle in itself. But then what happens when the card holder is no longer eligible to give gift aid? Where and who does the responsibility lay with to un-register? Do you think people would actively unregister? And if not, would either you or the charity then be complicit in gift aid fraud?
Why do you need to link cards? Can’t you just have an option on the terminal or a connected device to agree to gift aid if eligible? Or am I missing something?
Or is it because you have to put your name and address to qualify and you’re collecting from unattended contactless terminals?
It’s an interesting idea however, and something you could possibly get people to opt-into when they donate online or sign up to a bank account. But the difficult thing is convincing people to let you have access to their transaction data (no matter how indirectly or targeted) just for the fairly rare occasion they may donate.
I could probably be tempted if for example when signing up for a Monzo account there was an option to automatically apply gift aid for qualifying transactions made with this card.
But then again it might just be easier to have a connected tablet with the terminal that, after tapping, prompts you to enter your name, house number and post code to boost your donation by 25%.
Or… You could do what flux do: have a call to action in eligible banking apps after a qualifying transaction that applies Gift Aid.
Yeah it’s not the easiest challenge to be taking on, but then again many people already fill in forms to add Gift Aid and this sign up takes little more effort and sets them up for the year. We’re initially adding Gift Aid to contactless donations, but are working on SMS giving, Direct Debit and all other methods of donating so it will become the one location where people can manage their Gift Aiding abilities and receive reports each year.
Donors can disable their account and because they are asked to reauthorise ever year the chances of claiming ineligible Gift Aid is reduced, the responsibility lies with the donor, just like it does with other methods. We’re also working closely with HMRC to determine when someone is eligible to gift aid and how we can avoid mis-claiming, there’s so much that doesn’t work with the current Gift Aid claiming process, HMRC are keen to have a better process in place. I hope that answers a lot of your questions
Thanks again! If you have any other questions, I’d love to hear them
There’s a good idea in here somewhere that could be good for charities. How about a single declaration for Gift Aid within Monzo that effectively gives cover for all charitable donations. Any donations to charities on your Monzo card or via Direct Debit could then have this auto-added. No extra pain for the user, lots of benefit for receiving charities.
Spot on. The ultimate ideal way to go about it is to work by connecting all of the charities with all of the banks. as you rightly said no extra pain for the user, lots of benefit for receiving charities and HMRC are happy too… heaven. Just plain and simply more money reaching those that need it most.
Our current solution is certainly not the most ideal one, we’ve spoken to banks in the past they are most often focused elsewhere, we’ll get there in time! Just got to keep trying!
Yes the transaction itself needs to be linked to the donor.
Definitely, this is certainly the ideal, the donor adopting solution through signing up and linking their card is definitely not the easiest and we’d love to move on from this and create something that is easy and simple for everyone involved.
This is definitely an idea that we’ve had but some of the charities that we are working with, want to keep their visitor/donor journey to be impacted or slowed down at the point of donation… So we’re having to think outside the box in terms of donor acquisition!
Alongside this consumer-facing product we are also currently building an API that charities can directly integrate with and we will just become a facilitator for all things Gift Aid.
Yeah true, maybe their drive to help the cause will encourage them to sign up. Keep in mind we only see the donation transactions no other transactions are visible to us and they are solely used to generate Gift Aid.
I think any journey should be retrospective, rather than up-front, otherwise you end up reducing the actual amount of donations made.
I can’t think of any particularly smart way to get people to register other than promoting the URL next to the terminals.
I don’t really get the complaints other people are making about people being reluctant to authorise you to see their transactions, I don’t really think that’s part of the flow here, it’s not practically much different to Perkbox and others where you can add your card numbers and you get credit back when you use those cards with certain vendors.
Yeah the retrospective addition of Gift Aid is also something that donors are used to. We did have an open banking solution set up but found that 80% of donors were dropping off the point of adding their bank as it made them feel nervous, even though it was super safe and we are FCA approved! We’ve recently moved to the card-linking solution and are working on fulfilling the requirements of obtaining PAR so that we will be able to store card numbers, in the meantime we can’t back claim and so won’t be able to see any donations made before a card is linked… we’ve learnt a lot about patience building this! haha for now we are working on adopting donors before the point of donation. That’s no reason to say that we can’t advertise near the terminals still and then capture following donations but yeah, we can’t wait to have the power to back claim!
I’ve always thought a universal donor card system, like the NHS organ and transplant donor system, would be great.
Just scan your donor card to provide the required details, or even enter a donor ID number, then make your donation. No need to link or worry about using a specific card. It could also be used for non-cash donations
Sounds like a cool idea, how would you pair the donation to the donor and donation amount? Or would they be paying with the donor card? Sorry if I’m missing something
The donor card would just be a kind of ID card - not for payments. Then you could use it with any card or other form of payment or donation.
No idea how you’d link it up to the transaction at POS. Charity shops near me use handwritten lists to record donations, so
It would be even better if this was a universal HMRC scheme with a simple form to create a donor ID card linked to your PAYE or UTR number, or whatever.
Very much appreciated!
So we’re having to think outside the box in terms of donor acquisition!