Justgiving launches online vouchers for Christmas
Howard Lake | 20 November 2003 | News
Online donation site Justgiving.com is offering an alternative Christmas present this year – tax-efficient vouchers to donate to charity.
Gold, frankincense and myrrh are all very well but they’re not very tax-efficient. Justgiving.com’s new Christmas voucher service enables you to give the gift of a charity donation to a friend or family member, and make it go further using the Gift Aid. Just decide how much you wish to give, buy it online, and then the recipient receives an e-card with your message and the option to donate it to a charity of their choice. Even better, the donation can be tax-efficient if you complete the Gift Aid declaration when buying the gift.
Tax-efficient charity vouchers are not new. Charities Aid Foundation was selling them around 10 years ago for donors who used their CAF Charity Account. Justgiving.com’s service however updates the concept and makes it available to anyone with a credit or debit card.
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When buying the voucher you first need to choose one of four Christmas e-cards. Then you simply decide how much to donate – Justgiving’s suggested amounts are £10, £25, £50, £100 and £250, but you can choose your own figure. You customise the subject line of the e-mail you wish to send to the recipient and include your name, to prevent the recipient mistaking it for unsolicited e-mail. You then round that off with a short message to the recipient.
The recipient then gets to choose which charity to donate their gift to, selecting from over 400 UK charities arranged by category such as children, disability and social welfare. The redemption process takes seconds once you’ve selected the beneficiary charity, and you will receive an e-mail notification when the voucher has been redeemed, including a standard thank-you message from the beneficiary charity.
This simple but effective service will require further promotion by participating charities. It would make a useful news item on their Web sites and on any e-mail newsletters they plan to send out in the run-up to Christmas.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.