Donating working from home tax claims to charities tackling child food poverty
Howard Lake | 27 October 2020 | Blogs
When the Government voted not to fund free school meals people and organisations across the UK were outraged. Local councils pledged to fund school meal vouchers in their areas, Marcus Rashford championed the campaign for Free School Meals. His tweets were added to Google Maps, and businesses across the country offered free meals during school holidays.
Coincidentally, as this played out in the news and on social media, Money Saving Expert published a blog post explaining how those who have worked from home over the last year may be eligible to claim tax relief.
If the government won’t use our taxes to fund free school meals for children facing poverty, we should https://t.co/wfDNptPuFc
— Roger Swannell (@rogerswannell) October 23, 2020
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Putting these together I could see how people could claim back tax and use that money to support charities that were tackling child poverty issues.
Bouncing the idea off John Thompson, the fundraising consultant behind the successful #FirstFiver campaign(s), he suggested tweeting about it to test the idea. It quickly became clear that the challenge for potential donors is that it isn’t quite a simple as just being asked for a donation. They are more barriers, such as how complicated it is to claim the tax relief on the Government website, and choosing which charity to donate to, so I set up a web page to try to explain it in three easy steps: Claim, Donate, Shout.
Claim, Donate, Shout
How to claim your working from home tax credit and donate to charities to support and feed children facing povertyhttps://t.co/gxf2MESfu9#WFH #FreeSchoolMeals
— Roger Swannell (@rogerswannell) October 23, 2020
Perhaps for many people the thought of making a donation to charity should come with a sense of sacrifice rather than a balancing of the books, but as the pandemic brings about increasing economic hardship for more and more people perhaps this is a way to contribute without cost, or even just a way to have a little extra money.
I’m not a fundraiser, so I don’t have any sense of how to measure a response to something like this, and I’m not a digital communications expert so my Twitter following is small and not influential, but perhaps the idea of using tax money claimed back from the Government to fund services for some of our most vulnerable little citizens that should be funded by taxes has some symmetry, and maybe even some sense to it.
Roger Swannell is a digital product manager interested in innovation in the charity sector, working in the open, entrepreneurial business models, and tech for good. More at rogerswannell.com.
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.