Did you know that HMRC has estimated there’s over £500m of unclaimed Gift Aid for this tax year alone? According to UKFundraising, charities have until the 5th of April to search for this missing revenue. However, this isn’t completely lost, as Gift Aid declarations can still be made after this date.

Gift Aid can be backdated to apply for gifts for up to 4 years, meaning data could be holding unclaimed Gift Aid revenue that charities don’t know about. As charity professionals, you will know there are certain qualifications needed to receive and qualify for Gift Aid; donor names and addresses must be valid from the UK. In some cases, however, human error or mistakes can occur, leading to data that does not meet HMRC’s requirements.

How can a charity validate their existing data?

Charities who have collected data and found it to be in a poor state, can benefit from a data cleansing service to cleanse and return updated and standardised details. Data8’s Data Cleansing services have been used by over 100 not for profit organizations to improve the quality of data they receive.

Alzheimer’s Society were able to enhance the quality of their data by using Data8’s services, resulting in additional revenue of over £240,000 from Gift Aid.

Click here to read more about how we supported Alzheimer’s Society with their data cleansing activities.

So, what are the benefits of using Data8’s Online Portal for Data Cleansing?

Our online portal is the easiest and fastest way to cleanse and standardise your data. Each file uploaded comes with a free, no obligation data quality audit which highlights the quality of the data provided and how it can be improved.

Benefits of using the Data8 Online portal to cleanse your data:

• We can process 50,000 records in under an hour, saving charities a lot of time and reducing manual activity.
• The portal is quick and easy to use and carries no annual license or set up fee, plus we offer discounted rates for charities.
• Charities can process addresses against the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address Files (PAF) to update, correct, and insert missing address elements whilst standardising formatting.
• Generate additional income by increasing the number of Gift Aid submissions accepted by HMRC.
• Receive exceptional support with a specialist charity expert on-hand to answer any queries you may have.

How can charities prevent poor quality data in the future?

By using validation software that captures correct information in real time, charities can prevent salacious names being used or invalid addresses being entered into systems at the point of capture. This means Gift Aid declarations would already be standardised and correct without the need for cleansing.

Data 8 offers both Name Validation and Address Validation solutions for charities to integrate into their systems where data is captured.

What to do next? 

With the 5th of April deadline fast approaching, it’s a good idea to review and validate your data to ensure you don’t miss out on thousands of pounds in lost Gift Aid revenue. Checking potential invalid names and addresses is a mammoth task that can take days to complete, but a validation and data cleansing service can do it in just a few hours.

Data8’s Email and Phone Validation service offers a free audit of the data prior to any purchasing commitment. Once happy with the audit, Data8 will then proceed to clean up and standardise names and addresses so they can be submitted to HMRC.

So, whether it’s salacious names used or human error with a simple typo, a validation tool and data cleansing service can help support charities regain confidence when applying and submitting for their Gift Aid revenue.

For more information on how Data8 can help you with your Gift Aid data, you can call us on +44 (0)151 355 4555 to speak to one of our client service experts.