Thanks for your comment, Rasool.
We’re happy to provide as much info as we can here but I just want to make clear that, ultimately, it’s your call about whether you claim tax relief on this donation.
We do think we haven’t been sufficiently clear about how donations to EA Global work and we’ll be revisiting this language in due course to make things clearer. Addressing a few other points:
Our payment platform is set up to receive payments, and to generate receipts. A purchase receipt does not change the fact that this was a donation to a charity.
Re: whether tickets recoup costs: EA Global conferences cost >£1k per person per event (though that’s coming down) so the suggested donation amount wouldn’t cover the costs of one attendee. Our goal isn’t to maximise donations and break even, so while we’re very grateful for all donations, we want to ensure the event is accessible to a wide range of people.
Re: HMRC rules: As above, our goal isn’t to cover our costs through ticket sales—and we view giving free tickets as part of our wider charitable purposes—so this part of the HMRC guidance doesn’t apply to us.
RE: applications: Filtering all applications and then only inviting selected people to register for a free event is allowed within HMRC rules—provided the event is open to a sufficiently wide section of the public, it is fine to require attendees to meet some standards (e.g. demonstrating a genuine interest in the topics at the conference, before they are accepted and then invited to donate). CEA only asks people to make a donation once they have been accepted to attend the event.
Again, thanks so much for your comments here.
Thanks for your comment.
We’ve mentioned elsewhere that we might revisit the decision not to claim Gift Aid after the event, and so we’re planning to send around Gift Aid Declaration forms to donors soon. We think this would be helpful so we can preserve the option of claiming Gift Aid on these donations in the future.
We think the HMRC guidance to individuals is not very clear, and thanks for your prompt to check this. We have looked into it, and consulted our external advisors and we do not think that it is a requirement of personal tax relief that the individual donor signs a Gift Aid Declaration form. However, as HMRC’s own guidance isn’t consistently clear on this, and as we’d like to keep the option of claiming the Gift Aid afterwards, we’d like to send around GAD forms and will be in touch with donors to do this.
This thread has prompted us to pay closer attention here, so thank you (everyone in this thread) for flagging it!