Gift Aid - Running data for mailing - how to filter to eligible gifts

Hi Christine,


I'm wondering if the Gift Sub type would be able to help, we label our so that you can tell individual gifts from say group / organisation / Tickets ect. 


Rachel

You mentioned "if someone sends in an In mem gift with multiple cheques from lots of different people" - in this case, did the cheques from the different people get recorded on the sending person's record as a hard credit? 


The only thing I can think of that we have which is a little similar to that, is when someone gets sponsored for something and instead of sending in a bag of cash with their sponsor form with the various gift aid declarations filled out by the friends and family, decide to send us a cheque for the total. In this case, we can't claim on the friends and family - but if they sponsor themselves, we can claim the gift aid on that portion.  The total amount of the cheque is hard credited to them, but we enter it as two gifts - with one that has "apply gift aid rules" and the other (representing the donation from their sponsors) marked "set as not eligible."  For the scenario where someone sends in multiple cheques from lots of different people, (after attempting to match them against donors we already have records for) we create new constituent records for the different people who have sent cheques - and since we likely won't have a postal address for them you can scoop them out of a mailing since we'd mark them as "no valid address." It's a bit annoying to have all these records with just maybe a name and a single gift, but once in a while we get a donation further down the line where we can match them up against these.


For things like tickets, we have a gift attribute to set them apart and consistently mark them as "set as not eligible" too. In our case, this is also down to us having two different bank accounts - one for when people get a thing (like a ticket) in exchange for their gift and one for when they just get the warm fuzzy glow of donating to us (so pretty much all of the gifts that go in this account COULD be eligible for gift aid, providing it's not a charity voucher, payroll giving, from an organisation  (and these are excluded from gift aid claims by the rules in RE anyway) or the sponsor money case I mentioned where we'd mark those gifts explicitly not to claim gift aid on)


It sounds like the main conundrum is to find the people who have gifts that you could claim gift aid on? Are there any rules you can think of where you can say "we can definitely exclude gifts like this"? That way you can shave off at least some of the people where they'd be no reason to send a gift aid form. For the trickier ones, like the in mem scenario, maybe make the decision about whether to exclude all in mem gifts from this kind of mailing but instead, going forward on an individual basis, follow up after X amount of time with a gift aid form? Once you have that group of people, you could subtract "people who have a current valid gift aid declaration," to get the people you want to mail to. 


Gosh I think I waffled a bit there, but hopefully some of it might help!