Change for the Better – give your pennies to charity

Lincolnshire’s 19,000 NHS staff give the odd penny from their pay packets to charity at, say, 50p each a month.  Your local Foundation doubles the gift.

Result:       £228,000 a year exclusively to Lincolnshire charities.

Choose a theme

Agriculture & Rural Communities

Health & wellbeing

Civil society

Sport & young people

Eco construction

Case Study 2

Just 3% of Lincolnshire’s 33,500 Local Authority staff give £8 net a month from their pay packets to charity.

Your local Foundation doubles the gift.

Result:       £240,000 a year exclusively to Lincolnshire charities

Lincolnshire Community Foundation charges just 1.2%

a year to cover administration and grant making.

Payroll Giving

                                                                                                GWH October 2009

The rationale:

Giving to Charity direct from your pay packet makes absolute sense.  It’s easy and effective.  The employee fills in one form, the business another; your payroll agent does all the rest.  It’s cost effective with a 20% plus tax concession.

Your local Foundation will double all donations.

We can channel gifts to local causes.

Payroll giving through your local Foundation:

The Lincolnshire Community Foundation (charity number 1092328; see the Commission’s website www.charitycommission.gov.uk) is your biggest independent (we are not government funded), local grant making Trust.  We’ve given away £5 million from the Humber to the Wash in the last 6 years.  All our giving is local and grassroots.  We fund small voluntary groups, rather than big well-established organisations with big staff costs. 

Our motto is small grants, BIG difference. 

We are the experts on local giving, direct from payroll, to local good causes.

Context & statistics:

Government, local and national, is cutting costs, benefits and grant programmes.  Life will get much harder for charities, especially the small, local, volunteer-led groups.  Instead, and increasingly, local communities will have to support themselves through local fund raising, in the context that:

·       The general public does not give regularly or in a planned way [we give less than 0.7% of our salaries (Charities Aid Foundation)].

·       What we do give, or 95% of it, goes to national charities,

mainly to religious and health causes.

·       Only 3% of the UK workforce gives direct from payroll.

·       In the USA (where state intervention is uncommon), 35% of people give direct from payroll.

So, we need to stimulate regular, local giving – ideally through payroll.

Payroll Giving/2

The process is simple.  There are just 2 forms to fill in:  i) staff elect to give to a nominated charity or theme,  ii) the employer signs an agreement with the approved (by HM Revenue & Customs) payroll giving agency – in this case, the Lincolnshire Community Foundation. 

Each month your payroll department sends the Foundation just one cheque comprising the total of all payroll contributions plus a 4% administration fee [in some cases, the employer chooses to donate the admin fee].

The figures:

For example, ten staff each elect to give £10 a month direct from their pay packets; the cost to a basic rate tax payer is £8 a month.  The total monthly contribution is £100 plus £4 admin charge.

BUT up to April 2011, the Foundation guarantees to DOUBLE every gift.  A monthly gift of £8 (net) from ten staff, generates a massive £2,400 a year into permanent endowment.

What happens to your gifts?  They go into endowment funds.

Staff can choose one of 5 local themes to support:

·       Agriculture & Rural Communities (the LARC Fund)

·       Health & wellbeing (with income from “green burials”)

·       Civil society (based on the High Sheriffs’ law & order theme)

·       Sport & young people (originally the Lincolnshire Playing Fields fund)

·       Eco construction (supported by the Church & Community Partnership).

What do we do with our endowment funds?

We make grants from endowment at the rate of 4.8% per annum.  We also pay for our core costs, running the charity, doing the field work (visiting the hundreds of projects that apply for grants) and supporting our grants panels – we have 3 staff and 70 panelists, trustees and governors. Our target is £1 million plus for each theme so that we can give at least £240,000 a year away in grants. 

Lincolnshire Community Foundation