You may be familiar with the term Gift Aid, but do you know why it’s so important for museums?
If you don’t already know, Gift Aid is a scheme available to charities, which means they can claim extra money from HMRC. As long as your visitors are UK tax payers and make the donation from their own funds, you can claim an extra 25p for every £1 that is paid. Not only is that a charitable contribution that your visitors can make during their ticket-buying process, but it’s an additional 25% extra in revenue for you.
The next question to consider is, how can your own museum visitor software support that process? There’s a few ways that you can maximise visitor donations with Gift Aid and we’ve put together some practical ways below.
Internal Training of Seasonal Staff
In order to implement a Gift Aid procedure during the ticket-buying process, you’ll need to ensure that your teams understand what it is and why it’s important. This is particularly true when it comes to your seasonal staff who usually have brief training and little understanding of the importance of capturing Gift Aid.
You could aim to include Gift Aid as part of the training on your museums POS software and supply an overview of why it is an important step in the ticket buying journey. With some brief training you can make sure your teams know what it is, the benefits to your museum and what information it is they’re required to capture. That way everyone can hit the ground running and you can start seeing results quickly.
Make It Fun For Your Teams – Set Internal Targets
One way to help increase data capture for Gift Aid is to gamify the process. Everyone likes a little friendly competition.
As long as your ticketing system has good enough reporting, then you could consider running internal competitions to encourage staff to actively capture the information you need. Your teams get to have a little fun and you get the right information to submit to HMRC.
VisiSoft’s ticketing system for museums comes with a range of in-depth intelligent reports including HMRC compliant Gift Aid reports, which are included as standard. That means you can break down results by day, hour and operator, so you’ve got all the information you need at your fingertips – making a light-hearted competition easy to implement and manage.
Keep Your Visitors Informed
In the same way you need to educate your staff about Gift Aid and its impacts, your visitors might not understand the process and how it benefits your museum either. There can be a lot of confusion around what ticking the Gift Aid box means for the visitor, so ensuring you have a clear explaination is going to be key.
Plus, sharing information with visitors has never been easier and there’s plenty of ways for you to reach your visitors online. Here’s two simple ways to get you started:
Social Media
Use your social media platforms to reach them and explain Gift Aid. This is a good opportunity to get creative too, try creating a video, or designing your own infographic to explain the benefits or how it helps your museum. Whichever way you choose to convey the message, social media is a fast and easy way to do it.
Your Museum’s Website
Your museum’s visitor software no doubt connects with your website, so your visitors can purchase tickets online. If you don’t already, this is a great opportunity to show them the positive impact that Gift Aid can have. VisiSoft allows for personalisation at checkout during that ticket buying journey, so you can add your own message about what Gift Aid is and how easy it is for visitors to add it, at no additional expense to them.
Make it Clear
Everybody wants to feel like they’re making a positive impact, so we recommend using VisiSoft’s personalisation options during the checkout process to convey a positive message. Gift Aid is one of the simplest and most effective ways of giving to charity, so make sure your visitors know that. You’ll be able to mix this message up whenever you want.
With VisiSoft’s ticketing system for museums, you can automatically toggle prices at the ticket buying step to include an optional donation to your museum to help increase donation amount even more.
Give Incentive
Did you know that The Tank Museum run a super successful incentivisation campaign which helps increase Gift Aid revenue.
Every full price admission ticket purchased automatically comes with an Annual Pass. Their Annual Pass allows you to visit The Tank Museum as many times as you want for one year (excluding Special Event days). That meant data capture was vital; using VisiSoft’s ticketing system for museums, that process was simplified and greatly reduced any human error.
They’re now able to breakdown information by operators and times, to see who is capturing the most gift aid information and the increase in revenue has meant they can invest that Gift Aid money back into key operation’s and improvements on site.
Accurate Data Capture is Key
For one of your visitors to be eligible they must be a UK tax payer and all of the correct address information must be provided when the transactions are made. Historically this has been a down fall for many charities as full and correct information has not been collected using their museums POS software, therefore Gift Aid cannot be claimed back to that individual.
VisiSoft has handy features during the online ticket-booking process, so accurate data capture is simple and efficient. Postcode look-up software means that you can accurately capture customer information for Gift Aid reporting.
Simple Reporting
Once you have all the data you need, the next step is knowing what to do with it in order to reap the benefits.
You’ll want a museum visitor software that can collate all your data and send your Gift Aid claim off without the need for any manual, error-prone processes. With VisiSoft, you get museum POS software with Gift Aid built in. That means reporting is available as standard to speed up submissions to HMRC.
All you need to worry about is storing correct and relevant information and using that to automate a HMRC-compliant report. Then you can get back to focussing running your museum and growing your visitor numbers.
What Next?
There are plenty of ways to maximise visitor donations with Gift Aid, but those are some practical ways which are easy to implement. The most important thing is that you have an EPOS system in place that supports all of your efforts – eliminating the need for manual processes on paper and taking the guesswork out of reporting and data collection.
If you’d like to find out more about how VisiSoft can help your museum or attraction increase Gift Aid donations and ensure your attraction is Gift Aid complaint, then speak to us today and book a demo to see how easy registering Gift Aid can be with our museum visitor software.