Getting started with charitable giving

Your community

If your business can set aside some budget to support the wider community, it’s worth thinking about how to do it to make the biggest difference. Often financial support can provide the greatest impact as many needs can’t be met by volunteers.

Corporate donations

Donate to your charity partner, hold a team vote, make it a quarterly or annual occurrence or use the experts: give through your local place-based giving scheme, a community foundation or take a team of colleagues to a Funding Network event and give to your favourite project!

Payroll giving

Give your employees a tax effective way to donate to their favourite causes directly through payroll. Appoint an approved payroll giving provider, tell your colleagues about this great new benefit and see how high you can drive participation! Get your payroll giving excellence logo, initially for participating and then for the % of engagement you manage to reach

Matched funding

Great for employee engagement – this is your chance to show your support of the causes your employees care about.Set a budget, a decision-making process and any boundaries and communicate these to your team.You might want to match employee fundraising, payroll giving donations or office fundraising activities

No budget?

You could consider what in-kind support you can offer a charity. Do you have meeting space you could give, could you do pro bono printing, or could you hold a donation drive for specifically needed items? You could also organise fundraising at work using a sponsored event, holding a bake sale or having a dress down day!

This was last updated by Heart of the City in March 2020. We’ve created these resources for individual SMEs to use. None of our content is to be adapted, reused or repurposed for commercial use.

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