How Do We Donate To A Charity?

If your group is planning on running an event to raise money for charity (e.g. a ball, bake sale), firstly, you must make sure that the charity is registered in the UK and has a UK charity number as we cannot make donations to charities that aren’t. You can check the Governments register here - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search to make sure. 

Once you have confirmed that the charity is UK registered, for the event income to be exempt of VAT (please see our "How Does VAT Affect Our Group?" article for more information about this) you need to make sure that all social media, event ticketing, promotions, communications etc. around the event includes: 

1. List the name of the charity you are fundraising for. 
2. List the charity number of the charity.
3. State whether you are giving all ‘proceeds’ or all ‘profits’ to charity. Proceeds would be all money gained from the event and profits would be all money minus any expenses. 

Following the event, you will then need to get confirmation from the charity (preferably an email) confirming that they are happy to receive the funds that you have raised and providing their bank details. 

Once you have this information please complete a student group Finance Form with details of the charity (name, address, email contact, bank details) and amount raised. The finance form and the confirmation from the charity needs to be emailed to dsu.invoices@durham.ac.uk, where our finance team will make the donation on our nearest payment date (usually every Friday). If you need further guidance on how to fill in the form, you can view our dedicated article: How Do I Complete A Student Group Finance Form?

For any issues relating to accessing the links above, please get in touch here.