How the right reporting can help your nonprofit increase donations, maximise tax refunds and plan ahead this EOFY season.
It’s safe to say not everyone looks forward to tax season. We get it.
But, like it or not, it’s that time of year for our friends in these countries:
🇳🇿 New Zealand: 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023
🇨🇦 Canada: 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023
🇬🇧 UK: 6 April 2022 to 5 April 2023
🇦🇺 Australia: 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023.
Wherever you are, though, we thought it the perfect time to share some of our best practices on EOFY reporting.
We’ve spoken to our team members across each of the countries heading into EOFY season.
As fellow fundraising experts, they’ve given us some helpful tips about how your nonprofit can get prepared, make reporting time easier and get the most out of tax benefits.
Before we go on, let’s talk quickly about EOFY and what it means for charities like yours.
What is EOFY?
It might be a bit of a mouthful to say, but it simply means End Of Financial Year.
And yes, it can be a busy time for nonprofits - especially if you’ve got a year end appeal in the works.
Nonetheless, whenever yours falls, you’ll need to think about:
Pulling together an annual report
This is an opportunity to highlight what you’ve achieved, the impact you’re having and your financial position.
It’s not a small job, but it’s a wonderful way to bring everything together from the past year in one, succinct document.
You can find some excellent nonprofit annual report examples here.
Lodging your taxes
There are a number of tax concessions available to charities. As with anything tax related, it’s country-specific, so make sure you read the tips (coming up shortly) relevant to you!
Sending out tax information to your donors
Your donors are filing tax returns, too, so they need to know exactly what they’ve donated over the past financial year.
Lucky for you, this bit just got a whole lot easier on Raisely.
Your charity can now send out Donation Summary Receipts to all their donors at the end of the tax year (or whenever it suits).
This receipt is a summary of the donations your supporter has made - and can be used for their tax preparations.
Top tax tips from those in the know
And now… we get to the juicy bits that matter to you and your organisation.
Feel free to jump ahead to your own (though we think it’s quite interesting to see the differences between countries. Maybe that’s just us 🤔).
🇳🇿 Helga, Customer Success Manager in New Zealand
Helga lives in the beautiful Hawkes Bay - lucky lady!
Despite the potentially distracting vista around her, she’s got some terrific tips for all you Kiwi charities.
Tax credits
Helga tells us the easiest way to claim (and quickly receive) donation tax credits is online in myIR.
Your donors can do this throughout the year or at EOFY on March 31.
Also, donors in New Zealand have to submit a donation receipt for each claim. Which is why Helga recommends charities use Raisely’s PDF receipts.
We’re all about making life easier - and this feature makes it super simple for donors.
Registering your charity right
Every Kiwi charity must be registered with Charities Services.
However, to do this, your nonprofit must meet these conditions:
- Your organisation’s purpose and activities must be exclusively charitable.
- None of your charity’s income or funds can be used to benefit any of its members, trustees or associates.
🇨🇦 Haylee, Account Executive in Canada
Our Canadian expert, Haylee, tells us EOFY is a little different in the land of hockey, maple and poutine.
You’ve got a choice
She says charities can actually choose when their EOFY falls.
So, while the government fiscal year is April to March, many charities go for January to December instead.
Top tip: If you’re thinking about changing your tax year, this info from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) might help.
Sign up, sign up
Keep ahead of the game by signing up to the CRA charities and giving mailing list.
This’ll help you stay up-to-date on any changes or additions that pop up tax-wise. You’ll also get the latest guidance products and educational videos to help you on your way.
Real reporting
Haylee reckons Raisely’s Report Builder is the best way to gather metrics on your campaigns (obviously, we agree!).
You can turn all that wonderful data you’ve got sitting there into an impact report for donors.
Not only does that communicate to your supporters how much they’ve helped you raise, but it tells them just how that money is being used (and cements that donor relationship along the way).
🇬🇧 Our team, in and from the UK
It’s not all cosy pub lunches and getting caught in the rain for our British friends.
Jamie gave us some great tips on what UK charities can (should!) do as EOFY approaches.
Talking tax
Your organisation must be recognised as a charity or Community Amateur Sports Club (CASC) for tax purposes. Otherwise, you won’t get the charity treatment!
Which brings us to…
Get going with GiftAid
GiftAid is open to all UK charities and means you can claim extra money from HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs).
You can claim GiftAid online and you should see funds within 5 weeks.
Sounds pretty efficient to us!
The reporting side
If you’re a UK nonprofit who uses Raisely, you can add GiftAid to your donation form.
And, if you want to know which donors opted for GiftAid, it’s a quick and easy job.
Simply generate a Donation Report on Raisely and drag in the includes GiftAid field (found under the donation type dropdown menu).
We told you charity reports don’t have to be tricky!
What about your donors?
Every time someone donates £1 to your charity, you can claim back 25p. BUT your organisation must have paid the basic rate of tax and made the donation from its own funds.
That means GiftAid can increase the value of a charity's donations by 25% - and they can give more to the causes they care about.
🇦🇺 James, Lead Educator + Chantelle, Customer Support Specialist in Australia
As for our crew down under, EOFY differs slightly between major givers / corporates and stock-standard donors.
Having said that, the emphasis for everyone in Australia at this time of year is the tax return: will you get a refund and, if so, how much will it be?
(We’ll go into a bit more detail of the Aussie tax situation, simply because that’s where our roots are 🦘 ).
So…let’s look more closely at both groups.
Major givers and corporates
This time of year is their moment to do their last run of giving before June 30. That’ll maximise deductions when it’s time to submit their tax returns.
What does that mean for your charity?
Simply that you need to know who your most generous supporters have been in the past. Chances are they’ll dig deep again.
So, run a report on those organisations and givers and send a personalised message to them (this will be far more effective than a generic “hey, it’s EOFY…” type thing).
This goes for individual donors, too
Like we said earlier, EOFY is when donors start rifling around for all the right receipts.
In Australia, they need these to complete their tax return online (or hand them over to a tax agent doing it for them).
So, in the same way you’d run a report on (and segment) your corporate givers, you can do this for individual donors.
Any tips on running those reports?
For you…absolutely.
- Segment your audience into groups that make sense to you.
Need some ideas to get you started? Try these:
- Regular donors
- Those who gave one-off donations a few times
- Donors who gave more than a certain amount
- First-time supporters
- Long-term donors (say 10+ years)
- Use tags to segment these audiences
- Create and send personalised messages to target each group (and be clear about what you’re asking for! A great theme is ‘getting those last donations in before EOFY’ to really create that sense of urgency and encourage last minute, generous giving).
You can then generate reports to see who has opened their email (always interesting…).
Come July 31, you could even ask them whether they’d consider using their tax refund (if they get one) to support your charity.
Making matched giving work for you
Some charities develop corporate partnerships for larger campaigns (for example, the Oxfam Trailwalker or Kids’ Cancer Project).
Then, instead of a corporate donating a set amount, they commit to matched giving. That is, for every dollar raised by an employee, they’ll match it. $100 becomes $200 and so on.
The beauty of these sorts of campaigns is that they pull individual donors (i.e. the employees) in, too.
Those employees are more likely to give if their employer is involved in a well-publicised campaign. In fact, they will often end up becoming regular givers.
And that’s what we call a win.
Tax time made easier on Raisely
Ok. We’ve established that reporting goes hand in hand with tax time.
But stress does not need to come into it!
We are always working to make reporting as straightforward as possible for our customers.
With that in mind, we’ve pulled together a quick list of the features you can use at your charity.
They’re all about supporting you throughout the EOFY season - and the rest of the year, too.
Custom reports
It’s seriously easy to create a custom report with our drag and drop builder. You can choose from our 10 templates or start from scratch.
Report building
Need to build a report? You can export data from a single campaign, multiple campaigns or across your entire Raisely account.
Bank payout reports
These aren’t only accurate (that’s a given, obviously), but flexible, too.
You can download a full report from each deposit from Stripe. There you’ll see every donation that’s come through - including any refunds or other charges.
And that means you’ve got what you need to check everything lines up with your bank balance.
Automatic sharing and scheduling
Do you want (need) the latest donation data ALL THE TIME? You’ll love this feature.
You can create and schedule as many reports as you like - for any and all of your campaigns. Whether you want a single, once-off report or recurring ones (daily, if you so desire!), we’ve got you covered.
Doing EOFY right
While EOFY reporting is unavoidable, it doesn’t have to be a huge headache.
In fact, it’s the ideal time to take stock of where you’re at, where you’re going and what your donor base is looking like.
You can implement a whole raft of best practices that cover you tax-wise, make life easy for your donors and set you up for a great year ahead.
The right reporting software plays a big part here (and can make one heck of a difference to your EOFY experience).
So why not get in touch with Raisely? There’s so much to show you.
