Charities often treat gift aid as an administrative or compliance burden, left to relatively junior members of the finance or fundraising teams. However, those responsible for charity finances have a duty to ensure that they take full advantage of the opportunities.
 
Some of the opportunities are not straight-forward and professional advice needs to be sought before acting to ensure the correct procedures are followed.  Extreme care must be taken to ensure that essential administrative details of relevant fundraising activities and events are planned and established sufficiently well in advance so that the arrangements and documentation facilitate claiming gift aid, where possible.
 
Areas where you may be missing out are:

• Membership/friends schemes
  Depending on the value of any benefits provided to members their subscriptions can often be gift-aided. 
• Charity shops
  Major national charities have led the way in this area but the techniques can also be used by charities with only a few shops. 
• Gala events
  By pricing tickets to cover costs and then requesting a donation it is possible to arrange these events so that gift aid can be obtained. This is not risk free as admission cannot be refused if someone gives less than the suggested amount so you must trust your supporters.
• Charity auctions
  People often intentionally pay more than an item is worth in order to support the charity. With advance planning and care the bid for certain lots can be split into a price for the lot and a donation enabling gift aid to be used.

See our charity briefing Fundraising in the credit crunch, for more details.