Sending in Money

Project Trust is a registered charity and thus we are bound by charity rules and regulations, governed by The Office of Scottish Charities Register (OSCR).

You are fundraising for Project Trust, and we use the money you raise to support our aims and objectives, which includes arranging international volunteering places for young people.

Money raised by Volunteers is allocated into ‘accounts’ so we can track everyone’s progress towards their target, but money sent in is still a donation and does not ‘belong’ to that Volunteer. See more below, and please ask us if you have any queries about this.

Cash

We do NOT recommend sending physical cash to us. If you take cash at a fundraising event, take care to record the exact amount and then use one of the other methods below to transfer us the equivalent amount.

You should be able to pay physical cash into your bank account at a local bank or (larger) Post Office branch. This can be good for your record-keeping as you should be able to request a receipt for the exact balance.

Online Bank Transfer/BACS is generally the easiest way to transfer such a balance from your account to us – see the details below.

Just Giving

JustGiving is an online fundraising platform (similar to GoFundMe) where people can make donations – we recommend this one because if you link your page to us, you receive 100% of donations towards your total, and money comes through to us automatically within a few weeks.

Follow this link to create a JustGiving page linked to Project Trust!

We receive detailed reports and fund transfers from JustGiving every fortnight, so you don’t need to do anything else. You will receive the full donation from your Just Giving page; if you use one of the other crowd-funding pages such as GoFundMe, they may take their charges out of the amount they pay you – this is why we recommend a linked JustGiving page.

If you use JustGiving but do not link it to us, you will have to pay them a 2% transfer fee to get the funds; we absorb this cost if the page is linked to us.

For any monies in your bank account which you want to send us, please consider a Bank Transfer instead of putting it into JustGiving. Either way we will allocate the same amount to your total, but we incur a 2% fee from JustGiving and it takes up to a fortnight to process, whereas a Bank Transfer is free and instant.

Bank Transfer (BACS)

Bank Transfers are quick and secure. We are happy to confirm that we have received donations by this method – please email Tom to verify. We process these manually to allocate them to your account, so it is important to follow the instructions below regarding the payment reference.

Add us to your online banking. Our details are:

Bank:	Clydesdale Bank
Account Name:	The Project Trust*
Account Number:	6045 7014
Sort Code:	82-48-08
Reference:	Your name (this is very important!)

Cheques

If a cheque is payable to you (has your name on the top line) you need to put it into your bank account. If it is payable to Project Trust, you should send it to the Coll office with some information:

The most important information to put with the cheque is your name, but please also write how the money was raised (was it donations from a neighbour, or from cake sale proceeds, or another event) because we can give better advice if we can see which events are going well for you.

Please send all cheques to:

Project Trust
The Hebridean Centre
Isle of Coll
Argyll
PA78 6TE

CAF Vouchers

We do accept these. If someone offers you something similar to a cheque we can accept it, but it may take a bit longer to process.

Gift Aid

Gift Aid is important to Project Trust, so please encourage donors to reclaim Gift Aid on our behalf by completing the form provided below (we suggest taking a stack of these printed to each event). When a taxpayer makes a charitable donation, the charity is able to claim back an extra 25% of the value of the donation from HMRC (the UK tax office). We are only able to do this if the donor indicates at the time of donation that they are indeed a taxpayer.

Unfortunately, Gift Aid does NOT contribute towards your fundraising total because of rules set by Inland Revenue. We are only allowed to use Gift Aid to pursue our, “general aims and objectives,” and are therefore not allowed to allocate it to your account.

You are still benefitting from Gift Aid, however, as we use previous Volunteers’ Gift Aid to keep your fundraising total as low as possible, so please pay it forward wherever you can! The Gift Aid your donors can reclaim will allow us to keep future fundraising targets lower. As a non-profit charity, everything we receive is fed back into providing all Volunteers with the best possible experiences.

Deadlines

We ask that Volunteers aim to raise around 30% (upwards of £2,000) of their target by the time we book your flights. This ensures that the cost of the flights themselves can be covered and is a way of demonstrating to us that you intend to go ahead with your project.

We recommend trying to complete fundraising by Training, so that you can focus on relaxing and farewells before departure, but the amounts required to enable us to cover the cost of the approaching international Projects for this point are as follows:

For 8 month Volunteers we ask that you complete 90% of your fundraising by Training (December before departure).

For 12 month Volunteers we ask you to complete 60% of your fundraising by Training (July before departure).

Two weeks before your flights is the final deadline for sending funds, to ensure your entire amount has been fully processed by the time you leave the UK.

When to send money

The Institute of Fundraising’s code of practice states:

“Anyone raising funds for a charitable organisation (eg. Project Trust) must ensure that the organisation receives all the money. They must also pass on funds to the organisation as soon as reasonably practical and within a maximum of 28 days.”