The Spektrix Ticket Converter tool allows you to encourage your customers to donate all or part of their cancelled tickets, instead of asking for full refunds. If you are a UK organisation and a registered charity, remember that you can claim Gift Aid on any money donated – including donations gathered using this tool – to get an extra 25% from the Government on top of any donation received.
All you need in order to claim Gift Aid on these donations is a valid Gift Aid declaration from each customer, and then you can use our integrated tool for making Gift Aid claims as normal. This article talks through how to identify customers who have made donations via the Ticket Converter, and ask them for a Gift Aid declaration if you don't already have one on file.
Here's what we'll cover:
- The overall process
- Which customers to contact
- Finding your customers
- Options for contacting your customers
- Capturing declarations
- Testing, sending and reporting
Before we look at how to get in touch with Ticket Converter customers and capture their Gift Aid declarations, here's a quick rundown of the overall process to follow, of which this article is just focused on one part:
- Use the Ticket Converter to get in touch with customers and encourage them to donate
- Process those donations, making sure you're using a dedicated Fund set up specifically for this purpose
- Contact your Ticket Converter customers to confirm that donations have been made, and ask them for their Gift Aid declarations (this is what we're covering here)
- Run your automated Gift Aid claim as you would do normally
If you're not already familiar with the Ticket Converter, setting up Funds or claiming Gift Aid via Spektrix, make sure you familiarise yourself with the following articles before going any further:
You won't necessarily need to get in touch with all of your customers to ask about Gift Aid declarations:
- First time donors (customers who have not donated to you before): get in touch with these customers to ask them to submit a Gift Aid declaration
- Customers who already have a valid Gift Aid declaration: there's no need to get in touch, these donations will be processed and valid the next time you process a Gift Aid claim
NOTE: there is no time pressure to get in touch with customers, as Gift Aid claims can be backdated up to four years.
In order to identify those customers who have made a donation, but don't yet have a current Gift Aid declaration, the best thing to do is to use an Auto Tag. We recommend you set this up based on a Purchasing Segment to look for customers who have made donations, but whose donations are not currently Gift Aid claimable - i.e. the customer doesn't have a valid Gift Aid declaration. If you're not familiar with this tool in Spektrix, please read this article.
NOTE: you will need to have the General Administrator role on your Spektrix user account in order to set up Auto Tags. See this article for more details of user roles and permissions.
Here's how to set up an Auto Tag for this purpose:
- In the Admin interface go to Customers > Tags and either create a new Auto Tag in an existing Tag Group or create a brand new Tag Group for this purpose:
NOTE: make sure your Tag Group does not have the On web box ticked; otherwise it can't contain Auto Tags, only Normal tags.
- Click the Add auto tag button, followed by the New Local Segment button:
- Choose the Purchasing Segment Type and name your segment, then click OK:
- Un-tick the Only show commonly used criteria option, then expand the Donations metric wrapper and drag down the Fund criteria down to the dashed area where it says Drop criteria here...:
- Choose which Fund you want to include from the list then press OK
- Add in the Gift Aid Claimable criteria (still from the Donations metric wrapper), and make sure to leave it unchecked:
- You've now got all of the criteria you need, so click the Next button to save your segment
- Drag your new segment to where it says drop criteria here:
- Give your Auto Tag a suitable name to make sure it's clear when you look back at customer records what the Tag is for
- Click the Next button and then the Save button to complete the Auto Tag
Once your Auto Tag is saved, it will automatically apply to all of your customers who fit the criteria you chose, i.e. those who have donated to the relevant Fund, and who don't have a valid Gift Aid declaration.
Options for contacting your customers
Now that you've tagged the relevant customers, you have a couple of different options on how to contact them. Using your new Auto Tag you can either:
- At a date of your choosing, send a one-off dotdigital campaign to these customers asking them to fill in an online Gift Aid declaration (see the Capturing declarations section below)
- If you have an automated thank you email set up (using a Scheduled Customer List) you can use your Tag to power dynamic content which includes a Gift Aid ask (using the same online declaration)
- Set up your Scheduled Customer List to look for customers who made a donation (Purchasing segment), based on a relative date range (‘last week', ‘yesterday' etc. – don't use any greater frequency than ‘yesterday', as you don't want to end up sending duplicate emails!)
Remember, you've got four years to collect a declaration, but you may want to do it soon while each customer's gift is fresh in their memory.
Historically, the only time customers could make Gift Aid declarations online was during an online transaction which included a donation. With the introduction of the Retrospective Gift Aid declaration form iframe, however, customers can quickly add retrospective declarations to their accounts online.
Here's an overview of how this iframe works, starting from when the customer first lands on the page:
- The customer will be asked to log in to their online account
- They will then be presented with the Gift Aid ask with a button to declare they agree
- Once pressed, this is immediately updated on their customer record and the customer is presented with a thank you message
Here's an example of how the Gift Aid ask can look online:
There are two main ways of using this iframe:
- Time and budget permitting you can ask your web developer to embed this on your website as a standalone page, so that the option is always there for customers to make an online declaration
- The quicker option is to link directly to the iframe in an email
Whichever option you choose, you'll need two pieces of information in order to get the URL for the iframe:
- Your custom domain
- For example tickets.myvenue.com – if you haven't set up a custom domain yet, use system.spektrix.com
- Your Spektrix clientname
- This is the part of your Spektrix URL which is unique to your organisation - see the screenshot below
- See this article for full details of what this is and how to find it
Use the link below as your template, making sure to include your organisation's custom domain and clientname:
https://tickets.myvenue.com/clientname/website/secure/RetrospectiveGiftAidDeclarationForm.aspx
- Replace tickets.myvenue.com with your custom domain
- Replace clientname with your organisation's clientname
Testing, sending and reporting
Once you've set up your Auto Tag, you should test everything you've set up before you start contacting your customers, just to make sure it's working as expected. We recommend you test the iframe link using your own account on your system, including resetting a password in the login flow (if you don't have an account, you can quickly set one up using your own email address, so that you can use it for testing). To test, just copy and paste the link (using your organisation's details) into a web browser, and log in using your account.
Here are a couple of things to check:
- Make sure that a Gift Aid Declaration has been created against your customer record (look for the Gift Aid option in the bottom-right corner of the customer record in the Sales Interface)
- Check the look and feel of the iframe to make sure it's clear for your customers; if not, you might need your web developer to adjust the styling for this iframe
When you're happy that the link is set up properly and you've tested the flow, you can add it to whichever channel you're asking for Gift Aid declarations via – whether in a scheduled thank you email or a one-off campaign – and start sending.
Once you've started contacting your customers and you're receiving new declarations, you probably want to keep track of how successful your campaigns are, and how many new declarations you're receiving. The simplest way of doing this is by using Customer Lists - here are two possible options you could use:
- Create a Customer List based on the Auto Tag you set up earlier – run this regularly once you've sent your campaign and watch the numbers go down
- Use a Customer segment
- Use the Tags criteria from either the Customers or Individuals metric wrapper
- Choose the Auto Tag you created, and click Add
- Create a Customer List looking at customers with Gift Aid declarations – run this regularly once you've sent your campaign and watch the numbers go up
- Use a Customer segment
- Use the Has Current Gift Aid Declaration criteria from either the Customers or Individuals metric wrapper
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If you have any questions about this process, or would like to discuss anything in more detail, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team.