The spreadsheet problem that led us to build Gift Aid automation
Three months before Gathrd launched, I received a message from a church treasurer in Nottingham. She'd just finished running a retreat on Eventbrite. The event raised £3,200 in ticket sales. But the Gift Aid reclaim? Stuck in a spreadsheet, cross-referencing attendee names against a list of church members, trying to remember who'd opted in and who hadn't. It took her six hours. I remember thinking: this is the exact problem we're supposed to solve.
The gap nobody talks about
Most faith communities in the UK are registered for Gift Aid. For every £1 donated or paid for an event ticket, the church can reclaim 25 pence from HMRC, provided the attendee is a UK taxpayer who's made a Gift Aid declaration. It sounds straightforward. In practice, it's chaos. Eventbrite isn't built for this. Neither is Ticketmaster, nor any of the generic ticketing platforms. They take your money, they keep their cut, and they hand you a CSV file with attendee names and email addresses. What you do with that data is your problem. Most churches end up managing Gift Aid eligibility manually, which means errors, missed claims, and lost revenue that rightfully belongs to the ministry. When we were designing Gathrd, this became impossible to ignore. We were building specifically for faith communities. If we weren't going to solve the Gift Aid problem properly, we'd just be another generic events app with a cross on the logo.Why split-checkout matters more than it sounds
The solution wasn't obvious at first. We could have built a Gift Aid declaration form as a bolt-on, something attendees tick a box for at the end of checkout. Simple. Everyone does it that way. But then you're asking someone mid-transaction to make a tax decision. They're thinking about whether they've got their ticket, whether their payment went through, whether they need to add a guest. The Gift Aid question lands in a weird mental space. Completion rates drop. Declarations get skipped. So we rebuilt checkout around split-payment logic. Gift Aid is now part of the purchase flow itself, not tacked on the end. When an attendee buys a ticket, they see immediately what portion of the cost is a donation (Gift Aid eligible) and what portion is a service fee. It's transparent. It makes sense in context. And from the church's side, every declaration is captured at point of sale, already linked to the right attendee record. This is why we built it into the platform from day one, rather than treating it as a feature you could add later. It changes how the whole transaction works.The maths that shaped the decision
When we launched Gathrd, we set the platform fee at 3%. Eventbrite charges 6.95% plus 59 pence per ticket. On a £15 ticket, that's £1.53 gone before the church sees anything. We wanted better. But here's what sold me on the full Gift Aid automation: a church running a conference might raise £5,000 in ticket sales. At a 3% fee, Gathrd takes £150. Gift Aid reclaim, managed properly, could be worth £400 to that church, depending on attendee mix and eligibility. The fee I'm charging is almost invisible next to the money my system helped them reclaim. That alignment felt right. We're not fighting churches for a bigger cut. We're helping them keep more of what they're raising, which means we stay small and sustainable on our side and they grow on theirs. The split-checkout automation is just the mechanism that makes that possible.What changed after we shipped it
The first few weeks post-launch, we watched how people used the Gift Aid flow. Some churches had never claimed Gift Aid before because the process seemed too hard. Suddenly they were doing it automatically, without extra work. One church organiser told us she'd been running fundraising events for five years and always skipped Gift Aid claims because she didn't understand the rules well enough. With Gathrd, the system handled it. She reclaimed £1,200 in her first quarter. That's real money for a small ministry. We also learned that some attendees actually want to make a Gift Aid donation. It's not just a tax thing. When the option is clear and easy, people choose it. They understand their money is going further. That feedback shaped how we've built since. We could have stopped at automation. Instead, it pushed us to add denomination filtering, offline door check-in, and integration with NFC tools like TapTrust. The whole platform logic became: if we're going to do something for churches, do it completely. Don't half-ship it and call it a feature.Why this matters beyond Nottingham
The Gift Aid automation isn't flashy. It won't get headlines. But it's exactly the kind of thing that separates a platform built for faith communities from a generic ticketing app with a faith coat of paint. We've kept the platform fee at 3% across all plans, and Gift Aid automation is built in for every UK church, whether they're on the free tier or the Church plan. The split-checkout is free. The declaration capture is free. Because this isn't upsell logic. It's foundational. I think about that treasurer in Nottingham every time we ship an update. She represents a thousand churches doing the same work manually, leaving money on the table. Our job is to make sure that never happens again. Not through dark patterns or hidden fees, but by designing the entire system around how faith communities actually work. That's why the automation went into the core product, not the marketing material.If your church is currently managing Gift Aid claims outside of your ticketing system, would you actually use an automated approach, or would you rather keep the process you know?