I also don't feel comfortable claiming this as a Gift Aid eligible 'donation'

• I can't remember the wording on the registration page, but I think it was phrased around purchasing a ticket, rather than making a donation
  • And as you said, there wasn't any mention of Gift Aid declarations (regardless of whether CEA was going to do anything with that)
• Even the confirmation email I got said 'Date of purchase' (rather than 'Date of donation' or similar)
• While it is true that you could have gotten a free ticket meaning that there was no extra benefit in paying (pointed out by domdomegg here)
  • I'm not sure how it works given that there was an application process and your application could be rejected
  • More importantly, HMRC seem to be wise to the idea of treating all ticket purchases as donations, in 3.43.6 here it states:

A charity can charge what it likes for a ticket to attend its event. However, it should not put the charity’s funds at risk and, therefore, should set the ticket price at a level to at least recover its costs.

And I'm pretty sure the wording on the registration page was something like "£400 lets us recoup the cost from running the event" or similar.

So I don't think HMRC would see these payments as 'monies received as fundraising during an event that the charity put on' rather than 'ticket price for an event' (which is not an eligible donation)

Is there much administrative overhead to claim Gift Aid?

If 500(?) people are paying £400 (for a total of £200,000), you can claim £50,000 from the government which seems like it should be worthwhile 

And it's not too late to collect people's Gift Aid declarations (section 3.6.3 here)

I'm disturbed by a couple of things in this thread:

• @OllieBase is giving very confident tax advice, which I'm not sure is correct
  • It seems to be contradicted by a later email exchange between the EAG team and Lovkush
•  In that email exchange, it turns out that we could choose the free ticket and then separately make a tax-deductible donation to CEA through GWWC
  • Why isn't this more publicised? Every UK tax payer would benefit from this (or CEA themselves would benefit by being able to claim 25% extra)

Swapcard tips:

1. The mobile browser is more reliable than the app

You can use Firefox/Safari/Chrome etc. on your phone, go to swapcard.com and use that instead of downloading the Swapcard app from your app store. As far as I know, the only thing the app has that the mobile site does not, is the QR code that you need when signing in when you first get to the venue and pick up your badge

2. Only what you put in the 'Biography' section in the 'About Me' section of your profile is searchable when searching in Swapcard

The other fields, like 'How can I help others' and 'How can others help me' appear when you view someone's profile, but will not be used when searching using Swapcard search. This is another reason to use the Swapcard Attendee Google sheet that is linked-to in Swapcard to search

3. You can use a (local!) LLM to find people to connect with

People might not want their data uploaded to a commercial large language model, but if you can run an open-source LLM locally, you can upload the Attendee Google sheet and use it to help you find useful contacts

I can see a bunch of EA orgs (and others) have used these folks:

https://www.ppf.org/

In the UK at least, they are especially desperate for donors who are male and/or from an ethnic minority background

https://www.anthonynolan.org/help-save-a-life/join-stem-cell-register