I work for a 'Friends of' hospital charity, and we're looking to overhaul our membership scheme. At present, the only benefits of membership are a monthly e-newsletter and a lapel pin badge. To encourage new members with the new scheme, we talked about offering priority tickets for fundraising events, exclusive talks by doctors and a ‘Friend in need’ scheme where members that are inpatients could receive items from the shop with priority delivery.

Separately, we are looking to introduce a Corporate Membership scheme – local businesses would receive advertising space in our e-newsletter and a feature on social media in return.

However, these ideas and potential changes have opened a can of worms regarding VAT and GiftAid!

I believe the corporate membership will need to have VAT added as there are tangible benefits involved. However, I’m unsure whether GiftAid can be claimed on corporate membership?

For the individual membership plan, I’m unclear whether our suggested benefits will mean that we’ll have to include VAT, and whether it affects our ability to claim GiftAid on memberships? I’ve checked the government website, but frankly it’s all a bit confusing and I can’t seem to find a definitive answer on this! We obviously need to get it right, and if it will affect both VAT and GiftAid, it may well be that we scrap the idea of the new benefits.

Any advice on this would be gratefully received, or if you could point me in the right direction to get it clarified that would be amazing!