I was reviewing entry prices for 2009 today. As a charity it’s obviously important that we monitor prices carefully, retaining value for money while ensuring the income that we need to maintain our places for ever, for everyone. My region is one of the financial engine rooms of the Trust, providing one of the three big chunks of what we call our operating contribution. The situation has been made more complicated in recent years by the introduction of Gift Aid On Entry (GAOE).
Many charitable visitor attractions have claimed GAOE for years, asking visitors to confirm their admission price was a charitable donation, and allowing the charity to claim the tax the visitor had already paid back from the taxman. It requires some administration, not least when the visitor pays their money, so for a long time the NT declined to follow suit. We had no problem doing it in membership, people fill out a form already to apply for membership, so its a matter of adding a tickbox and an extra signature to that form and you’re done. Filling out a form every time to buy a ticket, especially when you’ve come to have a nice day out away from the desk is a different matter. Eventually we were persuaded that is was worth the extra hassle at the entry point and decided to do it. Then Gordon Brown changed the rules.
Claiming gift aid on the admission price was not in keeping with the spirit in which gift aid had been set up, he said. Gift aid was about encouraging people to make charitable donations, not to redefine money they were going to spend anyway. To qualify for gift aid on entry, visitors would have be be actively giving a donation (at least 10%) over and above the price of admission.
So just as we were starting to do the whole GAOE thing, we were presented with having to achieve two processes: not only did we have to convince people to fill out a GAOE form when they paid, but we’d also have to convince them to pay 10% more than the normal price of admission.
As it turns out this new requirement was the easy part. Over 80% of our paying visitors are willing to pay the extra. But to qualify for the extra tax back from tax man, we need all those who paid extra to fill out a form giving us permission to do so, and to do it correctly. This is a lot more difficult.
So when I was reviewing prices today, I was looking at a spreadsheet that had the prices our property managers want to charge at one end, and the expected operating contribution that the wider National Trust expects us to deliver at the other. In the middle are an awful lot of calculations that basically say “if the expected number of visitors all turn up, and pay the expected price, then we should end up making what the National Trust needs from us a region” to pay fro all the conservation projects we’ll need to do next year”. Those calculations are based on just 60% of the people who pay the extra donation on top of the admission filling out a GAOE form correctly. Just 60%, but we can even manage that right now. Right now, it appears to me that properties are managing to get about 40% of the people who pay the extra to fill out the form properly.
The shortfall that leaves us with as a region is equivalent to everybody paying an extra 20p on their ticket price. Of course, we should work harder at making it easier to fill out the form. But I’m thinking, should I also just put up all the prices by 20p?
