100 years of giving

The main responsibility of the Charities Department was to facilitate deeds of covenant – legal agreements from donors to pay money to the charities of their choice annually. The deeds enabled tax-efficient giving for both donors and charities. 

During our first three years as the Charities Department, we helped recover just under £40,000 for charities, which is equivalent to £2 million today.

We focused on expanding our skills and services as an organisation and extended into new areas of ‘efficient giving’. For example, we launched the Charity Account and pioneered the first steps into international giving by acting as an intermediary for 200 charities worldwide. 

In 1939 we changed our name to the Benevolent Fund. Twenty years later, we find a new identity as the Charities Aid Fund to align with our evolving role in the sector. 

We recognised that many charities worked in isolation and had no voice to represent themselves or their interests to the government. There was a growing need for an organisation that would take on the role of connector between donors, charities and the government, and we began to fulfil it. 
 
And so, our annual conferences emerged as a space for all the key stakeholders of the charity sector to come together. Building on this, we also became a voice for the charity world in matters of charity finance and tax reforms specifically, where we made representations to Parliament and the Chancellors of the Exchequer. 

By the end of the 1960s, it became apparent that we could and should operate independently. But due to legal restrictions, it wasn’t until 1967 that we became a registered charity in our own right. 

We launched ‘The Directory of Grant Making Trusts’, only the third-such publication in the world. One donor recalled, “The Directory has changed the whole pattern of fundraising but has also done a valuable job in educating trusts to a new concept of their responsibilities. None of this could or would have happened without the Directory, which has become the Bible of most charities”. 

Our 50th anniversary marked a new chapter for us, with the formation of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). After 50 years and distributing over £40 million to charities, the change in status enabled us to broaden our activities extensively. The new organisation was launched on 2 October 1974 with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh as our Royal Patron. 

Eager to revolutionise the sector following the launch of CAF, we established our research arm in 1975. Since then, the division has consistently provided new and relevant insights, playing an important role in lobbying for policy changes and the development of the UK charity sector. Two of our flagship reports - UK Giving and the World Giving Index - have been in production for more than 15 years. 

Following the momentum and insights drawn from our research, we commenced grant making from the Foundation Fund. These grants were the first of their kind distributed to charities experiencing extraordinary financial setbacks. Charitable Trustees focused on ways to make small amounts of money go a long way; with management exercises, training and technical facilities to help them improve their own efficiency and effectiveness. 

To celebrate our 60th anniversary, CAF Bank was launched. We joined an exclusive group of charity banks in the UK, enabling financial services for small- and medium-sized charities. Today, CAF Bank is a multiple award-winning charity bank, serving over 14,000 charity customers, with deposits totalling £1.5 billion. 

By the end of the 1980s, we recognised that more can be achieved within the charity sector if the government introduced laws that stimulate giving, specifically allowing payroll giving and scrapping tax on one-off charitable gifts. Our intense government lobbying resulted in Give As You Earn (GAYE) launching in 1987. To mark the occasion 2,000 balloons were released, with the first 50 businesses to return a balloon receiving a donation to the charity of their choice. It is still our flagship payroll giving solution and has inspired payroll giving around the world. 

Encouraged by the success of payroll giving, CAF continued its lobbying efforts and finally Gift Aid was announced by John Major in 1990. Gift Aid now delivers an estimated £1.3 billion to the charitable sector in the UK each year. 

During this era, CAF grew its international reach and established the European Foundation Centre (1989), Transnational Giving Europe (1999). We were also the founder of now independent organisations that encouraged domestic philanthropy, including CAF Russia (1993), CAF Bulgaria (1995), CAF Southern Africa (1997), CAF India (1998) and CAF Australia (1998). These now form part of our International Network, with new locally relevant names, alongside partners in Argentina, New Zealand, Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Pakistan and Türkiye. 

The 1990s was an era of ambitious international expansion with the launch of CAF America in 1992, helping Americans give overseas with greater impact. 

Continuing to create international opportunities, CAF brought to market the CAF American Donor Fund in 1999. A dual-qualified donor advised fund that has helped donors maximise the value of their gifts to charitable organisations and claim eligible UK and US tax relief on their global giving. An innovation in the market, this delivers enormous benefit to the sector. By our 75th anniversary, we were distributing over £153 million globally to charities annually, transforming lives and communities. 

A new Millenium brought another impressive innovative solution in CAF Venturesome, our social investment arm. We continue to be a market leader in offering risk capital to charities and social enterprises and so far, has supported over 700 social investments with over £61 million. 

By 2012, CAF was well established within the giving sector. Leveraging our unique role, we launched several high-profile campaigns. Famously, over 1,160 organisations joined in our ‘Give It Back, George’ campaign. This campaign aimed to exempt charity donations from the cap on tax relief proposed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne in that year’s Budget. This resulted in the Chancellor confirming that he would exempt all forms of charitable gifts from the cap on tax reliefs. 

We launched the international #GivingTuesday campaign in the UK, bringing together more than 820 partners from the commercial and not-for-profit sector to create a day to celebrate charity as an alternative to the pre-Christmas Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.  

CAF Canada was established with a vision to engage the Canadian donor community with global needs and causes. 

The Covid-19 pandemic saw the charity sector squeezed in unprecedented ways and spurred CAF’s unwavering support to building charity sector resilience. We awarded 1,264 grants at a total of £39 million to charities in the UK affected most by the impact of the pandemic.