By Kevin Taylor FCIPR,

As you can imagine, the current coronavirus crisis is seeing an upsurge in CIPR members contacting iprovision and looking for support. It’s a worrying time for many in our industry.

Solo practitioners, used to working from home, suddenly find themselves needing to deliver home schooling while clients drop off and income falls through the floor. Agency staff suffer redundancy as businesses scale back, and – welcome though it is – government support cannot fill all the gaps.

In these tough times we are working closely with the CIPR on ways to support our members in need.

At iprovision we can provide both practical and financial support. Many of the members who come to us have never before been in the position of looking for support – so as well as looking at what financial support we can provide, we help them through the maze to uncover the benefits they are entitled to, and also to get help from other specialist sources.

During this difficult period, we are also thinking long-term, and looking at new ways in which iprovision and the CIPR can work together to provide new services that will support our membership all year round, and not just in times of national crisis.

But there are two ‘all-year-round’ ways that every CIPR member can help us to deliver all this activity.

The first – and most important – is to tick the box on your membership renewal form that says you want to add the voluntary £10 per year iprovision donation to your membership. It is just another £2.50 on your quarterly direct debit. That £10 remains our biggest and most reliable source of annual income and we invest it in vital financial support to help our members in need.

There is, however, another reason why that donation is the most important thing you can do; because without that donation in the first place, you can’t do the second thing that will really help us in our work – and that is declare the donation as Gift Aid.

Reclaiming Gift Aid would add a very healthy bonus to our annual income and allow us to provide even more help and support at no additional cost to our members.

Right now, as we approach the end of a tax year, declaring in the next few days that you want iprovision to reclaim the Gift Aid from your donation would help us claim the refund for this year, and for every year going forward – you only have to make the declaration once.

To help iprovision reclaim the Gift Aid on your donation simply visit our page, here, on the CIPR website.

You will find a link to the Gift Aid declaration form – and remember, you have to use your home address, i.e your taxpayer address, not your business one. It will take you two minutes and make no difference to you. But it will help make an enormous difference to our members in need.

It really would be the gift that keeps on giving. The page also has links to other ways in which to make one-off donations to iprovision that also qualify for Gift Aid.

Kevin Taylor is an iprovision trustee and a former president of the CIPR.

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash