What's your 'why'?

ShareGift occupies a ‘niche within a niche’. I therefore often find myself explaining what we do, how we do it and most importantly why, though it’s always a pleasure and never a chore because every time I do so it reminds me anew of our purpose. ShareGift’s ‘why’ is simple: we were set up to solve the problem of small shareholdings, and in doing so, achieve a charitable outcome. Although over the past twenty-five years our remit has expanded considerably into other areas, including unclaimed assets, our core work remains the same.

There are myriad ways of ending up with a small shareholding here in the UK, and further afield. For example, as a shareholder you might have sold a shareholding just after a dividend record date, and subsequently found yourself with an additional and unexpected handful of shares as a reinvested dividend. These small holdings are frequently worth less than the actual cost of selling them.

As a company secretary, charged with managing your company’s share register compliance and relationship with share registrars, you can swiftly find your share register populated with many small shareholdings. Management fee structures for share registers vary but most will have an element that’s charged on the number of holdings on your register.

As a share registrar, you will want to offer your corporate clients an efficient and cost-effective means of streamlining their share registers, re-engaging with their shareholders and in some cases reuniting shareholders with forgotten shares.

All of these problems are eminently resolvable with ShareGift’s assistance. Unwanted or unclaimed shares can be donated to ShareGift, we can aggregate these shares and sell them when possible, and then donate proceeds to charitable causes. We welcome charity suggestions from our donors and partners, as these help to inform our grant-making. There is no fee for shareholder, corporate,

registrar or charity, and promoting ShareGift need not cost a penny if the information is ‘piggy-backed’ onto an existing scheduled mailing to shareholders, such as an AGM notice, dividend notification or Corporate Sponsored Nominee statement. Many companies choose to offer our charitable donation service to their shareholders as an ongoing and regular part of managing their share register.

ShareGift is unique amongst grant-making foundations in the UK, for these key reasons:

- The way in which we generate our funds;

- Our cause-neutrality;

- We almost always make grants as unrestricted funding; and

- We don’t accept applications for funding from charities.

Put simply, we generate our funds through donations of shares, and cash. A lot of these donations come from individuals, ranging from a few pounds-worth of shares to many thousands in some cases, but a large part of our funding now comes from institutions and companies, in the form of unclaimed assets. Once strenuous efforts have been made to reunite assets with their owners, those that remain unclaimed are able to be legally donated to ShareGift, and ultimately turned into funding which can be put to good use in the hands of charities.

Our cause-neutrality is the cornerstone of our grantmaking policy. It enables us to support charities and charitable causes the length and breadth of the UK, regardless of their size or how long they’ve been in operation. We consider that it is just as important to support the largest charities, with their incredible reach and public name-recognition, as it is to support the tiniest charities which are deeply rooted in and valued by their local communities, and all shapes and sizes in between those two poles.

Largely in response to the urgency of the pandemic, there has been a welcome and much-needed rise in the level of funding granted to charities as ‘unrestricted’. ShareGift has always recognised the value of unrestricted funding to charities and has employed this method of grantmaking from its inception. When funding is ‘unrestricted’ this means that charities can choose to apply that funding to central costs as well as or instead of specific campaigns or services. It is still a much-misunderstood term, though. Charities cannot deliver front-line aid and assistance if their premises electricity bill goes unpaid! Central costs have to be managed prudently of course, but they are largely unavoidable and therefore cannot be ignored. Sometimes, however, it makes perfect sense to make a grant as restricted funding, as that may enable the charity to receive matched funding from the Government or another source. In those instances, we’re delighted to flex our approach in order to maximise the value for the charity and its beneficiaries.

Most foundations and grant-making organisations support specific causes and therefore require charities to apply for funding in order to demonstrate that they qualify, and also to report back to show the impact of funding post-grant. This makes perfect sense in the context of cause-driven grant-making, and allows funding rounds to be scheduled and aligned with the organisation’s own fundraising and/or investment cycle.

ShareGift’s cause-neutrality allows us to allocate funding to charities on the basis of a) our own research on charities, charitable themes and causes, and b) charitable suggestions from our donors and the companies and organisations that we work with, all of which are subject to our in-house due diligence process. Although this removes the burden of applying for funding (at least from us) from the charities we grant to, it also ensures that our own resource is focussed not on managing applications but on the activity that generates the most value for ShareGift, i.e. taking in donations

of shares and cash. Which brings us neatly back to our ‘why’: solving the problem of small shareholdings and achieving a charitable outcome.

What’s your ‘why’?

Find out more about share donation: www.sharegift.org

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