In late 2016 HMRC introduced new compliance guidelines relating to Retail Gift Aid which stated that all staff and volunteers should be trained in Gift Aid procedures and that records of this training must be kept by the charity should the charity be audited.

With 400 charity shops nationwide, Age UK relies on its 7,500 staff and volunteers to process 20 million customer transactions per year. As many of these transactions will include Gift Aid, it was vital that everyone working in an Age UK shop understood the HMRC rules.

The challenge for Age UK, as with many UK charities, was to implement a training programme that complied with the HMRC guidelines whilst being straightforward enough to ensure all staff and volunteers were trained quickly and effectively, keeping cost and impact on day-to-day business to a minimum.

Age UK chose Eproductive’s Gift Aid Training Platform, which provides a series of online training modules designed to comply with HMRC’s training and record keeping requirements. Over the course of last year, 25,000 tests were completed by Age UK staff and volunteers with some volunteers, not rostered to work every week, completing their training off site on tablets or laptops. Eproductive’s secure cloud captures and stores results in real time so Age UK are confident their training records are compliant, up to date and easily available.

With the successful implementation of the Gift Aid Training Programme, Age UK decided that using an online training option was a highly effective way to deliver training to all staff and volunteers over a short space of time. Critically with everyone receiving the same standard of training with accurate, automated record-keeping in place to provide visibility of who has completed what training.

Working with Eproductive, Age UK have extended the Gift Aid Training Platform, releasing training modules early this year covering key Health and Safety compliance and HR areas such as identifying and dealing with Safeguarding concerns.

Age UK plan to release a new module every month through 2018, with some targeted at paid staff and other modules focussed on volunteers such as Volunteer Induction. Using this method of online training works well in conjunction with offline resources like workbooks and training sessions and ensures everyone, no matter where they are based, has access to the training they require – and the charity has the records to prove it!

Laura Winckles, Age UK’s Retail People Development Manager, is delighted by the system, saying: “At Age UK, we rely on our fantastic volunteers and staff to bring in much needed funds for the essential work we do. With the large numbers of people involved we needed an innovative approach and with Eproductive’s Gift Aid Training Platform being such a success it was a simple decision to extend their platform for our other training programmes. We are delighted with the results.”

Steve Wooldridge, Age UK’s Head of Retail Operations, added: “With 400 shops being run by 7,500 over staff and volunteers, we take the training of our people very seriously and especially in all areas of compliance such as Health & Safety. With Eproductive’s first class cloud solution, I can see that we are compliant, where necessary, at a click of a button.”