HMRC allows you to claim Gift Aid on donations provided as sponsorships of a participant in a particular event - for example, someone running the London Marathon.
It would be very labour intensive to ask fundraisers to collect full address information and declarations for every sponsor, so HMRC (helpfully) allows you submit sponsorship donations a little differently.
HMRC requires:
A sponsorship declaration from the fundraiser
Assurance that no single donation is more than £500 (if higher, these donors must have their own declaration)
Adding sponsorship payments in Beacon
Create a new payment, and check the sponsorship box
Input the fundraiser in the fundraiser field and not the payer field. The payer field should be blank as the assumption with a sponsorship declaration is that you don't have the details of the payer
Specify the amount as the total amount raised by the participant
Set the Payment Date as the date of the last donation, and specify the other required fields.
Make sure that Gift Aid allowed is checked.
Note: It's usually the case that not all sponsors will be UK taxpayers, so not all payments written on a sponsor form are eligible for Gift Aid. In this case, you should create separate sponsorship payments in Beacon:
One totalling all Gift Aid-able donations (with Gift Aid allowed checked)
One for non-Gift Aid-able donations (with Gift Aid allowed unchecked)
Gift Aid eligibility
In Beacon, the eligibility criteria changes when a payment is marked as a sponsorship:
For more information on sponsorship eligibility, see this article.