How ShareGift works for charities

ShareGift does not accept unsolicited applications – in fact we don’t accept applications at all!

Our grants are driven primarily by the suggestions of our donors and our corporate partners who help us create the funds we give away.

Anyone who donates to ShareGift can suggest a charity or charities that they wish to support.

We are not a membership organisation, and you do not have to register to be eligible. We can give to any UK registered charity subject to due diligence. We are giving to new charities every month.

All of our funding is unrestricted. We trust charities to spend the money how they need to, and they can apply this wherever they have the most need, including towards core costs. We do not require budgets or update reports from charities.

Unlike most grant-makers, our model does not support multi-year funding. All grants we make are standalone. Most grant-makers know exactly how much money they have in their accounts, and how much they can award, often for years in advance. Our available grant-making funds are determined by ongoing donations of shares and corporate activity. Because of this we do not know how much we will have available for funding in the long-term.

ShareGift is cause neutral – meaning that we can give to any area of charitable work, and we aim to make grants to every qualifying charity suggested to us. We undertake due diligence on the charities we support. Please refer to our charity pack for more information about our due diligence.

All the grants we make are ultimately at the discretion of ShareGift – however we always try and support qualifying charities that are suggested to us, and this is part of the reason why we have supported so many charities to date.

We primarily support charities suggested to us by our donors, and also include suggestions from our corporate partners who help us to create the pool of funds. We also undertake independent research into charities to support with available funds. We not accept applications for funding from charities.

The research we undertake is based on specific themes which we identify to diversify the causes we support and to address specific areas of underfunding. We do not share themes in advance, and we do not accept applications in respect of our themed distributions. As at the end of 2025, themed distributions accounted for less than 5% of our awarded funds.

No. ShareGift is not a conduit or stockbroking service for charities. Most of the shareholdings we receive are worth around £40 or less, and we don’t make grants for £40! Because so many of the assets we receive are given to us without a charity suggestion we are typically able to make larger donations to suggested charities, but we cannot guarantee this. All the donations we make are from a pool of funds and subject to our grant-making policy.

No. There is no registration process; ShareGift can support any UK registered charity subject to due diligence.

No. We are not a membership organisation – we do not know who our donors will be or which charity they wish to suggest until they contact us. We don’t have an existing pool of donors we engage with and aren’t able to promote individual charities to donors. In line with our grant-making procedures, donor suggestions inform the grants we make, and we would never influence a donor’s choice of charity suggestion.

The best way for you to increase the chances of receiving funding from ShareGift is to promote ShareGift to your supporters.

In 2025 ShareGift awarded grants from £500 to £900,000. We are equipped to handle share donations of all sizes.

We purposely do not make step change grants to charities and would rarely make grants that are more than 15% of a charity’s turnover. We can occasionally make exceptions for this for very small charities but this decision will be made on a case by case basis.

All the grants we make are standalone, and past grants are not indicative of grants we may choose to make in the future.

ShareGift are unusual as a grant-maker in that we are transactional. We give up to 100 grants to charities a month, and as much as we would love to get to know charities and hear all about their amazing work, it ultimately does not influence who we award grants to. We do not have the capacity to process impact or update reports from charities.

Apart from confirmation from the charity that the funding has been received, we do not require ongoing stewardship. While we do enjoy being mentioned in a LinkedIn post, we don’t require update reports. As we are a transactional funder, this stewardship is better channelled into your supporters who may have shares to donate.

If ShareGift have supported your charity we are more than happy to be acknowledged in your annual report as “ShareGift”.

ShareGift is not a stockbroking service for charity or a conduit — we don’t just sell shares and remit the exact proceeds to beneficiary charities- but we do not take a commission or fee either. We designate all the proceeds arising from the sale of donated shares to grant-making; we don’t use any of this towards our costs.

We make grants in round figures, based on a number of factors including the value of shares donated to us. As an independently philanthropic charity, we typically make grants in excess of the value of shares donated to us – although we cannot guarantee this. We are generally able to do this because we have a wide range of sources of income, many of which come to us without any charity suggestion attached.

While there are various factors around the selling of shares that can affect the timeframe, when shares are sold and are above £500 in value we will typically include the suggestion in the next of our monthly grant distributions – subject to due diligence. 

For lower value donations we still welcome suggestions (again, subject to due diligence) but we’re unable to apply the same priority so these can take significantly longer to result in a grant. All valid suggestions that we receive remain under consideration until such a time as the charity has received a grant from us.

All our donors are giving to the charity ShareGift, not to any underlying charities that they may suggest. Due to GDPR we’re unable to give details of our donors to beneficiary charities. Donors are always welcome to let charities know that they have given to us and suggested them as beneficiaries. We do share letters of receipt from charities with our donors on request.

Ultimately, any donation that comes from us is from the charity ShareGift, and is made from the pool of funds that we generate.

It is impossible for us to give a breakdown of where the funds we donate have come from. We amalgamate tens of thousands of share and cash donations every year to create funds for charitable benefit. Funds are not ringfenced against specific share donations.

There are several ways to promote share giving to your supporters. Please download our charity pack for more in depth information and template wording.