Chess Charities Missing Out on Donations

[Ian Thompson]

My employer is a member of Benevity. This allows employees to make donations to charities, and other good causes, and my employer will make a matching donation (within limits). It also means that if I do voluntary work for a registered organisation, I earn money from my employer to donate to an organisation, which need not be the one I volunteered for.

Having earned some money to donate, I searched for "chess" to see who I could donate it to. Fifteen UK organisations were returned, some well-known national ones, and other less well-known local ones. Disappointingly, it was only possible to donate to two of them because the other thirteen hadn't provided Benevity with the information needed to allow donations to be made. It seems to me that those organisations are missing out on at least the possibility of getting donations.

If I want to donate to a chess charity I have a choice between:

• Chess in Schools and Communities
• The Chess Trust

[Joey Stewart]

I guess that's the downside of there being a hundred billion charities in the UK - nobody really knows who they all to be able to register with them in the first place.

If you have put the time in raise some money and don't want to see it go to waste why not just cut out the charity middleman altogether and donate directly to a club or league?

[Ian Thompson]

If you have put the time in raise some money and don't want to see it go to waste why not just cut out the charity middleman altogether and donate directly to a club or league?

Because it's my employer donating the money in accordance with my wishes. They're not going to give me the cash to do with as I like.