Vodafone Offer Free 20GB Data SIMs to Charities Across the UK
Vodafone UK has today launched a new initiative that offers SIMs packed with 20GB of free data (mobile broadband), as well as free calls and texts every month for 6-months, to charities across the country. The hope is that this may help some of the 1.5m households – approximately 6% of the population – who live in digital poverty.
According to the previous Skills Platform 2021 (Charity Digital Skills) report, some 45% of charities reported they had to give their users devices, data or support to enable them to get online; and 20% said they had to cancel services because they didn’t have the skills or technology needed to deliver them.
The above thus helps to explain Vodafone’s new charities.connected initiative (only registered charities can apply). The operator believes that it can deliver connectivity to as many as 1 million people by the end of 2022.
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Helen Lamprell, Voda’s General Counsel and External Affairs Director, said:
“At Vodafone, we’ve put tackling digital exclusion at the heart of our business with our pledge to connect one million people by the end of 2022. We hope that by giving free connectivity to charities across the UK, we can enable them to better support their local communities, particularly those that are digitally excluded. We want to support projects big and small – please help us share this offer so we can reach as many charities as possible.”
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I think they just do this as a form of advertising that they can then also write off tax wise.
Fo charitable donations actually confer a tax advantage in any way? Why do people keep chattering about tax write-offs?
At an individual level, charitable donations with gift aid result in the charity gaining a little, this is deducted from the tax you pay, but the money doesn’t go to you, it goes to the charity. As an example, If you paid £1000 in taxes and made a charitable donation of £100, the charity gets £20 extra from your taxes, and the government keeps £980. You get nothing except the headache of accounting for this on your tax returns if you are required to file them.
There’s no arrangement where making charitable contributions result in a tax credit as far as I know. At the very best your tax liability is reduced, but that is only fair. It makes no sense to pay tax on money that you have given away. As an example, if a business made a profit of £100000 and made a charitable donation of £1000, they may only pay tax on £99000, which is logical and confers no advantage, because that’s their net income after giving a thousand away.
Are you insinuating that they are heartless capitalists?