Digital fundraising and cross-border donation management for UK charities

12 November 2026

Nothing in charity law stops a UK charity from sending money abroad. According to GOV.UK guidance on making grants, charities can make grants to organisations overseas, including for specific projects and activities. What the Charity Commission expects is that trustees do the groundwork first, and that the groundwork grows with the risk. For charities working with partners in Brazil, that expectation shapes everything from the grant agreement to the donation page.

Cross-border grantmaking rules for UK charities

The Charity Commission's position, set out in the same GOV.UK grant-making guidance, is that a charity must carry out appropriate checks before it makes a grant. Where the risks are higher, it must make more checks. The guidance names some grants to organisations operating overseas as falling into that higher-risk category. The wording matters: there is no single checklist that satisfies every grant, and the standard moves with the circumstances.

In practice, a small grant to a long-standing partner whose work the trustees know well will need less scrutiny than a first grant to an unfamiliar organisation in a region where funds are harder to trace. A Brazil-facing partnership sits towards the demanding end of that range, simply because distance, currency conversion, different banking arrangements and less direct oversight all add risk. Trustees cannot visit every project, so they have to build confidence through documents, references, reporting and the way money physically moves.

That is why due diligence for overseas partners is better treated as a continuing process than a one-off hurdle. Before the first payment, a charity will usually want to establish who the partner is, how it is governed, what it will do with the money and how it will report back. After the grant, the checks continue through the reports it receives and any change in the partner's circumstances. Trustees who record what they checked and why, and who adjust their approach as risks shift, are in a far better position than those relying on goodwill and a handshake.

One practical caveat for UK readers: the Commission's expectations apply to the UK charity making the grant, whatever the partner's own local obligations may be. A partner may comply fully with Brazilian requirements and the UK trustees still need to show that they, independently, took reasonable care with charitable funds.

Managing donations and payments safely across borders

Money moves in two directions in an international programme. Grants go out to partners, and donations come in from supporters who may live anywhere. Both need handling with care, and the GOV.UK chapter on holding, moving and receiving funds covers each.

On incoming gifts, the guidance tells trustees to take care with donations from outside the UK. They may need extra steps to identify, verify and handle those donations. A charity that has built its donor database around UK supporters, with UK addresses and UK bank details, may find that an overseas gift does not fit the usual process. Someone has to decide, before the money arrives, how a donor from abroad will be identified and what happens if the details do not check out.

On outgoing money, the guidance is more specific. Charities should try to move money to overseas organisations by electronic bank transfer to a bank account held in the organisation's name. The point is traceability. A transfer to a named organisational account leaves a record at both ends, while cash, or payments into an individual's personal account, leave far less to go on if questions arise later.

Fundraising coordinators also need to understand the environment in which Brazilian supporters and partners actually operate online. Looking at Brazilian digital media channels and user directory portals can help, and local market listings such as a guia de cassinos online confiáveis show how Brazilian users move through local sites and what payment processing options they are used to seeing. Observing those conventions gives a team practical benchmarks for its own donation journey, from how many steps a form takes to which payment methods feel familiar. It is a way of testing assumptions before committing to a particular set-up, not a substitute for the formal checks above.

A common mistake is to treat the payment route as a technical detail to be settled after the programme is agreed. The route should be chosen alongside the grant itself, because it determines what records exist, how quickly funds arrive, what the partner pays in fees and whether the named-account principle can be met.

Why digital infrastructure matters for UK-Brazil fundraising

A charity raising money for Brazil, or sending money there, runs on its systems as much as its policies. A customer relationship management system (CRM) holds the donor record. The payment gateway takes the gift. Between them sit currency conversion, consent and the audit trail trustees may later need to show. If these pieces do not fit together, staff end up reconciling transactions by hand, and the gaps that appear are exactly where errors and weak controls tend to creep in.

Three questions are worth putting to any platform before a Brazil-facing campaign. Can the gateway handle gifts in more than one currency, and show clearly what the donor pays and what the charity receives? Does the CRM capture enough about each donor, including country, to support the identification and verification steps the guidance describes? And can the set-up accommodate local compliance requirements, which a partner on the ground or a professional adviser is best placed to confirm?

The table below sets out how those elements line up with the safe-handling principles in the official guidance and CAF's published approach.

The last row reflects CAF's description of its own service. CAF says it carries out due diligence on overseas charities and uses a risk-based approach that can be influenced by global sanctions and government instability. For a small charity without in-house expertise, routing funds through an intermediary that does this work is one way to meet the Commission's expectations without building the whole apparatus alone. It does not remove the trustees' responsibility, but it can supply evidence of checks that would otherwise be hard to gather.

Building trust and compliance in international philanthropy

CAF defines cross-border giving as any donation that qualifies for tax relief in one country and is given directly to a foreign charity. The definition is useful because it shows how much sits behind an apparently simple gift. Tax treatment in the donor's country, the status of the recipient, and the movement of money between jurisdictions all have to line up. Each one is a point where a donation can be delayed, queried or refused.

That is the reason validation and risk controls carry so much weight. Donors want to know their money has reached a genuine organisation. Regulators want to see that trustees took reasonable care. Banks want to understand where funds come from and where they are going. A charity that can answer all three, with documents rather than assurances, tends to find that international work runs more smoothly and that partners take the process seriously too.

The scale of the activity explains why the infrastructure has become so formal. CAF says it helps move hundreds of millions of pounds and dollars safely across borders every year through its UK, US and Canada teams. It also says it helped deliver almost £1bn to over 100,000 charities in 110 countries in the last financial year. Those figures describe one organisation's reach, but they indicate how large the flows of international giving are, and why established channels, named accounts and documented checks have become the norm rather than the exception.

For trustees and fundraising staff weighing up a Brazil-facing programme, the practical sequence is straightforward. Decide how much scrutiny the partner and the grant warrant, and write down why. Choose a payment route that ends in an account held in the partner's name. Make sure the CRM and payment gateway can record who is giving, from where and in which currency. Then work out how donations from outside the UK will be identified and verified before the first one turns up, not after.