If your donation is less than €100,000, we will retain 5% as an administration fee. This covers our administrative costs. This applies both to donations processed via our European network (Giving Europe) and to all other donations. Bank charges may also be deducted from this 95 per cent. The service provider for our online form retains a further 1 per cent. You can avoid these additional costs by making a standard bank transfer.

For all donations in excess of €100,000, the tax-deductible portion is calculated using a tiered system. You can find more information here. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us by email. 

We forward all donations under €10,000 in accordance with a fixed payment cycle: we transfer the donations quarterly in January, April, July and October as bundled sums – each time for the preceding quarter. This consolidated transfer helps to save on bank charges and ensures that the recipient organisations receive larger amounts.

We can only make exceptions to our standard payment cycle in the case of one-off payments or special transfers of €10,000 or more. Please contact us in advance by email if you wish to make a donation of this amount or more and would also like us to process your donation outside our usual payment quarters. Unfortunately, we are unable to deviate from our fixed payment cycle for amounts below this threshold.

If you wish to support a charitable organisation abroad directly, you cannot claim this as a tax deduction. This is because the law assumes that a tax relief in Germany is only justified if a donation benefits Germans. The Transnational Giving Programme makes it possible to legally circumvent this restriction.

But how does it work?

Your donation is a designated donation to the Maecenata Foundation. ‘Designated’ means that your donation, less a discretionary portion, will be passed on to the recipient organisation of your choice. The Maecenata Foundation first checks all recipient organisations to ensure that they are recognised as charitable under German law. To guarantee that the funds are used for their intended purpose, the recipient organisations are subject to strict reporting requirements.

The answer is therefore:

Simply because this is initially a designated donation to the Maecenata Foundation, you can receive the relevant donation receipt (for the full amount of the donation), which you can use to claim your donation against tax.

If you have already set up a standing order, you can usually amend it yourself via your bank or through your online banking service. To do this, you would first need to cancel the existing standing order and then set up a new one. You can find the information you need to set up a new standing order here. Do you need help? If so, please email us.

To change your bank details, please first cancel your existing standing order. If you are unable to cancel the standing order yourself, please contact us by email.

You can find all the information you need on setting up a new standing order for donations using your current bank details above under ‘Change donation amount’.

If you are unable to cancel your donation yourself (e.g. because you used our online form or the World Food Programme’s online form), please contact us by email. We will then cancel it on your behalf.

This will enable us to locate you quickly in our database and avoid any unnecessary follow-up enquiries. Please let us know:

• the name under which your standing order for donations is set up,
• which organisation will benefit from your donations and
• the email address you provided when you set up your regular donation.

There are two ways in which you can claim your donation as a tax deduction via the Maecenata Foundation:

1) For donations of up to €300.00, all you need is a standard donation receipt. You can download this here. Submit the standard donation receipt to the tax office, together with a bank statement showing the donation payment.

2) For donations over €300, you will need a personalised donation receipt. We will be happy to issue this for you, ideally digitally as a read-only PDF file. To do this, we need your email address. If you have not yet provided us with this when making your donation, please let us know briefly by email. Provided we have all your details, you will receive your donation receipt during the month following your donation.

Please note: If your donations, when extrapolated over the whole year, amount to more than €300, we will issue you with a collective donation receipt in the following year. We will also need your full details for this.

Questions such as these depend on individual circumstances. If in doubt, please consult a tax adviser for such calculations. The Maecenata Foundation is unable to provide advice. 

There are various possible reasons why you may not have received a donation receipt.

1) Is your donation less than €300? In that case, you only need a standard donation receipt. You can download this here. Please submit the standard donation receipt to the tax office, together with a bank statement showing the donation payment.

2) Do we have your address details? If not, we will be unable to issue a donation receipt. This is the most common reason why we do not send out donation receipts. Please send us a quick email letting us know which email address we should use to send your donation receipt to.

3) Has our email ended up in your spam folder? If you have provided an email address, we usually send donation receipts electronically. However, some email programmes automatically move our emails to the spam folder. Please check whether our email may have ended up there. Please contact us by email if your spam folder has been automatically cleared or if you cannot find our email anywhere.  

4) Has our post been returned? Delays or delivery problems do occasionally occur via the postal service. We often receive returned items. We have noted this accordingly in our database. Please contact us by email if, contrary to expectations, you have not received your post. 

You can find a selection of organisations accredited by us here. If you cannot find the organisation you are looking for, please feel free to contact us by email. If your preferred organisation is not yet part of our programme, you can nominate it for accreditation.  

It is not possible to predict the duration of the assessment in individual cases. However, you should generally expect the assessment to take around one month – once we have received all the necessary documentation from the applicant organisation. We would, however, like to point out once again that, as each review depends on various individual factors – such as the need for specific consultations, communication flows, etc. – it is not possible to estimate the actual total duration precisely in advance.  

As a private individual, you cannot receive donations through our programme, as only organisations are eligible to apply to us. Furthermore, it is not possible in Germany to provide charitable support to individuals. Consequently, it is also not possible to obtain a donation receipt for tax deduction purposes for donations made to an individual.

The World Food Programme is one of many organisations accredited by the Maecenata Foundation’s Transnational Giving Programme. This programme enables charitable organisations headquartered outside Germany to receive tax-deductible donations. Further information can be found here.

The Maecenata Foundation does not have its own fund. There is only one way to receive a grant through the Maecenata Foundation: you must register with our Transnational Giving programme. You can find information on the process and the application requirements here.

You can recognise charitable organisations by the following key characteristics:

Exemption notice:
Charities usually receive an exemption notice from the tax office, which exempts them from corporation tax and enables them to issue donation receipts.

Legal form:
Charitable organisations are often registered associations (e.V.), foundations or non-profit limited companies (gGmbH).

Articles of
Association: The articles of association of a charitable organisation clearly define its charitable purposes. These purposes must serve the public good, for example in the fields of education, science, the arts, culture, social welfare, environmental protection or health. The charitable purposes are defined in the German Tax Code.

You must be one (1) charitable organisation (2) based abroad which (3) has donors from Germany. You can find information on charitable status here.

The aim of the Transnational Giving Programme is to enable German donors to make donations to organisations abroad and to benefit from tax relief as a result. You will therefore receive donations to your organisation from donors in Germany. Important: The Maecenata Foundation does not support your organisation with fundraising activities. You are therefore entirely responsible for securing donations.

To register, you will need to be nominated by a German donor. Please therefore ask one of your donors to contact us and nominate you (there is no minimum or maximum donation amount). We will then send you all the necessary information and a list of the documents required for registration. As soon as we have received all the documents, we will begin our due diligence process, which usually takes around one month.

Through our Transnational Giving Europe programme, charitable organisations in Germany can receive tax-deductible donations from various countries. You can find an overview here. We also have a partnership with CAF America, through which you can receive tax-deductible donations from the USA and Canada. Further partnerships with countries in the Asian region are currently being prepared.

If you have donors in any of these countries, it is therefore worth registering with our programme. In this case, please contact us by email. We will guide you through the accreditation process and answer any questions you may have.

There are various ways and means of receiving donations from abroad

1) The simplest option within the Transnational Giving Europe network is to use our centralised donation platform [insert link]. This is particularly recommended if you receive donations from various European countries. Please note, however, that there is a one-off fee of 500 EUR to list your organisation on the donation platform. If you are interested, please contact us (tg@maecenata.eu).

2) As the countries with which we cooperate all have different procedures for preparing and processing donation transfers, we strongly recommend that you contact the relevant partner foundation in advance of any expected donation. Some partner foundations promptly return unannounced donations. You can find all the contact details for the Transnational Giving Europe network here [insert link: https://www.transnationalgiving.eu/category/partner]. If you have any questions, please contact us (tg@maecenata.eu).

With the exception of special payments/special transfers (from €10,000), we disburse all donations in batches on a quarterly basis in January, April, July and October, in each case for the preceding quarter. Please note that we are unable to deviate from these dates. If you are expecting a special transfer in the near future that you would like to be processed outside the fixed payment cycle, please let us know by email.

There may be various reasons why your donations have not yet been paid out:

1) Please note that we disburse donations on a quarterly basis in January, April, July and October, in each case for the preceding quarter.

2) We may need updated documentation in the form of a renewal of accreditation. Such a renewal is required every three years; for further information, please see ‘Renewal of Accreditation’.

3) Have you already sent us your statement of expenditure (MVN)? We require this no later than the second calendar year following the last donation received (for example, if you last received donation payments in January and April 2024, we will need an MVN for this by 2026). You can find more information under “Statement of Expenditure (MVN)”.

In the MVN, you report to us on how your organisation has used the earmarked donations. The MVN always relates to the total donations received within a calendar year. We require this report by the end of the year after next. We will send you a reminder by email to this effect. Please contact us by email if you have not received this email. We will then send you a pre-printed form. Please note that we cannot disburse any funds to your organisation if we do not have your MVN.

In order for us to accept donations earmarked for a specific purpose on your behalf, we require you to update your documentation every three years. Here you will find an overview of the required documents. If we have not received a renewal by the month in which donations are due to be paid out, and have not been able to verify it in good time, we are not permitted to pay out any donations. If we receive the renewal at a later date and the re-accreditation in our programme has been successful, we will disburse the donations accordingly in the next quarter. If you have any questions, please contact us by email.

In order for us to disburse the earmarked donations we have received for your organisation, we always require up-to-date documentation. Each month a payment is made, we will send you a ‘Details of Transfer’ document, in which you must confirm receipt of the donation by signing it. To remain in the Transnational Giving Programme, your organisation must also undergo a renewal process every three years (for more information, see ‘Renewal’). We also require a statement of expenditure for the donations disbursed each year (for more information, see “Statement of Expenditure”).