Charities Aid Foundation Reviews 

CAF provide a valuable service for those who want to give effectively and tax efficiently to provide two different charities. When you give via CAF the question of whether you are tithing before or after tax becomes irrelevant.

Good systems, an efficient way to manage charity donations, user friendly.

CAF is helpful because it provides flexibility for charitable giving, enabling one to make regular planned tax-efficient charitable saving and then making donations from that saving in amounts which do not exactly match the pace of the saving. I do feel that the level of contribution now charged by CAF is distinctly high and that the justification for it is not explained in as prominent away as it should be.

They are always there to assist me and my questions. On the whole, all my charity donations go through CAF and will do so via my Will.

Reliable and quick in dealing with my charitable donations. An excellent way to avoid having to have dozens of accounts for donating to charities. The website can be a little difficult to navigate and information on some charities hard to find on occasion. Staff deal quickly and efficiently with queries.

Probably the world's worst bank.And yes i am intending this to be oosted for CAF as they own CAFbank. Sadly they seem to have developed a talent for complete incompetence over the past 18 months or so. The first big problem came with the supposed system upgrade about a year ago which should have resulted in the CIO (and probably most of the executives) being fired. They took literally months to stabilise their system and simply restore functionality that had worked fine in the previous system. They then tried to roll out the supposed 'new' functionality (which if they'd achieved it would have put them where most high street banks were 15 years ago in terms of online capability). But they have repeatedly failed to make much progress with that and are still miles behind the rest of the industry. Repeated service failures (the latest of which was 24 hours of outage yesterday followed by an almost unusable system today) - when I called them a week or so ago to deal with a failed direct debit I had a 40 minute wait even though I was only number 2 in the queue - I got through to the same lady I always end up speaking to, so I can only surmise they have a single person on their help desk and they're not that good. Reason for the failed DD - because I used the account name that appears labelled 'Account Name' on my statement but apparently thats not what they check against - so different spelling in another version of it meant failed transaction. I'm in the process of moving one of my organisations to Monzo - the other one is harder because Monzo won't accept entities other than Ltd companies that have named directors - so charities set up under a deed of trust can't go with them, I will research further as I need to switch both my orgs.
Theres a simple solution to this of course - don't build a banking system yourself, buy/rent one from a big high street chain and get them to add the very few features that a charity needs (pretty much the only thing is dual authorisation of payments). I expect several of the big banks would be only too happy to do a good deal with CAF in order to be able to tout it as part of the 'CSR' activity.
If I had the time and energy I might research the board at CAF to understand a) how they ended up running such a poor banking organisation (always assume nepotism) and b) find out how to shake them up and change some faces - they certainly need it.

Very poor service from CAF.
They are technically inadequate for running an online banking system. The biggest criticism is they don't have contingency plans when their online systems fail. They appear to have very few staff on the telephone banking system - which means when the whole of customer transactions switch from the failed online service to the telephone banking they become overwhelmed. And CAF have no prepared plan for that. So looking at the numbers (over 4 hours on hold dropping from 120th in queue to 9th) it is clear they have the bare minimum of staff taking and making calls and no capacity to scale up.

This is all inadequate for company that has a record of third rate IT systems that don't do what customers need them to do and have no alternatives when they, inevitably, fall over.

I don't want a cut and paste apologetic reply - I want CAF to learn from the PR disaster of a repeat of their failed migration - and take note that they clearly learned nothing from that - they continue to be hit by the same errors again. Customers won't forgive a second time.

Also I note the obvious 5 star reviews are all "invited" and one line, all mysteriously around 11 July, whereas the 1 star reviews are unsolicited and give paragraphs of detail. I wonder which group is the honest review?

Website has been down for a week with no communication. Currently unable to pay our employees who have mortgages, rents and children with little to no help over the phone. Just not acceptable and will be looking to change bank.

Very easy to use. Option of "Make it anonymous". Simple to change amounts, charities, etc.

Wish I could give 0 stars! A clunky and old-fashioned website, which has become worse since the so-called "update".
To top it all off, which modern day bank would carry out days’ worth of website maintenance in the middle of a weekday during office hours?!?
If you're a charity, save yourself a lot of stress and aggravation and find somewhere else to store your hard-earned income.

I find this a convenient, straightforward and effective way to budget and then donate to multiple charities by means of a single payment.

clear instructions
works well always

Very easy to add money and pay out money. The cut taken by CAF is I think a bit high thus only 4 stars

Was able to do what I wanted with a minimum of fuss.

Ever since being introduced to CAF by Midland Bank plc in 1979 and subsequently continued my employment with HSBC I have contributed to a number of Charities. I have found CAF to be the most effective way of 'giving', particularly because my wife and I can remain anonymous. We continue to contribute to CAF by monthly S.O.

always satisfied in allmy dealings woth CAF

help very patient when needed. Convenient and easy way to give now we don't access our bank a/c.

Site is easy to use. I make regular donations to my CAF account so that I can respond quickly to appeals.
It is useful to have my favourite charities stored in the account.

Helpful staff