Foothold - changes to the way IET Members can choose to donate

We want to strengthen your relationship with Foothold – your questions answered.

Supporting our members both professionally and through life’s challenges is of upmost importance to us.

Foothold – the IET benevolent fund and an independent charity – works to ensure that engineers and their families never face life’s challenges alone. They provide a wide range of support services including legal advice, help getting back into employment, counselling and financial assistance.  We remain committed to providing our members with this vital support.

As a registered charity ourselves, we know how important it is to build relationships with our members in order to tailor our services to ensure you get the best value from us.

Up until July of this year, IET Members were asked annually at the point of their membership renewal if they would like to make a voluntary contribution via the IET to Foothold. This meant that we would share information with Foothold, with permission, of who these donors were and pass on the donation to them.

Maintaining high standards of data compliance and donor confidentiality is of course fundamental to both the IET and Foothold and we want to ensure our members are clear about who holds their data and what it is used for.

Therefore, from 1^st October and going forward and in line with current best practice, rather than making a payment to us via your membership renewal to pass on, we will be signposting you to Foothold to make a direct donation should you wish. This will allow Foothold to build a direct relationship with you and provide a greater insight into how your donation is being used to support other engineers. Information about the important work that Foothold do along with direct links to donate to them will be included in all our 150,000+ member renewal notices each year.

Foothold is an important extension of our IET family, and we hope that those members who have chosen to donate historically will still continue to do so via a simple process of contacting Foothold directly. We also are committed to helping introduce Foothold and their work to many more members over the coming years and highlighting the wide range of direct support options they have available including regular monthly donations and in-Will gifting. We will continue to remind and encourage members of all the ways to donate to Foothold via the annual renewal process.

You can find out more and donate to Foothold directly at  www.myfoothold.org/donate-direct/