How Tax Receipts Work When You Give

If you are thinking about giving to Phoenix, you deserve to know exactly what happens between the moment you decide and the moment a tax receipt reaches you. The path is deliberately simple, and deliberately human. This article walks through it, step by step, and then explains the tax side as honestly as we can.

One caveat before anything else: we are not tax advisers, and nothing here is tax advice. What we can promise is this: we confirm what applies to your situation before any transfer.

The four steps

• You pledge on the site. A pledge is a declaration of intent, nothing more. No money moves, and no payment details are asked of you.
• The team replies by email. You receive secure bank-transfer instructions, personally, from us. This is also the moment we confirm which entity should receive your gift and what tax treatment applies to your situation.
• You make the transfer. From your own bank, on your own terms, once your questions are answered.
• You receive your tax receipt. Issued by the receiving entity, documenting your donation for your tax filing.

Why there is no card form

No card data passes through our site. That is not a missing feature; it is a choice.

A card form would be faster by a few minutes. But the email step buys things we value more than those minutes: it lets us confirm the right entity and the right documentation for your country before money moves rather than after; it means the site holds nothing that could be stolen; and it puts a person, not a payment processor, at the moment of the gift. A foundation that shows its work should also show its plumbing, and this is ours.

What French tax rules currently provide

Phoenix has two legal homes: the Colombian foundation in Rivera and Fondation Phoenix Initiative France, an association loi 1901 based in Vielle-Aure. For donors in France, the French association is the relevant entity, and current French rules provide:

For individuals, an income-tax reduction of 66% of the donation, within a limit of 20% of taxable income. In the standard case, that means a 100 € gift costs 34 € after the reduction. For companies, the reduction is 60%, within the limits that apply to corporate giving.

We state these figures because they are the published French rules, not because we can promise them to you personally. Thresholds, situations, and filings differ. That is exactly why the confirmation step exists: before any transfer, we tell you what applies in your case, in writing.

If you are not a French taxpayer

Tax treatment differs from country to country, and we will not pretend to know every regime. If you give from elsewhere in Europe, from Colombia, or from anywhere in the Americas, write to us. We will tell you honestly which entity is the right recipient, what documentation we can provide, and, just as honestly, what we cannot confirm and where you should check with your own adviser.

An honest "we don't know, please verify" is worth more to us than a confident answer that turns out wrong at filing time.

What your gift becomes

The receipt documents the giving side. The field side, we document in this journal all year. To make the connection concrete, we publish field-cost equivalences, illustrative, based on 2025 field costs: about 20 € corresponds to a dozen native seedlings planted and tracked; about 50 € to one training day for one woman of the Rivera cohort; about 250 € to 1,000 m² of wildlife corridor restored.

Those are illustrations, not earmarks. But they are drawn from real costs in a real place, and they are why the paperwork in this article is worth doing carefully: at the end of it, on a hillside in Huila, something grows.