Individual Giving Conference 2026

The Email Soft Opt-in guidance has landed. Now what? We’ll explore what you can do to start planning for Soft Opt-in, and how you can use it to grow your email list ethically and effectively. How can fundraising and engagement teams make the most of these changes without compromising trust or compliance? In this session, we’ll break down what’s changed, what it means for your supporter acquisition and retention strategy, and what you could do next to start discussing soft opt-in in a way that’s smart, sustainable, and aligned with your charity’s values.

Charities spend a lot of time asking whether their communications are working. Not enough time asking how they make supporters feel, and what that actually does to giving behaviour over time.

This session shares findings from the SAFE Index, built around data from over a dozen charities, on the emotional drivers that keep supporters giving and the warning signs that show up long before lapse hits your income figures.

You’ll see how positive and negative emotions translate differently to donor commitment and value, how motivational profile shapes the way supporters respond to your communications, and how the emotional map helps charities understand where they stand relative to peers across the sector. If you want to build donor value and stop losing donors before you know you’re losing them, this session gives you the tools to start.

Maximise every moment: making every gift go further
Speaker: Victoria Read, Senior Customer Success Manager, Funraisin, Fernanda Salerno, Projects Manager, Funraisin

In this session, we will be sharing some beautiful and inspiring examples of appeals and strategies to optimise every campaign, interaction, and upsell moment, and to create a moment that really matters and a movement. We will look at how you can maximise every action and moment of a gift.

Key Learnings:
– How to drive urgency and scarcity within a campaign.
– How to build and engage a community around an appeal.
– Easy real-life tactics on what visuals and interactions matter and how they compound growth and create upsell moments.

Small List, Big Impact: Getting Supporter Acquisition Right
Speaker: Rhiannan Sullivan, VP, Care2

Whether you’re building a supporter list from scratch or investing significantly in acquisition, the same fundamentals determine whether that investment delivers long-term value. This session will explore how mission-aligned acquisition can help organisations grow engaged audiences at any scale — and why acquiring a new supporter is only the beginning.

We’ll look at what happens after someone takes their first action: the journeys, follow-up and fundraising fundamentals that turn new supporters into engaged activists and donors. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for getting the basics right and making every acquisition budget work harder.

Key Learnings:
– How mission-aligned acquisition can work at any scale – from building your first supporter list to scaling significant investment efficiently.
– Why acquisition is only the starting point: it’s the journey afterwards that turns new supporters into engaged activists and donors.
– The fundamentals that make acquisition pay off – from effective action and donation pages to follow-up, nurture and conversion.

Closing the engagement gap: the missing piece to turn leads into donors

Speaker: Florian Engel, Managing Director, More Onion

A common challenge in digital fundraising is the failure to engage supporters effectively before making a financial ask. This is what we call the ‘Engagement Gap’.This session explores how to cultivate deeper relationships through meaningful engagement actions. We will discuss designing strategies that go beyond simple clicks to build lasting trust and connection. Using real-world examples and actionable insights, you will learn to create experiences where supporters feel truly valued. We will also demonstrate how you can integrate wider engagement with your donation asks. By closing the engagement gap for your organisation you can improve the long-term results of your individual giving program.

Key learnings
– Why engagement matters so much in digital fundraising
– How to identify the engagement gap in the supporter experience
– Practical ideas and examples for engagement actions that will inspire you

This high-impact session dives deep into the mechanics of a successful charity-agency partnership. We’ll move beyond the basics to explore how to build radical trust with partners, manage attrition with insider experience, and scale campaigns without sacrificing quality. We will also reveal the single most important KPI that most charities and agencies overlook.

Key learnings
– How to cultivate a high-trust, transparent relationship with an agency that exceeds expectations, becoming a true extension of your team.
– Get insights on the metrics that most charities overlook, and how to use them to accurately predict long-term campaign success.
– Proven insider tactics for managing attrition and fine-tuning your outreach, allowing you to grow supporter volume without sacrificing ROI.

Speaker: Sinem Bilen-Onabanjo, Head of Legacy Engagement, Oxfam GB

Legacy giving shouldn’t be treated as a separate fundraising product or conversation. Instead, it should emerge naturally from the relationships we build with supporters throughout their journey.

This session explores how Individual Giving programmes can create the conditions for meaningful legacy engagement by focusing on supporters’ motivations, values and identities rather than channels or fundraising asks. Drawing on practical examples from Oxfam’s supporter journeys, persona development, stewardship programme and the *Stay in the Fight* campaign, it will demonstrate how legacy can be introduced as a natural continuation of a supporter’s lifelong commitment to a cause.

The session will also challenge the idea that legacy fundraising belongs solely to specialist teams, exploring how stewardship, volunteering, campaigning and supporter care all play a role in creating opportunities for legacy conversations.

Ultimately, successful legacy fundraising is less about identifying the perfect moment to ask and more about embedding legacy thinking across the supporter experience, enabling people to see how the values they champion today can continue to shape the future long after they’re gone.

Speaker: Sophie Lamont, Christian Aid

How do you refresh a Value Exchange product that already works without losing what made it successful in the first place?

This session explores how Christian Aid evolved its Adult Prayer Journal from an established lead-generation product into a refreshed acquisition proposition designed to support long-term regular giving. We’ll share how testing across the product, creative, audience targeting, campaign timing and supporter journey helped shape the latest version, and why the decision was made to refresh rather than reinvent.

Using the Adult Prayer Journal as a practical case study, the session will look at how the product itself changed, how the Meta creative evolved, and how the acquisition journey became more connected from initial sign-up through to follow-up and ongoing supporter engagement. Attendees will leave with practical lessons on testing, creative optimisation and building on proven Value Exchange propositions.

Key Learnings:
– Refresh, don’t automatically reinvent: If the core ValEx proposition still works, build on it rather than starting again.
– Test across the whole journey: Product, creative, audiences, timing and follow-up all influence performance.
– Keep the supporter experience simple: Remove unnecessary friction and make the route from interest to engagement clear. Think beyond lead generation: ValEx should be treated as the start of a longer-term supporter relationship, not just a way to collect leads.