Explore Fundraising Articles & FAQs

We’ve gathered our top 5 On-Demand sessions this month so that you can see what’s been popular in our community. You can check out the sessions by clicking on the thumbnails below.

This might be controversial but I’m going to say it – your organisation is potentially spending lots of money on training that isn’t working.

Not because your team doesn’t want to learn- but because the way most training is structured in our sector sets people up to tick a box rather than actually grow.

And the cost is high.

According to Civil Society £28m alone is wasted on inefficient training – and our own Impact of L&D on charity staff research shows millions more could be lost from potential income.

How is this happening at a time when skills, confidence, and progress should be top priority?
What the Research Tells Us

A few weeks ago, Skillcast published their Lost Hours Report, a sector-by-sector breakdown of training efficiency across the UK.

Our sector came out with one of the highest “workforce development gaps” of any industry – but nearly half of all training effort in our sector is absorbed by basic or mandatory sessions. Refreshers that are perhaps required for regulatory needs, changes nothing when people get back to their desks; leaving only 40% of development time focused on the advanced, role-specific learning that actually moves people forward.

The result? An estimated £28 million lost annually in unrealised training spend, and the equivalent of 764 full-time roles worth of wasted capacity.

F2F fundraising remains one of the most powerful channels for acquiring recurring donors. Yet across many markets, rising Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and increasing pressure on ROI are leading organisations to question its sustainability.

One week after my last post on risk, filtering and value destruction in F2F, I’d like to focus on another uncomfortable but central issue for our sector: the retention of F2F fundraising teams AND what we choose to invest in (or not).

There are not many topics that can make a room full of fundraisers sit up quite like data protection.
Not because it is glamorous. Not because anyone is desperate for another policy update. But because the second the rules around supporter communications change, the questions start flying.
Can we email more people now?
Should we?
What counts as interest?
And how do we use this without damaging trust?
That is exactly why the new charitable purpose soft opt-in matters.
The change comes from the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. It creates a new route for charities to send some electronic marketing, including emails and texts, to people who have shown interest in or offered support to the charity, without relying on traditional consent, as long as specific conditions are met. The Act received Royal Assent on 19 June 2025, and the relevant soft opt-in provisions came into force on 5 February 2026.
That sounds simple enough on paper. In practice, there is still a lot for charities to think through.
Because this is not just a legal change. It is a supporter experience decision.\
This blog has been inspired by one of the talks from our London In-Person event. The session was titled: BREAKING NEWS: Email Soft Opt-in now in force in the UK delivered by Mark Burnett, CEO of Hope&May.

We’ve gathered our top 5 On-Demand sessions this month so that you can see what’s been popular in our community. You can check out the sessions by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Social media is constantly changing—and fast. According to Hootsuite’s 2026 Social Media Trends Report, 22% of marketers feel pressure to respond to trending topics or viral moments on social media daily or a few times per week, and 39% say they’ve had social media content perform poorly due to rushing to keep up with trends.

For charities, you can’t afford to participate in every viral trend and waste resources on pushing out content that may quickly become outdated, while you could be focusing more intently on your mission. To navigate the social media marketing and fundraising landscape, charities need to solidify their strategies on these platforms. While participating in a trend once in a while won’t hurt, your focus should be on building relationships and providing a positive supporter experience.

This guide will help steer you in the right direction, offering tips to make the most of social media’s fundraising potential.

Let’s talk about something that fundraisers everywhere know is true, but rarely gets said out loud.

Sometimes, the thing stopping your charity from doing more good isn’t a lack of ambition, creativity, or passion.

It’s shelving.

Or insurance.

Or web hosting.

Or the fact you’re still using a wobbly chair that’s one spreadsheet away from taking you out completely.

Welcome to the world of “boring funding”. The unglamorous, often invisible costs that keep charities running, compliant, and able to actually deliver their work.

And recently, one brilliant idea has been shining a spotlight on just how broken our relationship with these costs has become.

It’s called… The Boring Fund.