personal development

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.

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.

Events fundraising can feel like one of the hardest areas to get right.

High admin. Tight budgets. Supporters who sign up full of enthusiasm, then quietly disappear. And for smaller charities, the risk can feel huge. One wrong decision on event places or marketing spend can wipe out months of work.

So when we hear about a charity growing its events income from around £100,000 a year to over £630,000, it’s worth paying attention.

In a recent episode of the Fundraising Everywhere podcast, Simon Scriver sat down with Georgia Akers, Head of Events at Spinal Research, to unpack what’s actually driven that growth. No silver bullets. No “overnight success”. Just thoughtful strategy, relationship-building, and a willingness to change what wasn’t working.

Here’s what events fundraisers can learn from Spinal Research’s approach.

If you work in event fundraising, this probably feels familiar: demand is there, supporters are still stepping up, and results are coming in, but the pressure on your time, energy and capacity hasn’t eased.

The good news is that the latest JustGiving 2026 Event Fundraising Snapshot shows events fundraising is not just holding steady, it’s delivering real value again, both financially and strategically, for charities of all sizes.

And don’t worry, on January 29th we’re hosting the Events Fundraising Conference to show you exactly how you can achieve that too.

Every January we take a moment to pause, look back, and be open about what we’ve learned – and then look ahead at what we’re committing to improve.

Fundraising Everywhere exists for one simple reason: to help fundraisers feel more confident, capable and supported in their work. That means constantly asking ourselves hard questions. What’s working? What isn’t? Where are we creating friction? And where could we do better for our community?

2025 was a big year for us. A year of growth, learning, and deliberate investment. And 2026 is about making sure all of that translates into something even better for you.

This is our review of what we focused on in 2025 – and what we’re committing to next.

The single greatest driver of mission achievement is not the size of your budget, but the strength of your organisation’s work culture.
Staff turnover, internal friction, and burnout erode capacity, stall growth, and ultimately compromise impact. But by intentionally engineering a positive work culture, your charity can drastically improve staff retention, strengthen departmental coordination, drive efficiency, and develop the stability required for agile fundraising operations.
This five-part framework provides a strategic approach to cultural improvement, treating your internal operations with the same care you apply to your fundraising strategy.

As we head into 2026, fundraising leaders are being asked to do something that feels increasingly hard: grow income, modernise approaches, and build resilience, all while teams are stretched, systems are cracking, and confidence is fragile.

That’s why we brought together two key data sets:

How fundraisers are actually using Fundraising Everywhere – what they search for, what they ask, and what they say is keeping them up at night

What sector reports are telling us about growth, opportunity and risk

The aim wasn’t to predict the future. It was to understand where ambition and reality don’t yet align, and what leaders can do to close that gap.

Here’s what we found – and what it means for your strategy in 2026.

We hope you managed to get a bit of rest over the holidays and you found some moments of joy, whatever that looks like for you. For team FE it has involved lots of chocolate (of both the vegan and non-vegan kind – yum!)

We know that Christmas can be a difficult time for some, so if this is you, we see you. ❤️

Getting back to work can be overwhelming, so take it slow. Prioritise only the most urgent tasks and remember to be kind to yourself.

Whether it’s handling emails bit by bit or taking extra breaks, you’re doing great.

The new year is full of opportunities, but there’s no rush. Start with care and a clear mind. You’ve got this!

We’ll be here, ready to support you whenever you’re ready to dive into 2026.

On any given day in the charity sector, fundraisers are doing a lot of emotional and practical heavy lifting.

They are juggling targets, stewarding donors, holding stories of trauma, and trying to raise money in a cost of living crisis. Enthuse’s Donor Pulse Spring 2024 shows that over half of people still feel it is harder to give than it was six months ago, even as inflation eases. At the same time, CAF’s UK Giving 2025 report finds that only around half of UK adults are now donating, down from 58 percent in 2019, which equates to roughly four million fewer donors.

In short, everyone is under pressure. Which is exactly why safe, inclusive workplaces for queer and trans fundraisers cannot be treated as a side project or a “nice to have”. They are central to whether your organisation can attract and keep brilliant people and whether your fundraising actually works.

This blog is based on a session from the Fundraising Culture & Change On Demand Programme, which is a conversation between Cam St Omer-Donaldson (she/her), Head of Membership Engagement, and guests Luca Straker (they/them), CEO of Proud Changemakers, and Arlo Hilton (they/them), a partnerships and inclusion specialist. It digs into what it really looks and feels like to create safe spaces for queer and trans colleagues, and how you can move from policy on paper to culture in practice.

Today’s focus is on queer and trans staff, but many of the ideas here will support everyone on your team.

During our Getting Code Ready webinar, some of you shared thoughtful questions, thank you!

Below you’ll find answers & related links that might help with questions asked in the chat, links to the Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice, and pointers to supporting guidance also included.

The purpose of the webinar was to share key overall changes, frameworks and top tips on getting code ready, hearing from others on how they are doing this and how they’re staying code ready for the future also. We have provided, similar to the webinar, sign posts to the Fundraising Regulator directly as the regulatory body responsible for the Code of Fundraising Practice.