A few weeks ago I had one of those conversations that lodges in your head and won't leave. It was with a fundraising leader at one of the UK's largest charities, someone who has spent a career on the front line of delivering income growth. And it crystallised a question I've been turning over for a while: are the days of substantial growth from our traditional sources of income coming to an end?
I want to tread carefully here, because plenty of people I respect remain stubbornly, and perhaps rightly, optimistic about the future of voluntary income. But this particular leader was refreshingly candid.
Legacies, still the thing that quietly rescues the year-end, are bumpy and hard to predict. Regular giving feels stagnant: attrition high, acquisition low. The shop estate is being trimmed rather than grown. Strip out the occasional exceptional gift and underlying growth has slowed to a crawl. As he put it, if you were designing the organisation from scratch today you wouldn't build a chain of charity shops or a portfolio of mass events at all; the traditional sponsorship model feels tired, and much of the effort now goes into defending margin rather than growing it. A large, loyal base of regular givers is a wonderful asset. It can also, in his words, be ‘so stagnant.’
So it's worth asking honestly, if that's broadly true, where does future growth actually come from? One possibility is that fundraised income keeps growing, but only incrementally, from two directions.
The first is breadth: making giving genuinely frictionless for the great mass of people who are sympathetic to a cause but not especially engaged with it. Think of an affinity energy tariff, or rounding up a card payment to the nearest pound. Arguably people rarely sit down to "donate." They go about their day and, because they care, a little flows to the cause - generated commercially, without the charity carrying the cost of raising it. Might this be where a lot of small money quietly comes from in future?
The second is depth: treating engaged supporters as people with individual needs, sympathies and interests. So many of us have historically had transactional relationships, never really understanding supporters as individuals, or reflecting their support back to them as impact. The shift everyone seems to be straining towards, from product-led to audience-first, may be the single biggest unlock available to most fundraising and engagement teams.
So, grow value through the depth of the relationship on one hand; grow reach by making giving effortless on the other. Both feel real, and both matter. But are they, in the end, incremental? Because the growth that can make a real difference could lie somewhere else entirely, in new business models and partnerships that tie income far more tightly to impact.
The part of our conversation that stayed with me was his charity's commercialisation work, which now behaves less like a fundraising team and more like a commercial venture in its own right, spinning intellectual property out into new ventures, co-investing with global partners, drawing capital from other governments and institutes. It can generate the kind of returns a conventional appeal could only dream of, and far faster. Could this be the real future of charitable income?
I don't know the answer. and I know that some causes have considerable headroom from traditional fundraising and marketing. But for how long before they too begin to plateau?
If commercialisation is the future, it's a daunting one. It runs headlong into the sector's governance, its capacity, its appetite for risk and its protectiveness of brand. But, as he asked: when do you press the ‘self-disrupt’ button on the traditional model that's still making money but may quietly stop growing?
I'd love to know what you think. Is this the future, incremental fundraising to keep the lights on, and income aligned far more closely with impact to fund the missions we exist for? Or am I overstating the decline of models that have served us well for decades?
Let me know.