Fundraising When Money’s Tight
Donations are down. Costs are up. Demand is rising. So how can charities make every appeal work harder?
It’s hardly a relaxing time to ask anybody for money. Household budgets have been battered for several years, seemingly everything costs more than it used to, and charities are dealing with exactly the same pressures themselves while, in many cases, trying to help more people with fewer resources.
The latest figures don’t make especially comfortable reading either. According to the Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2026, the British public gave an estimated £14 billion to charity in 2025, down from £15.4 billion the year before. There are also around six million fewer people giving than there were ten years ago, while one in five now say they simply cannot afford to donate.
That’s quite a backdrop for a fundraising campaign, and the instinctive response might be to fundraise harder: send more appeals, increase the email frequency, add a little more urgency and put a few more envelopes on doormats.
The trouble is, there comes a point when turning up the volume doesn’t make the message clearer. It simply makes it louder.
The problem isn’t necessarily generosity
It would be easy to look at falling donor numbers and conclude that people simply care less. There may be an element of disengagement, but affordability is clearly part of the picture too, and millions of people are still choosing to give despite having to think much more carefully about their own spending.
That distinction matters because a £10 donation isn’t simply another unit of response on a campaign report. It’s £10 somebody has chosen not to spend somewhere else, and when money is tight that decision carries a little more weight.
The case for support therefore has to work harder too, not necessarily by becoming more dramatic or emotionally charged, but by becoming clearer. What will the donation actually achieve? Why is it needed now? Why this organisation rather than another one? Can the donor see what difference their support has made?
None of those are new questions, of course, but in the current climate they matter more than ever.
The same applies to how often charities communicate. When income comes under pressure there’s an understandable temptation to squeeze a little more out of every available channel: another email, another appeal, another reminder, another “last chance”, occasionally followed by the remarkably durable final, final chance.
That may produce a short-term response, but it can also wear out the people you hope will still be supporting you several years from now.
The alternative isn’t simply to communicate less. It’s to make the communications you do send more worthwhile. That means using data properly rather than treating an entire supporter base as one enormous mailing list, looking at what people have responded to before, how recently they gave, what interested them and, importantly, whether there is a good reason to contact them now.
Sometimes not sending something is a perfectly sensible fundraising decision. It saves money, certainly, but it can also make the communications that do arrive feel more relevant.
Make the value obvious
Charities are often extremely good at explaining the scale of a problem. Where things occasionally become less clear is what an individual donation will actually help to change.
There’s a considerable difference between telling somebody that thousands of people need support and showing them what their particular contribution makes possible. The latter is tangible and, in a financially pressured world, helps answer one of the most obvious questions a donor might have: will my money actually do some good?
There’s a considerable difference between telling somebody that thousands of people need support and showing them what their particular contribution makes possible.
Public confidence matters here. The Charity Commission has described financial resilience as one of the defining challenges facing the sector, with the gap between charity income and expenditure having narrowed sharply in recent years. Transparency, therefore, shouldn’t be regarded as the worthy but rather dull bit tucked away in an annual report. It can be an important part of fundraising itself.
Tell people where their money goes and show them what happened afterwards. Explain what things cost without wrapping everything in corporate language. If £25 pays for something specific, say so. If it contributes towards something rather than covering the entire cost, say that too.
People generally cope surprisingly well with the truth.
Good creative matters more when money is scarce
There’s another understandable temptation when budgets tighten, which is to play safe. Reuse last year’s approach, change the photograph, update the date and get it out of the door.
It may save a little money at the front end, but it can be a surprisingly expensive way of producing something nobody notices.
When people are exposed to more messages while becoming increasingly selective about where they spend, creative work isn’t decoration around the fundraising. It is part of what gets somebody to stop for long enough to hear the case being made.
That doesn’t mean every campaign needs to reinvent fundraising. Quite often the strongest idea is a very simple one, expressed clearly and without trying to sound like everybody else: a powerful image, a human story, a headline that actually says something, or a letter that sounds as though one person wrote it for another person rather than something that finally escaped from a committee after fourteen rounds of tracked changes.
The fundamentals of direct marketing haven’t suddenly disappeared because the economic climate is difficult. If anything, they become more important: the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
It sounds suspiciously straightforward. Doing it well rarely is.
Show them progress. Tell them what happened. Thank them occasionally when there isn’t an appeal form attached.
And while acquiring new supporters will always matter, continually replacing donors as quickly as they disappear is an exhausting and expensive way to run a fundraising programme. Somebody who has already supported you has already made an important decision about your organisation, so there’s value in keeping that relationship alive without making every communication another request for money.
Show them progress. Tell them what happened. Thank them occasionally when there isn’t an appeal form attached. Give them other ways to stay involved through volunteering, events, campaigning, sharing a story or simply keeping an interest in the work.
Not every supporter relationship has to progress neatly from first donation to regular donation to larger donation. People are messier than fundraising funnels.
Thankfully.
Fundraising harder, or fundraising better?
None of this makes the current environment easy. Small charities in particular are under considerable pressure, often with fewer resources and very little room to absorb further increases in cost. There isn’t a clever campaign line that fixes that.
But when people have less money available to give, simply asking them more often can’t be the whole strategy.
Using data intelligently, targeting more carefully, making the proposition clearer, investing in creative that gets noticed, reducing waste and showing supporters what their money achieves all become more important when every pound has to work harder.
So perhaps the answer isn’t necessarily more fundraising.
It’s better fundraising.
At Wodehouse, we help charities bring together strategy, creative, data, print and direct marketing to make fundraising communications work harder, particularly when budgets have to.
Because when every pound matters, that should include the ones you spend asking for it.
We love good design and aesthetics and don't feel it should cost the earth either. Across all areas of business and the charity sector Wodehouse have delighted our clients with graphic design, high quality print and direct mail solutions since 2003.