Five little insights to help charities get more givers
Illustrated by a project I worked on recently.
I've done a handful of insight projects for charities of different shapes and sizes. The brief is never quite the same, but the pattern of what they ask for and what we find out is ridiculously consistent. The same handful of blockers keep coming up, the same preconceptions from teams with very little resource or time to actually sit and think/plan.
I'll use my most recent project to bring these to life. It was for a charity that had changed strategy: instead of relying on companies to promote them to their staff, they wanted to find supporters directly, which meant they actually needed to understand who those people were. I took my usual approach - a survey to size things up and get a bigger picture, then proper one-to-one conversations to find the why underneath the numbers.
But the point of this post isn't that one charity. It's the five things this kind of insight work surfaces almost every time. If you're a trustee, or you work with a charity in any way, it's worth taking a little look to see if they could help you do something differently, something a little better.
1. People give when they can see exactly where the money goes…and they need to see it early
The single most common reason people abandon a donation is that they're not sure what their money will actually be spent on.
Most charities do explain this. The problem is where. The tangible bit, the "your money pays for this specific thing", usually lives on the final page of the donation flow, after plenty of clicks and possible distractions. By then you've already lost the people who needed that little nudge.
"We support those in need" does far less work than you'd think. Something concrete and specific does much more and it works best right up front, in the campaign messaging, not buried at the point of payment. (To invent an example from a different cause entirely: "£20 feeds a family of four for three days" lands in a way that "help us fight hunger" just doesn't.)
One wrinkle worth knowing, which a trustee raised when I shared this recently: naming exactly what a donation funds can tie your hands on how you're allowed to spend it. So part of the job is finding the form of words that feels tangible without legally restricting you. Worth a conversation with whoever handles compliance.
Have a look at your own donation journey. Count the clicks before someone learns what their money actually buys. If it's more than one, that's an easy win right there.
2. The biggest blocker to fundraising is the fear of asking
This one comes up every, single, time. A personal request (someone asking their own friends, colleagues, family, neighbour, favourite Amazon delivery driver to sponsor them) is dramatically more effective than a social media post. The personal ask is the most powerful tool a charity has.
And yet people freeze. You hear versions of "I signed up, but then I didn't know what to say" from everyone. They feel awkward asking friends for money, especially if what they're doing doesn't feel impressive enough to justify it. An ultramarathon, fine. A local 5K? "Who am I to ask people for money for that?"
The fix isn't motivation, it's removing the awkwardness. The charities that get this give fundraisers a proper pack: ready-to-send messages, sensible suggested amounts so nobody has to guess, links already built in, social tags, the lot. Make the ask something they can copy and paste, not something they have to invent while cringing.
And don't assume everyone lives online. Plenty of fundraisers aren't digital natives, and physical materials like packs, cards with a QR code they can hand out, tend to matter more than you'd expect.
When someone signs up to fundraise for you, what do they actually get? A ready-made kit, or a link and a cheery good luck?
3. The people who need you most are often the hardest to reach
Whenever I look at who's struggling most (financially, mentally, with their general wellbeing) they tend to also be the people least aware the charity exists and could help them.
Not because the cause doesn't fit…it’s because you can't reach them. They're not sitting in an inbox or scrolling a work intranet, and a polished digital campaign sails straight past them. The most vulnerable people are often the least visible to you, and the quickest to drop out of any journey that asks too much.
The right response is usually unglamorous: go to where those people actually are, spend time in the places they get together for a chat, and stop waiting for them to find a website they're never going to visit.
Where does your highest-need group actually spend their time? And if they did find you, could they get through your donation or support journey on a cracked phone during a tea break?
4. Say the specific thing you do, not the worthy category it sits in
Vague mission language washes straight over people. "We help improve people's wellbeing" does almost nothing; naming the actual, concrete service you provide stops them in their tracks. Very similar point to the donation tangibility point, huh!
When someone's in difficulty, they have very little spare mental energy to translate your well-meaning-but-fuzzy mission into "oh, that means they could help me." You have to do that translation for them. Unless you’re one of the big boys, with huge brand awareness…this probably isn’t what you need.
This is hardest for the charities that help their beneficiaries with lots of things, which sounds like a strength and is actually a trap. When you do everything, you end up describing yourself in generalities that mean nothing to anyone. One of the most useful things you can do is pull the real phrases people use in conversation and feed them straight back into your communications, instead of the hyped-up marketing language teams tend to default to.
Read your own homepage as if you were in crisis. Would you know, in plain words and about five seconds, exactly what you'd get and what would happen next?
5. "Our supporters" are never one audience
Probably the most useful shift in any of these projects is the same: the charity assumes it has one kind of supporter, and it almost always has several who are giving and fundraising for genuinely different reasons.
For one person it's about community and belonging. For another it's a point of personal pride. For another it'll only ever happen if it's effortless. Talk to all of them in the same voice and you land with none of them. Once you understand the groups properly, you can speak to each individually and in their language, about what actually moves them, and in the places they already are. The same message that pulls one group in can quietly push another away.
A related pattern that's shown up in every charity project I've done: donors, fundraisers and the people you support aren't separate worlds. They feed into each other constantly — someone helped by a charity tells a friend, and that friend becomes a fundraiser. Most charities never make that connection on purpose. It's one of the biggest missed opportunities I see.
Are you speaking to "supporters" as if they're one crowd? If a single core message has to serve everyone, it's probably excluding the very people you most need to reach.
The bit that actually matters: what you do with it
Insight with no action attached is just expensive reassurance. What I care about is what changes afterwards and the encouraging thing is that the fixes these projects point to are usually small, cheap and obvious-in-hindsight. Move the "where your money goes" moment to the front. Build a proper fundraiser pack so nobody has to invent the ask. Write for your different groups separately, in the words they actually use.
None of it is guessable from behind a desk. All of it is findable, by asking the people who'll only say it to someone outside the organisation.
If any of this rings true for a charity you're involved with, the cheapest place to start is the donation-journey walk in point one. Grab a coffee, pretend you've never seen your own website, and try to give yourself money. It's amazing what you notice.
I'm Vicky — I help organisations understand their customers (or donors, or fundraisers, or beneficiaries) properly, and then actually act on what they find. If this was useful, I'm always happy to chat.
