Individual Giving Is Declining. Here’s A Way To Change That.

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Individual giving in the UK is on a downward slide. According to the Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2025, which surveyed nearly 13,500 people, 50% of people donated to charity in 2024, compared with 61% back in 2016. Sponsoring someone for charity has dropped even more sharply – from 37% to just 21% over the same period.

That’s not a blip – it’s an unfortunate trend that affects us all.

If you work in fundraising, you probably already feel it – in the numbers, in the conversations with trustees, in the anxiety about what next year’s income looks like.

So Why Is It Happening?

Cost of living is the big one. The CAF data shows 44% of non-donors simply say they can’t afford it. That’s not something any campaign or clever strategy can fix overnight, and it’s worth acknowledging that honestly rather than pretending there’s a magic workaround.

But here’s where it gets more interesting – and more actionable. 19% say they don’t trust charities to use their money wisely. 10% say no cause has interested them enough. 8% haven’t been asked. 9% say it didn’t occur to them. And 4% just forgot.

That last cluster – the “wasn’t asked, didn’t think about it, forgot” group – adds up to around 21%. These are not people who are hostile to giving. They’re people who haven’t been reached in the right way at the right moment. And that, encouragingly, is something we can work with.

The Grant Trap

Many charities have responded to declining individual income by leaning harder on grants. Completely understandable. But the picture there is getting harder too.

Demand for grant funding has increased by up to 50% according to the Association of Charitable Foundations, while award rates have dropped – from roughly one in three to closer to one in ten for some organisations. That’s not a safety net. That’s a lottery with increasingly long odds.

Meanwhile, 3,885 charities closed in 2023-24 alone. None of this can be attributed to donations alone, but it’s clearly part of the picture.

The lesson here isn’t that grants are bad. A healthy income mix will always include them. But relying on them as the primary fallback for a decline in individual giving is a risk that’s getting harder to justify. As we say at All Things Equal: if there is no money, there is no mission.

A Different Way of Thinking About Donors

Here’s where it gets interesting – and hopefully a little energising.

Traditional fundraising campaigns – the kind that ask for money upfront – work. The whole sector is built on them. But they work best when donors are already primed and ready to engage. And the truth is, most people aren’t. They’re scrolling past your ad on Facebook. They’re half-watching TV. They’re just… busy.

What if, instead of starting with an ask, you started with an offer?

This is the core idea behind Value-Based Donor Enrolment (VBDE) – a model borrowed from the world of private sector lead generation and adapted thoughtfully for the charity sector. Rather than leading with a donation request, you lead with something genuinely useful: a guide, a resource, a quiz, or even a small product like a sticker pack or pin badge. Something that meets your prospective donor where they are, on their terms, and gives them a real reason to engage.

In exchange, they share their contact details. They’re now in your world. And from there, you can build an actual relationship.

The contrast with a direct response campaign is worth spelling out clearly:

A direct response campaign asks for money, focuses on the charity’s needs and its beneficiaries, and calls for immediate action. It works – but only when your audience is ready to respond. The likelihood of action, in a cold context, is relatively low.

A value-based campaign offers something first. It focuses on the donor’s needs and interests. It’s a nurturing process, not a transaction. And because of that, the likelihood of meaningful engagement – and eventually, giving – is considerably higher.

Both have a place. The smartest fundraising programmes use them in tandem.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The VBDE model has four stages: Awareness, Enrolment, Activation, and Stewardship.

Awareness is typically driven through paid ads – not asking for money, but promoting your value-based asset. You don’t need a huge budget to start. You need targeted, relevant content that gets the right people to stop and look.

Enrolment is the moment someone downloads your guide, takes your quiz, or requests your resource. They’ve handed over their details. They’re in your system.

Activation comes next – and sooner than you might think. You can make a donation ask on the thank you page itself, or shortly after via email. Whether they give at this point or not, you have their attention.

Stewardship is the ongoing relationship: a sequence of emails that shares impact, tells stories, connects them to your work – and yes, peppers in asks along the way. Not aggressive ones, but consistent, warm, purposeful ones.

The whole model sits on top of a clear Ideal Donor Profile – which we’ll come to in a moment, because it really is the foundation everything else is built on.

Some of the larger organisations are already doing this. The Salvation Army ran a campaign offering a free Children’s Outside Guide – nothing overtly about donations, everything about meeting parents where they are. The results were striking: they exceeded their lead generation targets with 40% of the campaign still to run, clocked over 4,500 downloads, and their follow-up email series achieved an average click-to-open rate of 55%. For context, the industry average for this type of campaign sits around 25-35%. Oxfam ran a similar approach and generated 3,000 leads over eight weeks, with around 2.5% converting into regular givers.

Rather than vanity metrics, this is the beginning of a real, scalable donor pipeline.

Playing The Long Game

Here’s the bit that sometimes makes people nervous: this isn’t a quick-win strategy. You might see income dip before it rises. It could take a year, sometimes two, before those leads meaningfully convert into committed donors.

We know that can feel impossible to sell internally – especially when trustees want results now, and “we’re building a pipeline” doesn’t fill anyone’s funding gap this quarter. We hear you. It’s genuinely hard.

But here’s the thing: fundraising has always been a long game, even when it didn’t look like one. Every major donor relationship, every legacy gift, every loyal monthly giver – they all started with a first touchpoint. The value-based model just makes that process more intentional, more scalable, and more human. You’re not hoping someone happens to see your appeal on the right day. You’re actively building a community of people who already care about something you care about too.

According to LarkOwl’s Fundraising ROI 2025 report, investment in individual giving delivers an average return of £5.47 for every £1 spent. The value-based approach is a longer road to that return, but it’s a road that builds something durable – a repeatable system for unrestricted income that you own and can grow over time.

Before You Do Anything Else: Know Your Donor

The most common (and expensive) mistake is launching campaigns without a clear picture of who you’re actually talking to.

Not just the demographic basics – age, gender, location, profession – but the psychographic stuff too. What do they care about? What are their priorities? What do they read, follow, and believe in? Do they have children? Do they volunteer? Are they already giving to causes adjacent to yours?

This is your Ideal Donor Profile, and it’s the foundation the whole model rests on. Without it, you’re essentially paying to talk to everyone and reaching no one.

The good news is you probably already have the raw material. Survey your existing donors – even a handful of honest conversations can be revelatory. Put a short survey on your website. Look at your CRM data with fresh eyes. Ask your regular givers why they give, and really listen to the answers.

Do this first. Then think about what value-based asset would resonate with that person. Then build the campaign around them.

One important note: your asset doesn’t have to be perfectly on-mission. The Howard League for Penal Reform ran a campaign around the right to read – books being banned in prisons – and activated an entirely new audience of readers and educators who hadn’t previously engaged with the charity’s core work on prisoner welfare. You just need to meet people where they are, and draw a line back to what you do.

Yes, It’s a Lot of Work

Let’s be honest about that too. Setting this up properly – building the donor profile, creating a genuinely useful asset, writing a stewardship email sequence, setting up and testing ads, monitoring open rates and click-throughs and iterating – is not a small undertaking. Especially if it’s new territory for your team.

For the first month or two, you’ll be looking at it daily. Tweaking subject lines. Adjusting calls to action. Watching where people drop off. It takes time, focus, and a certain appetite for experimentation.

But once it’s working it can run continuously. It scales. It generates better quality data than most traditional campaigns. And it gives you something charities have always struggled to build: predictable, unrestricted income that isn’t dependent on a grant decision or a one-off appeal.

Where to Start

If you’re thinking about building or rebuilding your individual giving programme with this approach, here’s the practical order of operations:

Start with the donor profile. This is your guiding star. Survey existing supporters, look at your data, talk to people. Build a real picture of who gives to you and why.

Design your value-based asset. Based on what you know about your ideal donor, what could you create that they’d genuinely want? Keep it simple to begin with – a well-designed PDF guide is a perfectly good starting point.

Write your stewardship emails before you launch. Don’t run ads until you have a sequence ready to go. Impact stories, mission connection, gentle asks – have it prepared and loaded.

Then launch your ads. Start small, measure carefully, and iterate from what you learn.

Keep going. This is the part most people underestimate. The first campaign teaches you an enormous amount. The second one is better. The third one starts to look like a system.

The donor base you’re hoping to build is absolutely achievable. It just needs time, the right strategy, and a team willing to stick with it through the messy early stages. We’ve seen it work – and when it clicks, it’s a genuinely exciting thing to be part of.

This article was born out of a presentation we gave on digital fundraising. Click here to watch it in full.