For the past month or so, I’ve been posting videos on LinkedIn examining the causes of the fall in individual giving income – in real terms – by £5 billion since 2005.

Here’s the chart that shows what’s happened. It’s been built with data from CAF’s various UK Giving reports. The actual numbers are represented by the blue columns, whilst the orange columns show how much we should have raised if we had simply managed to keep pace with inflation.

If you visit LinkedIn. You can watch the videos. The links for each are below:

  1. Highlighting the £5 billion shortfall and showing how donors don’t feel engaged by many of the charities. We look specifically about gaps in thanking programmes.
  2. Focusing on what has happened in the Overseas Aid sector. Identifying which organisations have done well and looking at the reasons why others have struggled.
  3. Looking at engagement products as an approach to recruitment and identifying why so many of them fail so spectacularly. I also ask why charities don’t focus their resources on engaging the donors they already have?
  4. Examining branding and asking why the charity brands that are most valued by Millennials and Gen Z, don’t match the charity brands most valued by boomers? I also consider the question of whether charities are guilty of ignoring the needs of older donors when they rebrand.
  5. A review of which audiences charities should focus on. I highlight that younger audiences own only 3% of the nation’s wealth and ask whether that is a sensible group to approach when the over 55s own two-thirds of the Uk’s wealth. I also suggest some specific sectors of the older audience that could help the sector grow.
  6. I look at which audiences have cut back the most on their giving. Here I demonstrate that the only groups where participation in giving has grown since 2005 is amongst the over 65s whereas participation amongst all other groups has fallen – with a fall of 36% seen amongst donors aged under 25. I also look at mid-value audiences and make a suggestion about why we need to update how we define higher value donors.

Which is a rather long way round introducing you to today’s post. It’s a podcast of a discussion I had with fundraising consultant Giles Pegram where we dig even deeper into the reasons why giving has fallen back over the last eighteen years and make a few suggestions about what we have to do as a sector if we want to turn things around.

I hope you enjoy listening. If you agree of disagree or have thoughts of your own why not let us know in the comments or in the LinkedIn post for the podcast which can be found here.