For trustees, CEOs and founders doing three jobs at once
Practical guidance for the people running small UK charities - trustees carrying legal duties alongside a day job, CEOs holding a service together with a team of two, and founders working out what they've taken on.
Every article is checked against the regulators rather than against what other people have written, and it's pitched at the scale you actually work at. Nothing here replaces advice on your own situation. It should tell you what the rules say, what they mean at your size, and what to do next.
A local business offers your charity money. Before you accept, one question decides most of what follows: what does the business get back? If the answer is nothing beyond a thank you, HMRC will normally treat the payment as a…
These are two different things, and the names do a good job of hiding that. The trustees’ annual report is a document you write. The annual return is a form you fill in online. Both are due ten months after…
Search engine optimisation for a small charity is a smaller job than the sector implies. For most charities under a million pounds of income, it comes down to two things: being found when somebody searches your name, and being visible…
Charity website design goes wrong in three predictable ways, and none of them is bad design. Charities buy before they have decided what the site is for. They pay for something they turn out not to own. And they end…
A CRM is a database that keeps everything you know about a supporter in one place – what they gave, when you last spoke, which events they came to, what they have asked not to receive. For a small charity,…
Gift Aid adds 25p to every eligible £1 given by a UK taxpayer, at no cost to the donor. That much is well understood. What decides whether a claim survives contact with HMRC is narrower and less well known. Three…
Email is the only channel where you own the relationship. Social platforms lend you an audience on terms they can change without warning; a mailing list stays yours. That’s why it’s worth the effort even at small scale. A charity…
Everything upstream ends here. The campaign, the email, the search result, the poster with the QR code – all of it delivers someone to one page, and what that page asks of them decides whether the money arrives. Most small…
Two questions come up about legacies in small charities, and neither is the one the sector writes about. The first is what you are allowed to say to a supporter who mentions leaving you something. The second is what to…
A Practical, Governance-Aware Guide. From the outside, a charity walk looks simple. People turn up, they walk, and money is raised. And when one goes well, that’s exactly how it should look; effortless. But the events that look effortless on…