The lesson isn’t the money
Small Charity Week runs from 22 to 29 June this year, and most of what you’ll read about it leads with the same figure: £1.84 million raised in seven days during the 2025 campaign. It’s a real number, and a good one. But it isn’t the most useful thing in last year’s results, and it isn’t what a small charity should take away from them.
Underneath the total sits a finding that says more about why small charities struggle to raise money than any amount of doubled donations. Most of the charities that took part had barely fundraised online before. By the end of the week, most of them could.
I am writing this article about that finding, what it tells you about the real barrier to fundraising in a small charity, and how to get past it without waiting until next June.
If online fundraising has sat on your list for a year or two and never quite happens, that gap is the thing our individual giving support is built around.
What actually happened in Small Charity Week 2025?
Small Charity Week has been running since 2010. The Foundation for Social Improvement started it; since the FSI closed in 2023, NCVO has run it, and for the last two years, the fundraising side has taken the form of a match-funding campaign delivered with Big Give and Global’s Make Some Noise. The mechanics are simple. For one week, donations made to participating charities through Big Give are doubled by a pool of funders, so every pound a supporter gives is worth two.
In 2025, the campaign ran from 23 to 30 June. 189 small charities took part and drew 9,208 donations between them. Doubled from a match-funding pot and topped up with Gift Aid, the campaign’s total reached £1.84 million. This year it has grown: 257 charities were selected for the campaign running from 22 to 29 June.
The organisers also published impact data from the charities that took part, and this is where it gets interesting. Of the 2025 cohort, 97% said they came away more confident about digital fundraising, despite 90% having had little or no experience of it before. 97% received donations from new supporters, and 39% of everything raised came from people who had never given to that charity before.
Read those figures for what they are. They are self-reported by charities that applied, were selected, and were given training and resources to take part. They don’t describe what happens to any charity that posts a hashtag for a week. They describe what happened to charities that were helped to fundraise online properly, often for the first time. That is the part worth paying attention to.
Why do so many small charities never fundraise online?
The 90% figure isn’t a quirk of who applied. It’s the ordinary state of the sector. Plenty of small charities raise money the way they always have – two grant applications a year, a collection at a summer event, a standing relationship with one or two local funders – and have never run anything you would call an online campaign.
The barrier usually isn’t money, and it isn’t a shortage of people who might give. It’s that the thing never starts. The person who would run it is also the person delivering the service, and delivery always wins. Online fundraising feels like a project rather than a task, and a project with no deadline drifts to the bottom of the list and stays there. The donation page is half-built, or built and never tested, so nobody quite trusts it. Running under all of it is a quiet assumption that campaigns like this are for bigger charities, and that people like us don’t really do that.
If you’ve worked in a small charity, none of that will surprise you. The work with an obvious deadline gets done. The work that matters but can always wait until next month waits until next month, indefinitely.
What got the 2025 charities over the line?
Look at what Small Charity Week supplies, and you can see why it works on exactly this problem. It isn’t that the charities suddenly got good at fundraising. It’s that the campaign removed the reasons not to start, four of them at once.
The first is a deadline. The week is fixed and public, so the task that never had a date suddenly has one. The second is a multiplier. Because donations are matched, every pound counts double, which turns a vague sense that you should fundraise into a specific reason to ask this week and not another. The third is support: training, templates, and a platform that already works, so the charity isn’t building from nothing. The fourth is a reason for the supporter to act now. “Give this week, and it’s doubled” is a far clearer ask than “please support us”, and a clear ask is what most small-charity fundraising is missing.
If you can see your own charity in that list – the page that never launched, the ask never quite made – the first move is usually smaller than it looks. A free 30-minute clarity call is the quickest way to work out what your version of that push would be, and what to put in place before it. No obligation; you leave with a clearer first step.
How do you create that push without waiting for June?
The useful thing about those four ingredients is that none of them belongs to NCVO. You can build a smaller version of each one yourself, in any month of the year.
Set a deadline tied to something real – your charity’s anniversary, the close of a project, a date in the local calendar – so the campaign has a reason to end as well as start. Find your own multiplier: a single trustee, a local business, or a regular donor willing to match what comes in up to a ceiling for a week. That is the same mechanism Big Give runs at scale, and one willing funder is enough to recreate it. Give people a reason to give now rather than someday. And for the support, the free guidance NCVO and others publish around the week is there year-round, whether or not you’re in the campaign.
One caution. The pull of a deadline and a match is real, but it has to be honest. A genuine reason to act now – a date, a matched pot that really does run out – is fair. Manufactured urgency, the kind that tells someone their inaction causes harm, is not, and it breaches the Code of Fundraising Practice. The test is whether the urgency is true.
There’s a catch worth naming, because it’s where a lot of this effort leaks away. The new donors a campaign brings in are only worth the work if you keep them, and most small charities treat a one-off gift as the end of the story rather than the start of a relationship. That’s a separate problem, with its own fixes, and it deserves its own attention rather than a line here.
What a good week doesn’t fix
It would be easy to take all this as “run a campaign and your income problem is solved”. It isn’t, and pretending otherwise would be the same overclaiming that every other write-up of Small Charity Week is doing this month.
A week of doubled donations is a moment. If your charity leans on one or two sources of income, a good week adds a one-off; it doesn’t change the dependence, which is a deeper piece of work covered in the guide on building income that doesn’t depend on one source. The reason the 2025 finding matters isn’t the cash, which is spent by July. It’s the two things that outlast it: a charity that now knows how to fundraise online, and a set of supporters it didn’t have before. Both compound, but only if someone builds on them. Getting started is the first move. It was never meant to be the last.
If the line about new donors leaking away landed, that’s the next thing to read: the income your charity has already earned and isn’t collecting – the three places a small charity loses money it has already raised, and how to find each one this quarter.
