The Growth Myth: What Separates Booming Charities From the Rest

By Tobin Aldrich Partner at AAW Group

Every fundraiser has a theory about who's winning right now. Sharper digital campaigns. A brand that finally clicked. A new chief exec who shook things up. Ask five people which UK charities have grown the most in the last five years and you'll get five similar lists, and five different, mostly unverified, explanations for why.

We decided to stop guessing and actually check.

The method

We looked at every UK charity pulling in more than a million pounds a year in voluntary income, just over three thousand organisations in total. From that pool, we isolated any charity whose voluntary income had grown by 90% or more between 2019 and 2024/25, provided they'd also crossed the ten-million-pound mark by the end of that period. Arts, culture and education charities were excluded, since their funding structures don't compare cleanly to the rest of the sector.

Sixteen organisations made the cut.

Sixteen, out of more than three thousand. That alone tells you something: genuine step-change growth in UK charities is exceptionally uncommon.

It's not what they did, it's where they stood

The most striking pattern isn't found in any individual charity's strategy. It's in the map of where these sixteen organisations sit.

Five work in international humanitarian relief. Four are UK food poverty or food bank charities. Three are in health, two in homelessness, and one in conservation.

That clustering is the finding. These aren't sixteen well-managed charities scattered randomly across the sector. They're concentrated almost entirely in causes that became far more visible in public life between 2019 and 2025.

The humanitarian organisations grew on the back of crises: the war in Ukraine from 2022, then the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in 2023, both of which triggered enormous surges in public donations that well-positioned charities were able to capture.

UK food poverty charities barely registered a decade ago. Their growth tracked the pandemic and then the cost-of-living crisis, as food insecurity shifted from a marginal concern to a dominant political issue.

Other shifts moved more slowly. The rise of Islamic charities in the UK reflects demographic change and a broader move away from informal, community-based giving toward structured, institutional donations, a trend with little to do with any individual charity's marketing.

Money helped. It wasn't the whole answer.

Several of the sixteen backed their growth with real investment, and it clearly paid off. One charity had over fifteen million pounds behind it from a parent organisation. Others committed to years of sustained donor-acquisition spending.

But in every case we examined, that investment landed inside a cause area that was already gaining public attention. We found no example of a charity achieving this scale of growth purely through investment, in a cause that stayed flat in public interest.

That's not proof it's impossible. It's evidence that it's rare enough that no serious growth strategy should be built around becoming the exception.

So what was actually driving it?

For most of these sixteen, the biggest single factor was something happening in the world, not something happening inside the organisation.

Strategy wasn't irrelevant, far from it. These charities still had to be prepared, credible, and structurally able to convert public attention into donations. Plenty of other organisations working the exact same causes, facing the exact same tailwinds, didn't grow at all. But in our reading, execution was the second variable here, not the first.

Three caveats worth naming

This only captures one kind of growth: large, fast, and recent. A charity quietly compounding at 6% a year for two decades wouldn't show up on this list at all, and might well be the more impressively run organisation.

Missing the list isn't a mark against anyone. Many of the UK's strongest fundraising teams aren't here simply because their cause never had its moment in the spotlight. That's circumstance, not a verdict on their work.

And untangling cause from effect is genuinely difficult. Public attention and internal investment tend to rise together. A charity whose cause is suddenly newsworthy finds it much easier to make the internal case for more funding. Both forces were clearly present in these sixteen cases. Which one did more of the work is often impossible to say with confidence.

The question boards don't like asking

If external conditions shape growth this much, two uncomfortable questions follow, and almost nobody in the sector asks either of them.

If income jumped in a year your cause was everywhere in the news, how much of that growth can you genuinely claim credit for?

And if income was flat in a quieter year, does that actually mean you failed?

We ran a version of this exercise with one charity recently. We broke down how much of its income came from things it could actually influence, versus income that would have arrived regardless: legacies set in motion decades earlier, in-memoriam giving, unprompted donations, and income that simply followed public attention to the cause.

Roughly 60% fell into the second bucket. This charity had been setting growth targets against its total headline income. Its actual controllable base was under half of that number.

I'll return to this idea, and why I think it's the single most useful number a board can calculate, and almost never does, in part three.

But this isn't the whole picture

There's a tempting, and wrong, conclusion to draw from all of this: that growth is mostly down to luck, so investment in fundraising capability barely matters.

I don't buy that, and our own data argues against it.

Cause salience determines the size of the opportunity in front of you. It doesn't determine whether you seize it. When we've compared multiple organisations operating in the same cause, under the same external conditions, the gap between the best and worst performers is enormous, and that gap comes down entirely to organisational capability.

That's the subject of part two: not why the sector as a whole grew, but why, even with a tailwind, so few organisations manage to capture what's sitting right in front of them.