Why Capability Decides Who Captures the Opportunity
Part Two of Three
By Tobin Aldrich
In part one, I looked at every UK charity that grew voluntary income by 90% or more since 2019, and found that in most cases the main driver was a change in the world outside the charity rather than a change in what the charity did.
Read on its own, this is rather unhelpful. If growth is mostly about conditions, why bother investing in fundraising capability at all?
Because the evidence on the other side is just as strong, and it comes from an entirely different sort of study.
The finding that turns part one around
Some years ago we reviewed individual giving performance for an international organisation across five European markets: the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The point was to work out where volume donor recruitment was achievable and what each market could realistically deliver.
Market conditions explained much less than we expected. What we found instead were huge differences between organisations working on the same cause, in the same market, at the same time. Some were recruiting donors efficiently at scale. Others, with comparable brands and comparable causes, weren't.
Our conclusion then was that an organisation's capability to run effective individual giving programmes matters more to its performance than the market it operates in. That held especially true in the channels that need specific expertise, where the gap between organisations that knew what they were doing and those that didn't was very wide.
So the two findings sit side by side. Cause salience sets the size of the opportunity. Capability decides whether you take it. Both matter, and they're different questions. Most charities measure neither.
What we've looked at
Between 2015 and 2026 we've carried out well over a hundred review projects for non-profits. Most of those were organisational reviews, each assessing the charity against a consistent framework covering strategy, investment, data and CRM, digital capability, culture and leadership stability, alongside analysis of income performance and, where we could get it, comparator benchmarking.
The reviews cover a wide range of cause areas, from local to global. They include charities with under a million pounds of fundraised income and charities with hundreds of millions. Most of the work is in the UK, with reviews in another 14 countries and across several global federations.
Charities commission independent reviews when they're worried about something. This isn't a random sample and these figures aren't a sector average. The sample also leans heavily towards large charities.
So when we describe recurring weaknesses, we're usually not describing small charities struggling for capacity. We're often describing some of the biggest and best-resourced organisations in the country, and globally.
But what's really interesting is that the same problems keep turning up in organisations with almost nothing else in common. Of the 800 or so individual issues we've identified and coded across these reviews, 86% were ones we'd found somewhere else in the portfolio. That degree of repetition across such different non-profits points to structural causes rather than local ones.
What we find
We found serious problems in the great majority of the organisations we reviewed. Four turn up most often.
Investment below what the plan requires. In 87% of reviews, the charity was investing less in income generation than it needed to deliver the income it had committed to. That isn't a criticism of fundraising teams. It's a governance point. Boards had signed off income targets they hadn't funded.
Data that can't answer the question. In 84% of reviews, data and CRM infrastructure was too weak to establish what actually drove income. In practice, that means the charity couldn't reliably say what a pound of investment returned, what a supporter was worth, or which activity was carrying the programme.
Digital behind the market. In 82% of reviews, digital capability was materially behind where it needed to be.
A strategy that isn't really a strategy. In 74% of reviews, fundraising strategy was weak or effectively absent. There was usually a document. What was missing was a route from where the charity was to where it said it wanted to get to, with investment, capability and timescales attached.
What's improved, and what hasn't
This is where a decade of reviews gets more interesting than a snapshot, and it isn't all bad.
Comparing our recent reviews with those from ten years ago, data and digital capability have both improved by a real margin. Not enough. They're still the two things we most often find wanting. But there has been investment and there has been progress.
Strategy and investment haven't moved at all.
The things a charity can buy have got better. The things that need governance and sustained attention from the top haven't. You can procure a CRM, hire a digital lead, appoint an analytics partner. You can't procure a coherent multi-year income strategy or a board that funds it, and that’s exactly where we are today, roughly where we were in 2015.
This is a measurement problem before it's anything else
Three examples from our work.
A board pack of 61 pages carrying 134 performance indicators, from which it was impossible to tell whether fundraising was working. Eight of them covered an income stream that was a rounding error in the accounts. The two measures that most determine future income weren't there at all. Nobody had been careless. The report was an accurate picture of the organisation's structure: every team reported what it did, and nobody reported across the boundaries.
A large charity getting its paid media performance through 17 separate agency dashboards, none of them properly joined to its own CRM. Cost per acquisition and return on investment couldn't be worked out accurately. Investment decisions were being made on numbers the charity had no way of checking.
A charity that had grown strongly for three years running and couldn't tell whether the growth came from its digital programme or from public interest in the issue it worked on. Its income leaned heavily on people searching for its name, and the searching was driven by news coverage.
None of these organisations was badly run. All three were measuring the wrong things in the wrong shape, for reasons sitting well above the fundraising department.
What the stronger charities had in common
A minority of the organisations we've reviewed were in genuinely good shape, and the comparison is worth making.
Set against those where we found the most serious problems, they were far more likely to have growing income, a culture that backed fundraising rather than tolerating or resisting it, a strategy with a credible route attached, stable senior leadership, and data good enough to make decisions with.
Not one of those is a fundraising technique. Every one is a board and executive matter.
Which explains something we see constantly. Only about a third of the charities we review have stable senior fundraising leadership when we arrive. A similar proportion are mid-transition or carrying a vacancy. When income disappoints, changing the director is a quicker decision than changing the system. But if the constraint is strategy, investment or measurement, the new director walks straight into it.
Where that leaves us
The picture across these reviews is serious. Weaknesses in strategy, investment, data and culture are widespread; they turn up in charities of every size, including the largest, and on the two that matter most they haven't shifted in a decade.
But this is completely fixable.
Almost nothing we find is caused by anything outside the charity's control. Not the giving market, not the economy, not donor fatigue, not regulation. It's strategy, investment, measurement, culture and leadership. All of it sits inside the organisation.
The sector's problem isn't that it doesn't know what works. It's that too few organisations have the governance, the investment and the sustained attention to act on it.
Part three sets out what I think follows, including one calculation I'd like to see every charity leadership team make.