Why charities don’t understand their fundraising and how we can fix it
By Tobin Aldrich, Principal Partner AAW
20th June 2025
I spent about 20 years as a fundraising director for five charities and, since 2015, have been consulting on fundraising programmes for nonprofits of all sizes and cause areas. At this point, AAW have reviewed, at some level, the fundraising operations of hundreds of nonprofits, including around half of the top 100 UK charities by voluntary income.
Across all these organisations we have consistently seen the same problems holding back fundraising performance. And they are not getting any better.
At the heart of these issues is the central problem of understanding fundraising performance. Out of the hundreds of charities that I have analysed, there are only a handful that actually understand the real drivers of their voluntary income and how they can effectively influence them.
The majority of the charities I have reviewed cannot reliably answer some fundamental questions about their fundraising portfolio. What is the actual ROI on the resources invested in each area of fundraising? Who are our supporters and why do they give to us in the ways that they do? What is the contribution of each part of our marketing mix and each pound spent on the recruitment and retention of supporters?
Fundraising Directors are, in too many charities, flying blind. If you don't know where the best places are to invest your time and money, how can you make meaningful decisions?
Why don’t charities understand their business? There are a range of interconnected problems that start with the disconnect between income strategy and organisational strategy. Fundraising is seen as an operational enabler not a core strategic driver. This leads to an overly operational and tactical approach to income generation.
This constrains a properly data and evidence-based approach to fundraising. The quality and availability of real action insight is the most common and most acute single issue in the charities we review. Charities have data, often lots of it, that details their fundraising and marketing performance, but it is inconsistent, unreliable and dispersed. There are different and incompatible versions of the truth, with the result that decisions, even on seven or eight figure investments, are made based on instinct, prejudice or based on the advice of suppliers with vested interests in the outcome.
This problem has actually gotten worse over the course of my career in fundraising. This is because charity marketing has got more competitive and more complex at a similar rate. Thirty years ago, I could build fundraising programmes by finding an activity that paid back fairly immediately and which didn’t really need much time and investment from the rest of the organisation. Face-to-face fundraising then, for example, was basically free money and you had to be an idiot not to invest (there were, of course, idiots).
The world now is very different. Successful fundraising programmes need to be much more sophisticated and to understand the interrelation between multiple channels and touchpoints, and their impact on supporter behaviour. Marketing in a digital word means needing to bring together and interpret data from many sources to actually understand what is driving what and why.
Charities have access to all the tools that would allow them to answer the fundamental questions about their fundraising. What they are struggling to do is to bring them together. Finance, IT, fundraising and brand and marketing teams are all addressing different parts of the problem but struggling to find a common language to discuss it, let alone a common approach to move things forward.
Millions are being invested in new technology, particularly in new CRM systems and their panoply of clever and expensive ideas. We have seen too many of these projects fail to meet expectations because actually this isn’t a problem technology can fix on its own. Spoiler alert, AI is not the answer.
What we need, above all, is the proper integration of strategy, data and technology, and insight.
This is why we have set up AAW Integrate. At AAW we have the combination of real depth of expertise in three things that don’t usually come together: fundraising with the AAW consultancy team, digital performance marketing with Deniz Hassan and marketing data architecture and technology with our technical team led by Simon Applebaum. The job of AAW Integrate is to bring all key strategic and operational elements together to allow charities to understand their fundraising performance and make better decisions about it. We are identifying what are the key questions, where the data lies that can answer them and developing solutions that standardises and integrates this data into insight that can really drive performance.
We are currently working with a number of big name charities and nonprofits and are already identifying actionable transformational changes in fundraising programmes as a result. Deniz and I will be joining Amnesty’s Rohan Hewavisenti to speak more about AAW Integrate at the Charity Finance Conference in June - so if you are attending please do come and say hello. Otherwise, drop me a line at tobin@aawpartnership.com to find out a little more.