Top fundraising trends for 2025

Charities faced myriad challenges in 2024. Grant-funding proved difficult to find, even harder to secure, with purse strings tightening across the economy. Individual giving decreased, partly due to the cost-of-living crisis, partly due to geo-political crises, partly due to a sense of pessimism.

 

The year 2024 proved to be one of economic hardship, but you could argue it was comparatively quiet, at least compared to recent years. And, towards the end of 2024, a sense of optimism pervades.

 

The fundraising trends of 2025 show us a sector embracing optimism. And the optimism, while desperately needed, feels justified, too. Slowly but surely, grant funding looks to increase, with a more promising public sector outlook and more interest from trusts and funds. In-person events are returning to centre stage and charities are exploring innovative fundraising ideas. Artificial intelligence (AI) boasts huge potential, with many charities eager to embrace its capabilities.

 

The fundraising trends of 2025 show a sector looking to the future. They show a degree of optimism, a sprinkle of hope, a lot of opportunities. So, without further ado, let’s look the trends set to define the year ahead and explore how charities can embrace the trends.

 

Skip to: Increases to grants and grant-funding

Skip to: The virtues of artificial intelligence in fundraising

Skip to: New approaches to old social media platforms

Skip to: The resistible rise of Gaming for Good

Skip to: Events returning to the centre stage

 

 

Increases to grants and grant-funding

 

In 2024, Enthuse’s Summer Donor Pulse Report suggested that “the cost-of-living may be slowly edging away from the front page, but it still casts a long shadow over the public’s collective bank accounts”. The cost-of-living crisis remains, but a more positive outlook seems within touching distance. Consider, for example, that the economy performed better than expected in 2024, with higher growth, increased investment, and falling inflation. Consider that we’ve seen interest rate cuts – a pretty clear signal for optimism – for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

 

And optimism tends to act as a multiplier. Giving seems likely to increase in 2025. One source of comfort stems from the CSS’s Philanthropy Outlook report, which show a huge increase (4.2%) of giving in the US, justified largely by a promising economic outlook. We know individual giving tends to rise during economic prosperity, but the availability of grants correlate with economic success. That’s unsurprising, particularly given many grants are supported by the government, indirectly if not directly. And a booming economy tends to make businesses more generous.

 

It would be a welcome shift. In 2024, only 15% of charities receive any form of public sector funding – and that included a mere 8% of small charities. Only 3% of charities said public sector funding in 2024 was their biggest income source. Just 16% of charities received funding from grant-making trusts and foundations, with  6% claiming the grants were their most important source of income. The economy certainly impacted charities in that regard: 29% receiving income from grant-makers experienced a decrease in funding during the early months of 2024.

 

The new government may have arrived at the right time in the UK. They are a small source of optimism, if only in that they signal change, however superficial. We expect a slight – perhaps very slight – increase in public sector funding, with the new Labour government showing a slight – perhaps very slight – increased appetite for investment. But, regardless of the public sector, the improved economic outlook should encourage activity from grant-making trusts and foundations.

 

To attract new grant funding opportunities in 2025, see CAF’s resources and IDOX’s exhaustive list of funding opportunities. Or check out the NCVO’s page on How to find grants.

 

 

The virtues of artificial intelligence in fundraising

 

Generative AI will be the talking point of 2025, and probably 2026, and likely 2027.  The tech has wide-reaching applications, far beyond writing basic copy or supporting research. It can among other things, generate images (DeepAI and DALL·E 2), audio (Soundraw and Jukebox), and video (Synthesia and Pictory); produce fast and effective data analysis (ChatGPT and Tableau); support day-to-day project management (Copilot); and so on.

 

We recently found an AI-dependent AI aggregator – There’s an AI for that – that shows the sheer amount of AI tools available for different tasks. On the aggregator, for example, you can use AI tools to generate motivational quotes, turn any given image into a painting, teach yourself to engage in better small talk, and so on.

 

In fact, AI has so many capabilities that pretty much any task could be completed using AI. That does not mean, of course, that pretty much any task should be completed with AI, as AI comes with plenty of risks, especially if misused, and humans are still the best option for loads of creative tasks.

 

AI offers huge potential to streamline fundraising. Charities can use text generation capabilities, for example, to write email headings, entire emails, ideas for social media posts, entire posts, taglines for upcoming campaigns, personalised comms to donors. The text often lacks originality and can feel generic and dull. But you can take the initial text and add value and personality, rather than starting from scratch. At the very least, AI text-generation seems to provide inspiration. 

 

You can use AI to help your community fundraisers reach their goals. GivenGain, for example, has started integrating AI text helpers on their site. That means, when a fundraiser creates a page, they can press a button to see potential improvements from AI. You can even incorporate an AI on your website, which you can train to tell people about your mission, your services, or any other information that might seem important. You can develop the AI to push people towards fundraising, by giving them information about your cause and information on how they can help.

 

In a similar vein, AI systems can improve Chatbots. The benefit of a Chatbot is that they’re constant, 24/7, always on and ready to respond. They can answer donor questions, direct them to relevant information, encourage them to donate. And, what’s more, you can integrate the Chatbots with payment software, such as PayPal, so that you’re unlikely to lose donors along their user journey. That could result in much greater fundraising potential.

 

AI tools can analyse huge amounts of data in a matter of moments. Using AI data analytics helps you to understand donors. You can ascertain how they’ve given in the past, preferred methods of giving, likely donors to re-donate, the most effective ways to approach them, and so on. AI, in the simplest terms, can help you create targeted and effective fundraising appeals in half the time.

 

Parkinson’s UK did just that. Working with data consultancy firm, Wood for Trees, Parkinson’s identified almost 70,000 people in their existing database who they could have approached and highlighted 10,000 people in the lowest deciles who would have been better excluded from the campaign. The use of AI-driven predictive analysis allows them to find the right people to approach, at the right time, which eventually boosted their cash giving by almost £500,000.

 

You can leverage AI for routine and monotonous tasks, conserving both time and resources, redirecting energy. Pick tasks ripe for automation: think of the jobs you hate. The most common tasks for AI automation include donation management, database management, orchestrating comms, identifying potential donors, and so on. By streamlining tedious tasks using AI, charities can allocate more time to creative endeavors, tasks that require the more personal touch.

 

 

New approaches to old social media platforms

 

Our advice used to be the same, year on year. We told people to find the platforms that best meet their needs and audience needs and invest in social media. But in 2024, for the first time, we suggested divesting from socials, or at least considering a move away from traditional social media platforms. The reason: the landscape of social media seemed controversial, perhaps even toxic, and the opportunities for fundraising seemed to dwindle. But we may have been wrong.

 

Or, at least, the landscape proved a little more complex than we imagined. Despite an much-talked about exodus from legacy social media platforms – Twitter, or X, being the most significant – we instead saw a degree of continuity. People stayed put, mostly, despite a lot of talk, despite a lot of threats, despite the constant uncertainty. People may not have posted as much. But accounts, for the most part, were not deleted. And charities, it appeared, were not an exception.

 

Last year demonstrated the staying power of Instagram, Facebook, and X. But the platforms have changed. Moderation ceased to be a priority – and not just on X. We saw Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and plenty of others change the way they approached moderation, with many of them letting go of the people responsible for moderation and tackling hate speech. The latter platforms changed their approach quietly, aware of potential backlash. X changed their approach loudly. 

 

It’s thus unsurprising that misinformation is rising – and fast. AI further complicates matters. AI makes misinformation easy. It allows the creation of false text, false images, false videos, in the click of a button. You don’t even need a good prompt. And bad actors use the capabilities to spread false but profoundly believable information, often in new forms. One famous example is a deep fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asking his army to cease fighting was shared across social media. Another example is a video of Putin calling for peace.  

 

AI-dependent bot networks  post, like, share, and comment on false posts, amplifying the reach and manipulating users. We’ve already seen plenty of examples of election interference – a phenomenon that seems likely to get worse as generative AI grows more sophisticated.

 

So the world of social media has become more toxic, more complex, the demarcation between real and unreal blurred. But social media is a vital tool for fundraising. We’ve seen in 2024 that charities are not simply leaving social media – or even trying to find more suitable platforms. But they are changing the way they engage on social media, with an increasing focus on fundraising.

 

One shift is a general embrace of inverse giving. A famous example is the RNLI tackling misinformation head-on and subsequently raising additional funds. They corrected false information, gained traction with their correction, and subsequently raised funds. So charities can use misinformation to their advantage, shifting the discourse away from the false to the correct, raising awareness and championing fundraising efforts in the process. 

 

Old social media platforms are changing. Charities can raise funds on these platforms despite the increase of misinformation. In fact, charities can raise funds while tackling misinformation, while making the platforms less toxic. Charities can boost their mission while providing accurate information to audiences in an era when such accuracy is proving increasingly rare.

 

 

The resistible rise of Gaming for Good

 

According to the Wood for Trees’ State of the Sector Report for 2024, Gaming for Good increased by 18% in 2018, 8% in 2020, but has not grown more than 2% since 2020. Gaming for Good has huge potential – but only a few charities seem to have realised that potential. Gaming has become a common feature in charity events, conferences, podcasts, and webinars over the past few years. It seems that everyone is talking about it. But few charities are doing it.

 

We were at the forefront of that conversation. We talked about Gaming for Good in 2021, 2022, and 2023, publishing articles on how to connect with influencers, how to engage the streaming community, how to find gamers, how gamers can raise funds and build a campaign, how to find the best platforms. In 2024, Gaming for Good seemed to slip from the conversation: charities who embrace Gaming for Good seemed happy, others seemed unwilling to try out the method.

 

So what’s gone wrong? The answer, as ever in our sector, comes down to time pressure. Gaming for Good is easy to do, but not easy to do well. It requires forethought, management, planning. It is no surprise that many of the charities really engaging in Gaming for Good – Teenage Cancer Trust, British Red Cross, MS Society, Sands – are large charities. It seems that the aversion to entering the world of gaming stems largely from resource and time constraints, something often felt more acutely by smaller charities. The good news is, with the increase in grants, with the potential increase in individual giving, charities may have more opportunity to get involved.

 

And getting involved really is easy. Gaming for Good is based entirely on streaming. Gamers switch on consoles, pick games, and play. They share the game with their audience. Friends and other gamers watch the action, usually on Twitch or increasingly YouTube, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. To raise funds, gamers just add donation buttons to streams and kindly ask the audience to donate. Gamers may create challenges, or complete quests, in order to raise funds, or they may simply play along, occasionally chatting to their audiences as they play.

 

In 2025 hopefully, charities will stop resisting the rise of Gaming for Good – and finally get involved. Fundraising with gamers is a simple and fun way to raise money. Charities needing a new fundraising stream should look no further than a games console.

 

 

Events returning to centre stage

 

The Spring Donor Pulse report from Enthuse highlighted that, while 44% of people say they are likely to take part in a fundraising event in 2024, a further 10% are undecided, meaning there is “plenty of opportunity for charities to engage the public in their fundraising events”. That report is substantiated by reports from the events industry. Consider, for example, that a Knowland survey found that events teams expect up to 10% higher attendance for in-person events in 2024. Or consider that, according research by Freeman, 82% of people prefer attending events in-person.

 

Despite the obvious appeal of virtual events, in-person events are making a comeback – and charities need to get involved. The Enthuse report showed an increasing appetite for fundraising event participation across all age groups, particularly the young. In fact, three in five 18–24-year-olds are keen to participate in fundraising events, followed by 58% of 25–34-year-olds. Just less than a third of over-45s (31%) expected to take part in a charity event in the past year. In a nice turn of events, socialising seems a key a driving force, as Enthuse suggest: “In a post-pandemic world, people’s social lives need a little more work – and this may provide an opportunity for charities to consider in their campaigns.”

 

Charities need to think about the best events for their audiences – and think about the events audiences want. The Enthuse report found that two in five (42%) were interested in exercise challenges, appealing most to those under 45, while a third wanted to get involved in large group events such as fun runs and walks. Distance races attracted the interest of one in six people (16%) – an impressive number considering the commitment needed to take part. Women seemed to prefer smaller fundraising events that were associated with wellbeing and social activities. Fun events, like karaoke or auctions, are preferred by people over the age of 45.

 

According to Enthuse, fun is by far the most important driving force behind fundraising event attendance, referenced by 53% of people. Other important factors are sociability (40%), a well-known cause (32%), ease of signing up (28%), and providing a new experience (25%). So all charities, in 2025, should aim to throw fun and sociable events, putting their cause front and centre. The possibilities are endless, with so many fundraising ideas at your disposal.

Check out our top fifty fundraising ideas, or to look at ideas for Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Valentine’s Day, or Halloween. And keep up to date with the latest trends on our fundraising hub.

 

 

Embracing the future of fundraising with Charity Digital

 

Successful charities learn lessons from the past, take advantage of the present, and look to the future. They will take advantage of optimism, looking for new fundraising opportunities as the UK grows more economically confident. They will change their general approaches to fundraising when necessary – utilising the power of AI, shifting the way they interact on socials, or adopting new fundraising avenues – and focus on the best ways to engage with their audience.

 

Let us know your thoughts below on any trends we may have missed. And please continue to keep up to date with our articles, listen to our podcasts, watch our videos, and learn from our webinars.