Introduction
There’s a number in the latest CAF UK Giving Report that I haven’t been able to put down.
Six million fewer people in the UK donated to charity in 2025 than in 2016. That’s an average of 600,000 fewer donors every year, and an estimated £12.4 billion that didn’t reach the sector over the decade. Total giving dropped 10% in 2025 alone. The proportion of UK adults who give has slid from 69% in 2016 to 55% last year. London is now the first region where fewer than half of people give.
I sat with that for a while.
Here’s the thing. For years, your website wasn’t doing the heavy lifting. Friends-of-friends were. Workplace giving was. Doorstep collectors were. The sponsored run, the church coffee morning, the colleague’s JustGiving link in the team WhatsApp. Your website’s job, mostly, was to not get in the way of people who’d already decided to give.
Those routes are quietly receding. The route that’s growing is the one that ends on your website. Which means the work the website is being asked to do is different now. It’s having to build the trust, prove the impact, make giving feel easy, and turn a one-off into a monthly, all in the few minutes a stranger spends on it.
Most of the charity donation pages I review weren’t built for that. Not a criticism. They were built for a different world.
This is about what I’d change.
What’s actually happening (the bits worth knowing)
I’ll keep this short because there’s a lot of doom in the report, and not all of it changes what you should actually do on Tuesday morning. But a few numbers are worth holding in your head.
The donor pool is shrinking, fastest at the young end. Donor participation fell from 69% to 55% over the decade. Among 16-24 year olds, it dropped from 52% in 2019 to 36% in 2024. That’s the cohort who become your major donors in 15 years. They aren’t starting the habit.
The people who do give are giving less. Average monthly donation: £72 down to £65. Median: £28 down to £26. People aren’t trading up to make up the gap. They’re just doing what they were doing, a bit smaller.
Regular giving is leakier than it looks. 2.8 million people cancelled direct debits or standing orders to charities in 2025. Direct debit remains the single largest donation method in the UK, accounting for roughly £1.1 billion a year. But it churns, and the new sign-ups aren’t keeping pace.
Affordability is the big one. Half of non-donors (49%) now say they can’t afford to give. The cost-of-living squeeze is real, and it shapes the kind of asks that actually work.
Gift Aid is being left on the table. £1.7 billion claimed in 2025. An estimated £560 million is unclaimed every year. Some of those are non-taxpayers. A lot of it is taxpayers who weren’t asked properly, or got asked in a way that made them tune out.
The CAF’s MD, Mark Greer, described it as a more fragile culture of giving than we’ve had in a long time. I think that’s right. And I think the temptation in the sector is to read it as a fundraising story when it’s also a digital one. Where people meet your charity has changed. Your website has to do more of the work that the world used to do for you.
Why does this change what your website has to do
A lot of charity websites were built to do three things. Explain who you are. Show what you do. Put a donate button somewhere near the top right.
That was fine when the donate button was at the bottom of a long, warm, trust-building funnel. Someone heard about you from a friend. Their kid did a sponsored run. Their workplace ran payroll giving. By the time they hit your website, they were eight-tenths of the way there. The site just had to not break.
The funnel is shorter and colder now. More of your visitors are people who:
- Saw your campaign on Instagram and Googled you
- Got pointed to you by an AI assistant when they asked about a cause
- Are weighing up three charities in the same space and choosing one
- Have ten minutes between meetings to set up a monthly gift before they forget
These people aren’t eight-tenths warmed up. They might be two-tenths. The website has to do the rest of the work that a personal recommendation used to do, and ideally turn a one-off into a regular gift while it’s at it.
Different brief. Same website. See the problem?
Five things I’d change
Right, the practical bit. None of this needs a full rebuild. Most of it is an afternoon’s focused work, or a targeted improvement job if you’d rather not wrestle with WordPress yourself.
1. Make monthly giving the default, not the optional extra
Direct debit and recurring giving are how the sector survives the next decade. They’re the antidote to donor churn. They’re the only realistic way to grow income when the pool is shrinking. They’re also the only sensible way to claim Gift Aid without re-asking the same donor every quarter.
And yet. Almost every donation page I review treats monthly as the second tab. One-off is the default; monthly is the smaller, paler button beside it. The amounts shown for monthly are often higher than people would naturally consider – £25 a month feels like a stretch in a way that £10 a month doesn’t, even when both are reasonable.
Here’s what I’d change. Put monthly first, not second. Show amounts people actually live with: £3, £5, £10 a month. Frame the gift in terms of what it does each month, not what it adds up to over a year (the maths is identical, the psychology isn’t). Add one sentence somewhere explaining why monthly matters to you. Not “regular giving is wonderful” but “this lets me plan, lets me apply for match funding, lets me hire a part-time outreach worker”. Real reasons. And test the whole thing on a phone, because that’s where most people give from.
CAF’s own guidance on direct debit vs recurring card payments is worth a read before you build anything, because the payment method choice affects retention more than people think.
2. Strip the friction out of the donation flow
I audit a lot of donation pages. The number of clicks and form fields between “I want to give” and “thank you” is almost always two or three more than it needs to be.
The same things come up over and over.
The title field (Mr/Mrs/Dr) at the top of the form. Pointless. Drop it. Asking for a full address before payment method, which kills any donor who wanted to give anonymously or via Apple Pay. A Gift Aid declaration that reads like a tax tribunal transcript instead of one clear sentence and a tick box. Marketing consent set to opt-out instead of opt-in (which annoys the donor and the ICO). Form errors that don’t tell you which field is wrong. No mobile wallet option, so the donor has to dig out their card mid-flow.
If you want a quick test, ask someone outside your team to donate £5 on their phone while you watch. Don’t help them. Don’t explain anything. Just note where they hesitate, scroll back, or sigh. The sighs are the work list.
3. Tell impact stories where they actually matter
This is where the heavy lifting really happens. It’s also where most charity websites quietly lose people.
A peer recommendation works because the person making it has implicit credibility. Your friend isn’t going to send you to a dodgy charity. Your website has to build that credibility from a cold start, with someone who’s never heard of you and won’t give you long to convince them.
Generic statements don’t do it. “We help vulnerable people across the UK” tells me nothing. What works is a specific person whose life was different because of your work. A specific number tied to a specific period (“412 advice sessions in 2025; 89% led to a successful housing outcome”). A short video of someone who’s been on the receiving end of your service. Independent verification – a regulator, an accreditation, an external evaluation. And honesty about what you can’t do, as well as what you can. That last one is counterintuitive, but it builds more trust than the polished version.
The trust signals matter most on the donation page itself. Not buried three clicks deep in an “About us” section. The person about to give wants reassurance in the moment they’re giving, not as a separate research project.
4. Build for the donor who just walked in off the street
A growing share of your traffic is people who didn’t know you existed five minutes ago. They’ve clicked a link in a news article, an AI summary, a friend’s social post, or a Google result. Their first impression isn’t your homepage. It’s whatever page they happened to land on.
Every page on the site that could plausibly be a landing page needs to answer four things in the first five seconds: who you are, who you help, how someone can help, and why they should trust you.
Most charity websites I review fail this on at least half their pages. They’re built on the polite assumption that visitors start at the homepage, click through the menu, and read in order. They don’t. They land sideways, scan for a second, and either commit or close the tab.
A practical fix that takes about half an hour. Open your analytics, find your five most-visited pages, and open each one in an incognito browser. If you’d never heard of the charity, do those pages give you what you’d need to give? If not, those are your front doors, and they need work.
5. Make Gift Aid effortless
£560 million in unclaimed Gift Aid a year. Some of those are people who can’t claim. A lot of it is taxpayers who got asked the wrong way, at the wrong moment, or not at all.
What helps. One plain-English sentence: “I’d like Gift Aid added – this turns a £10 gift into £12.50, at no extra cost to me, because I pay UK tax.” A single tick box, ticked by default, where you’re allowed. Ask in the same flow as the donation, not as a separate step after the thank-you (you’ve lost them by then). And for regular givers, make sure your CRM is storing the declaration in a way that covers ongoing gifts. Re-asking every quarter is one of those small accidental rudenesses that quietly lose retention.
If you’re running a membership platform or recurring donations, this gets fiddlier, because the declaration needs to cover ongoing gifts properly. Worth doing once, properly, rather than patching it later. That’s the kind of thing a website refresh sorts out cleanly, rather than as another plugin on top of a tower of plugins.
A quick word on AI search (because it’s how people find you now)
Worth a brief detour, because it’s connected.
People aren’t only Googling charities anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. “What charities help homeless veterans in Manchester?” “Where can I donate for flood relief?” And those tools answer. They recommend specific organisations by name.
What they recommend depends partly on whether your website is readable by them. Which mostly means:
- Your charity number, registered name, and main causes stated in plain text, not buried in an image or graphic
- A clear, factual “what we do” page in plain English (no marketing speak, no jargon)
- Structured data added by your developer (Schema.org markup for charities) so AI systems can extract your details rather than guessing
- Impact data that’s scannable: clear numbers, clear time periods, clear context
If an AI assistant is recommending a charity in your space, you want to be in that answer. The same factual clarity that helps a human donor decide is what helps the AI represent you accurately. I’ve written more about the broader picture of bot and AI traffic in an earlier post if you want to go further down that rabbit hole.
Where to start if you’re reading this and feeling a bit overwhelmed
Honestly, don’t try to do all of this. Pick one thing.
If you’ve got 30 minutes today, open your donation page on your phone in an incognito browser and make a £5 monthly gift. Time it. Note everything that annoys you. That list is your starting point.
If you’ve got an afternoon, run the four-question test on your top five landing pages. Test the donation flow on three different devices. Find your most recent impact story and check it’s actually on the donation page, not just in a news section nobody reads.
If you’ve got a budget, get someone to do a proper review of your donation conversion rate and your monthly-to-one-off ratio. Then plan a focused improvement on the top one or two things rather than commissioning a rebuild. A rebuild is rarely the answer when smaller, sharper changes will move the numbers.
The point isn’t to redo the website. The point is to recognise that the website is now doing a job it wasn’t originally designed for, and to give it the tools to do that job properly.
The bottom line
Six million fewer donors is a big number. Big enough that it makes people reach for big strategies and full rebuilds, which is usually the wrong response.
Most of what charity websites actually need is smaller and sharper. Make monthly the default. Strip the friction out. Tell a real story where it matters. Build for the stranger who just arrived. Don’t leave Gift Aid on the table.
None of it is rocket science. But almost no charity website I review does all five well, and plenty don’t do any of them. That’s the gap between a site that supports your fundraising and a site that doesn’t.
Peer recommendations aren’t dead, for the record. The data still shows around 17% of donations prompted by a friend, family member or colleague. But the pool of people doing the recommending is shrinking, and the work your website has to do is growing. Both things can be true at once.
If you’ve read this far and recognised your own donation page in any of the descriptions, that’s a good sign. It means you’ve already noticed something most charities haven’t. The next step is choosing one thing to fix this month, and I’d genuinely rather you fix one thing than commission a rebuild.
If you want a second pair of eyes on what to prioritise, I’m here.
