Statistics
97.3% of charities in the UK are small (166,508) and yet they are only bringing in 24.3% of the sectors £35.5 billion each year.[1] This means of course that 2.7%, the largest household brands are attracting 75.7% of all donations. Why? Because fundamental decisions like how much money to spend on generating income in small charities is still undermined by a lack of fundraising knowledge and experience. Whilst the larger charities are spending 13.81% of expenditure on generating funds, small charities are still only spending 5.2%.
It is this lack of experience and knowledge that the FSI continues to counteract with its charitable offering. Small charities identified fundraising as the third most important skill to implement in their organisations after strategic use of IT and Legal knowledge, and it was the only skill of all those listed as missing that was specific to the sector. Further evidence tells us that 57% of charities say that a lack of funding for training and development is the main reason they don’t close skill gaps[2]. This is more than enough for us to fight to keep knowledge free and accessible to small charities.
In 2009-10, thanks to our donors, we delivered 368 places on 36 training courses to improve small charities. We took away the barriers to accessing knowledge by making the training courses absolutely free, making donations towards travel costs if coming from outside London, and making sure the delegates didn’t go hungry.
Take a look at our impact reports here:
Impact Report and Accounts 2007 – 2008
[1] All figures taken from ‘The UK Civil Society Almanac 2010’, NCVO, and differ to those figures quoted by the Charity Commission because they do not take into account both the charities’ subsidiaries and their income, which can be assumed to be double counted in Charity Commission figures.
[2] ‘Third Sector Skills Research 2008: Further Evidence and Recommendations on skills gaps’, Jenny Clark and Veronique Jochum.
