Charities building lasting, meaningful engagement with supporters
The news that charity donations are down won’t come as a surprise to anyone who runs one. It’s something we’ve all seen for ourselves first hand, and recent research only confirms what we already knew – charities are now relying on donations from only 50% of people, down from 58% in 2019, equating to approximately 4 million fewer donors.
Donor fatigue and repeated appeals for money, particularly after the pandemic, have led to a sense of disengagement among supporters. But while donor numbers are dropping, the biggest shift has come in how people choose to give.
While the statistics undeniably show a significant drop in the number of donors, they actually only tell half the story. The numbers tell us that people are becoming more strategic in how they support the charities they care about.
They may be giving less, but they are also becoming more discerning, choosing when, how and to whom they donate. And as a result, emotional connection - and the loyalty that comes with it - is more important for charities to be aware of than ever.
Leveraging loyalty
How a supporter feels about your charity is a key driver in loyalty, tapping into an individual’s feelings, values and identity. The emotional bonds between cause and supporter have become ever more invaluable as being the intangible connections that lead to donations, even when there are plenty of other causes they could choose to support.
A donor who gives again out of habit (a repeat donor) is not the same as one who consistently chooses your charity over others because of a deep emotional connection (a loyal supporter). Charities can no longer depend on repeat donations alone because they need to invest in building meaningful, lasting relationships with loyal supporters.
The fact that phrases like LTV (meaning Lifetime Value) – a phrase commonly found in commercial and retail environments - is increasingly being used in the charity sector is a marker of how important loyalty in supporters has become.
The Donor Lifetime Value (as opposed to the consumer version) refers to the total amount of money a donor is expected to give over the course of their relationship with a charity. This can also mean aspects of non-monetary value like advocacy, volunteering or peer-to-peer influence.
Seeing supporters as brand advocates and attributing to them an LTV encourages a shift from short term fundraising goals to long term relationship building - a significant trend in UK charity fundraising and a reflection of broader changes in donor expectations and engagement.
Meaningful initiatives
So what does this switch from passive giving to emotionally engaged support look like for charities? For a start, we need to become conscious of the factors that help cultivate meaningful relationships with supporters. And this means looking at how they prefer to interact.
Changing demographics mean that younger generations are less likely to give through traditional means but are more motivated by experiences, authenticity and social impact. The rise of purpose-driven, participatory events is a clear indication of this, and these events’ resilience in the face of traditional giving is a testament to the evolving values of younger donors, who seek meaningful connection and tangible outcomes from their contributions.
It’s important for each charity to think objectively about what meaningful connection looks like for them and what obstacles they might face in achieving it. We’re a charity where all money raised is directed solely to funding detailed research into the causes, prevention, and cure for a relatively unknown disease (myocarditis).
So we became aware early on that fundraising to pay for medical research and raise awareness is often a difficult and confusing concept for supporters to connect with in a meaningful way.
Relationships with key individuals
Supporters often view medical research as a long term commitment, so we recognised the importance of investing time and effort into building strong relationships with key individuals. As a small, niche charity, we understood that our fundraising strategy had to prioritise purposeful, high-impact initiatives over broad, unfocused outreach.
Compared to more immediate, tangible causes like disaster relief or community support, it can be hard for individuals to connect with scientific and preventative work and we realised we would have to work around this to create loyalty in more tangible ways.
For Myocarditis UK, our answer to that was to create a meaningful charity sports event. We wanted to build an event that did more than simply raise money. We needed the event to build lasting relationships by making supporters feel emotionally connected and personally invested in the charity and its mission.
Insights and research
This isn’t merely anecdotal as there’s solid evidence to support the idea that successful sports event fundraising is about more than donations. But it also needs to provide participants with a sense of self-worth and meaning, self-esteem and personal fulfilment.
Leading researchers Funk and Filo carried out a series of collaborative research projects drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods to look at why people participate in charity-affiliated sporting events and what drives their ongoing attachment and engagement.
Their research explored how fundraising events, especially participatory sports events, can foster deeper donor engagement by creating meaningful experiences. What they found is that donors and participants aren’t just motivated by the activity itself, but by the sense of purpose, connection and personal significance that they get from the event.
Sense of accomplishment
They identified three key drivers of meaningful fundraising: personal relevance (the cause matters to the individual), social connection (the event brings people together and strengthens relationships), and achievement (participants feel a sense of accomplishment).
Their findings show that when fundraising events tap into these drivers - by aligning with participants’ values, encouraging teamwork or community, and offering opportunities for personal growth or challenge - they generate stronger emotional bonds and higher engagement. This, in turn, leads to increased fundraising success and long term loyalty to the cause.
Funk and Filo emphasise the importance for charities to design events and campaigns that go beyond transactional giving, instead creating opportunities for supporters to experience genuine meaning and connection through their involvement.
Putting research into practice
For Myocarditis UK, building a participatory sporting event that fulfils the principles of Funk and Filos research is something we’ve achieved through a decade of trial and error.
We launched the Jansons Rowing Cup in 2015 as a unique, community-driven event that combines friendly competition with business networking. It’s an annual charity event held at Eton College’s Dorney Lake, designed to bring together local businesses from Buckinghamshire and Berkshire for a day of community connection and friendly competition. Each year, around 120 people attend the event.
Businesses enter teams of seven - six rowers and one coxswain to steer - or we create mixed teams from multiple companies, ensuring everyone can take part. The races are held in traditional Cornish gig boats over a 200-metre course, with multiple heats leading up to a final showdown. The fastest team of the day takes home the coveted Jansons Rowing Cup.
Achievable target
Over the years, we’ve deliberately and iteratively evolved the event to strike a meaningful balance between business, charity, and personal challenge. For example, the course was an additional 300 metres long when we first ran the event, but we quickly figured out that 200 metres was a more achievable target for most of our competitors.
While there is, naturally, an element of sporting prowess, the focus of the event has never been an endurance activity. A stamina-based challenge like marathons or triathlons can work really well for some charities, but we wanted to create something less elite to appeal specifically to those we needed to reach namely, local businesses and donors.
Sense of friendly rivalry
We’ve also established over the years that deliberately fostering a sense of friendly rivalry was beneficial to not only add energy and excitement to the day itself but often to carry on well beyond the event, with businesses returning year after year to settle playful scores.
To do this, teams which progress to the semi-final and final are selected based on their timed performance in the initial heats. By letting competitors know and share their team’s results often sparks friendly banter, and fuels a healthy sense of competition.
Although fostering competition wasn’t part of our original vision a decade ago, we quickly recognised how valuable that element of challenge could be. It’s proven beneficial not only for the sporting aspect but also for encouraging professional networking.
The Jansons Rowing Cup has become a space where businesses connect through shared experiences and common goals, and we’ve seen those connections grow into a broader sense of community among participants - even outside the event itself.
More than just raising nearly £100,000, the event has become a symbol of what small charities can achieve when they focus on authentic engagement. With the charity sector at a crossroads, examples like the Jansons Rowing Cup point to a possible path forward which sees charities creating meaningful, enduring relationships that inspire continued support and drive long term impact. A win/win situation for both charities and donors alike.
