Most charity marketing is underfunded. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not looked at the numbers, and probably has not sat in a meeting where a team works out which post to leave unfilled.
The next statement tends to land less well, because it sounds like blame. Most charity marketing is also unfocused.
It is not meant as blame. The two problems are connected, and the connection runs in a direction that is worth understanding before anyone reaches for the word discipline.
The money problem is real
The Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2026 found that total household giving fell by almost 10% to £14 billion in 2025, with six million fewer people giving than a decade ago and one in five people saying they cannot afford to give to charity.
On the cost side, the increase in employer National Insurance contributions has added an estimated £1.4 billion in costs across the charity sector. Inflation has compounded the pressure too. What cost £100 in 2020 now costs more than £128.
The 2026 Charity Sector Support Index, based on responses from 1,274 charities, voluntary organisations and community groups, found that funding and income generation remained the most common challenge, cited by 28.6% of respondents.
The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 tells a similar story from a digital perspective. Squeezed finances are the biggest barrier to digital progress for 63% of charities, while 56% say limited skills are the biggest barrier to adopting AI effectively.
There is some better news buried in the data. The Charity Commission’s 2026 analysis of annual returns showed the sector’s income and expenditure margin improving to £1 billion in 2024, up from a five-year low of £700 million in 2023. But an improving margin at sector level tells you very little about a small charity managing a deficit in a room in Kent.
So no, this is not an argument that the money is fine.
Scarcity is what causes the scattering
Here is the part that matters. When resources are tight, the instinct is to hedge.
Nobody spreads a small budget thinly because they think it is optimal. They do it because concentrating it means choosing, and choosing means somebody’s channel gets nothing.
So a little goes to social, a little to print, a little to the event, a little to the newsletter, a little to whatever a funder attached a promotional requirement to. Everything is covered. Nothing reaches the threshold at which it would actually work.
Restricted funding compounds this. Each grant arrives with its own communications obligation, its own reporting cycle, its own audience. A charity running six restricted programmes is effectively running six marketing functions on the budget of half of one, and the person holding it together is usually the same person answering the phones.
Add a board where three trustees each hold a sincere and different conviction about which channel matters, and the lack of focus stops being a failure of discipline. It has been manufactured by the funding structure and the governance structure working exactly as designed.
This is not a moral failing. It is a predictable output of the system.
Which is why only one of these is yours to solve
You cannot conjure another £50,000 this quarter. You can decide what to stop.
That is the whole argument, and it is more uncomfortable than it sounds.
Because deciding what to stop is not a marketing decision. It is a conversation with a trustee whose preferred channel is not getting resourced, or with a programme lead whose activity generates real warmth and almost no measurable return, or with a funder about whether the promotional requirement attached to their grant is serving anyone.
There is a skills gap in the sector, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report found that 59% of charities now see building the skills of staff, volunteers and leaders as an organisational priority, up from 43% the year before. It also found that 60% say training on AI is the sector-wide support they need most.
That gap is real, it is well documented, and closing it changes what an organisation is capable of.
But deciding what to stop is a different kind of problem. It does not require a new skill. It requires someone with the standing to have the conversation and the willingness to be unpopular for a fortnight afterwards.
Plenty of charities have people who know precisely which activity should be dropped and no route by which to say so.
The two interact, which is why this is worth separating carefully. A skills gap makes the decision harder, because it is difficult to argue confidently for stopping something when you cannot demonstrate what it returns.
Better skills produce better evidence, and better evidence makes the conversation survivable.
But the skills alone will not make anyone have it.
The 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report also shows that only 28% of charities have a digital strategy in place. That is a finding about how organisations are planning and making decisions, not simply about how much money exists to make those decisions with.
What doubling the budget would actually change
Very little, if nothing else changed with it.
A larger budget spread across the same nine activities produces slightly better versions of nine things that were not working.
This is why organisations that receive a windfall grant for communications can still find, a year later, that it is harder to demonstrate the difference than they expected. The money went in. The structure it went into was unchanged.
The organisations that get disproportionate value from small budgets share one characteristic. They have decided, explicitly, what their marketing is for, and they have accepted the consequence of that decision, which is that some things do not get done.
We have written before about the trade-offs this involves in Budgets and the Hard Choices Behind Strategy, and about why the appealing alternative rarely works in The Dangerous Illusion of Quick Fix Marketing.
A more honest way to frame the ask
If you are going to your board or a funder for more marketing resource, the strongest case is not that you need more.
It is this.
Here is what we currently spend across these channels.
Here is what each returns, as far as we can tell.
Here are the three we propose to stop, and what we expect that to release.
Here is what we would concentrate on instead, and what we expect it to achieve.
Here is what additional funding would let us do that concentration cannot achieve on its own.
That case is harder to write and considerably harder to argue for. It is also the only version that survives contact with a finance committee, because it demonstrates that the request is the second step rather than the first.
Being underfunded is a condition.
Being unfocused is a decision, even when nobody remembers making it.
The first will not resolve itself this year. The second could be addressed before the next board meeting.
If working out what to stop would benefit from an outside view, that is precisely what a strategy session is for.
