How do I get started?
If you are already giving money away, feel free to skip this section. The aim is to provide some pointers to those who are still at the beginning of their donor journey.
Here are some pointers to help to get you started:
- The primary focus of charities is on their mission: the people they support and the issues they tackle. Donors don’t come first.
- Charities try to minimise their operating costs to channel as much resource as they can directly to their mission. They may not have much internal resource to communicate with you or to build a relationship with you as a donor.
- Generally, small charities are closer to the people they support and issues they tackle. If you also want to get close to the issues, it is well worth taking time to see if you can find those smaller charities, but remember smaller charities have the least amount of resource to keep in contact with their donors.
- Larger charities have more resources. In addition to supporting people and tackling issues, they often have capacity to innovate, to advocate and to crowd-in more funding. Larger charities are a good choice if you want your funding to have this leverage, or you simply want to give to an organisation that has deep expertise on a big topic.
- For a small charity, you are likely to get noticed as a donor if you make a gift bigger than £1,000. For a larger charity, that figure rises to £5,000 or more.
- If you are making a gift bigger than £10,000, the charity might ask if you would like to restrict your gift to a particular project or programme. Think carefully about whether you want to restrict the gift or leave it unrestricted. Keep in mind that the charity has the expertise in how to make a difference to people and issues. The more freedom they have, the more likely they will drive change.
- There are about 170,000 charities in the UK and the three charity regulators (for England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) each keep a register of these charities. These registers are the main source of information on charities. However, there are a few websites that draw on this information to provide more user-friendly ways of finding a charity to support.
Examples: