Charity regular giving: how to increase giving when the old playbook no longer works

Piece two of this series made the case for relationship-led fundraising. This is where that becomes operational.

Start with visibility.

Before you can improve retention, you need to know where you're losing people, and most charities don't have a clear enough picture of this.

Not in aggregate ("our retention rate is X%"), but specifically: at what point in the donor journey are people most likely to leave? Is it in the first 90 days? After a lapsed payment? Following a period of silence?

The answers are almost always in your data – and therefore almost always in your CRM – but it's important to look at individual donor behaviour over time rather than headline figures. 

Charities that can see this data clearly – which donors are disengaging, at what stage, and what preceded it – can intervene before someone leaves rather than trying to win them back afterwards.

That shift, from reactive to proactive, is where meaningful retention improvement tends to begin.

The CAF data puts a number on it: 2.8 million regular charity donations were cancelled in 2025. One in five donors cited affordability directly.

But affordability alone doesn't explain the full picture, because the donors who remain are giving more per person than a decade ago. People who feel genuinely connected to a cause tend to find a way.

Which points to the quieter cause of cancellation that's harder to see in the data: disconnection. Donors who don't feel the relationship is alive will cancel eventually; not because they can't afford it, but because the direct debit has become an abstraction, detached from any sense of ongoing impact.

This is the practical implication of everything piece two said about trust and connection. It doesn't stay theoretical – it shows up in your cancellation rate.

A few things that consistently make a difference:

• Impact communication that's specific, not generic.

"Your £10 a month means we can..." lands differently than a general mission statement. Donors give to causes, but they stay because of outcomes. National Churches Trust are a great example of staying personal, too.

• A genuine welcome sequence.

The period immediately after someone signs up is when they're most engaged and most at risk of second-guessing themselves. A thoughtful welcome — not a receipt, but a real acknowledgement of what their support means — sets the tone for everything that follows.

• A process for lapsed payments.

One of the most common sources of passive attrition isn't cancellation, it's a card that expired or a bank account that changed, with no follow-up. Many charities lose regular givers this way without ever knowing it. A clear, prompt process for catching and resolving failed payments can have a meaningful impact on retention without any new acquisition spend. Stamford School uses Donorfy activities to track expiry dates!

Upgrade asks are one of the most consistently underused levers in regular giving – partly because they feel uncomfortable, and partly because teams aren't always sure when or how to make the ask.

• On timing:

Most sector experience points to waiting around nine to twelve months before approaching a new regular giver about an upgrade. Too early and the relationship hasn't settled. For donors who've been giving for two or more years, an annual review of gift amount is reasonable, and most expect it.

• On framing:

The upgrade ask that works least well opens with "could you give more?" The one that works best connects the ask to something specific. That could be a programme milestone, a new initiative, a story of impact – something that makes clear exactly what the additional giving would enable. It's not more money for the organisation. It's more of something the donor already cares about.

• On segmentation: 

A donor giving £5 a month who has been with you for three years, who opens your emails and attended an event last year, is a different conversation from a recent sign-up at £25 a month. The former may be ready for a personal phone call. The latter probably isn't ready for an upgrade ask at all yet.

Charities with clear sight of giving history, communication engagement, and donor tenure can be precise about who to approach, when, and with what kind of ask. That precision is what makes the difference between an upgrade programme that feels like a relationship and one that feels like a billing operation.

Instead of blanket appeals, Acorns Children's Hospice calculated each donor’s ‘current value’ based on past giving, then used that to tailor ask ladders and increase the likelihood of a meaningful response.  

"We asked lapsed donors for 50% of their past giving, as they’re not as warm. For warmer givers we gave the option to give at their current giving rate, plus the option to give a little more. It worked.” 

Read their story

The default approach – sending a one-off donor an email explaining the benefits of regular charity donations and asking them to set up a direct debit – occasionally works. But, you're asking someone who gave in a moment of emotional resonance to make a considered, ongoing financial commitment on the basis of a follow-up message.

What tends to work better is earlier, and more personal.

• At the point of giving

The moment someone makes a one-off donation, they're at their highest state of emotional engagement with your cause. This is the best time to present a regular giving option. Not as an upsell, but as a natural next step. Framed well, alongside a genuine expression of gratitude and a tangible sense of what monthly support would enable, this can significantly increase the proportion of one-off donors who convert immediately.

• Targeting the right people

Not every one-off donor is a regular giving prospect. The ones most likely to convert are those who've given more than once, who engage with your communications, and whose first gift was above a certain threshold. Segmenting on these signals, rather than mailing your entire one-off file, makes the ask feel more relevant and produces better results.

• Removing friction from the conversion itself

The more steps between "yes, I'd like to give regularly" and "the direct debit is set up," the more people drop out. A dedicated regular giving landing page with a simple, mobile-optimised form removes one of the most common failure points. It sounds obvious, but many charities are still routing prospective regular givers through multi-step processes designed for one-off transactional giving.

This is where the systems piece – covered in part two of this series – becomes directly relevant to regular giving.

The signals that a regular giver is moving toward cancellation often appear before the cancellation itself: a drop in email engagement, a lapsed payment that isn't followed up, a stretch of silence in a previously active relationship. Individually, these are easy to miss.

Collectively, they're a pattern. Charities that can see this pattern can intervene early.

A personal outreach to a donor who has become less engaged, made before they've consciously decided to leave, is significantly more likely to retain them than a reactivation campaign months later.

The practical requirement is a CRM that makes donor engagement visible in one place: not just transaction history, but communication behaviour, payment status, and the kind of relationship signals that indicate whether a connection is strengthening or fading.

For example, Donorfy surfaces this by default, which means fundraising teams can build simple monitoring processes without commissioning custom reports or piecing together data from separate systems.

For charities managing a larger or more integrated operation, The Access Charity Suite brings this CRM visibility together with wider fundraising and operational tools, which can simplify both the oversight and the action.

The point isn't the software, though. It's having a clear enough view of your regular giving file to act on what it's telling you, rather than finding out what went wrong after the fact.

The honest version: it looks different from what many teams built their programmes around five or six years ago.

I was working for a charity myself then, and the old model assumed acquisition was the primary lever. Get enough people onto a direct debit, steward them reasonably well, and the portfolio would grow over time. Retention was largely passive, a natural outcome of a relationship maintained.

That assumption has broken down. Not because donors have become less generous, but because the relationship between a charity and its regular givers now has to be earned more actively, and more continuously.

The CAF report data is clear that more than half of donors are motivated by wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves.

The giving is there. What regular givers are increasingly asking for is a relationship that reflects that – one where their contribution feels real, visible, and ongoing.

The charities that are sustaining and growing their charity regular giving income right now communicate with purpose and specificity rather than volume. They treat impact reporting as seriously as the ask itself. And they've built the systems that surface what they need to act on each relationship, rather than chasing the information across spreadsheets and disconnected tools.

None of that is a transformation project. Most of it is process and discipline, applied consistently over time. Which is perhaps the most useful thing to take from this piece: the gap between where most charities are and where the best ones are isn't as wide as it might seem. It's mostly a question of where you're choosing to look.

This series moves next to income diversification – what it looks like to build a fundraising strategy that isn't over-reliant on any single income stream, and how the most resilient charities are thinking about that right now. We'll also be looking at why £560 million in Gift Aid is being left on the table: watch this space.

If you'd like to explore how Donorfy could support the data visibility that underpins most of what's covered here, you can find out more here.

Part of the Reality of Giving series:

• Part one: Fundraising challenges: what six million fewer donors means for UK charities
• Part two: Donor numbers are falling. Is your charity fundraising strategy ready to do more with less?