Generating income and financial sustainability is top challenge for charities, according to poll

May 2022

Generating income and financial sustainability is top challenge for charities: A survey by the Charities Aid Foundation has revealed that the most pressing issue for charities is generating income/achieving financial sustainability, with 58% of respondents saying it was their leading concern. This was followed by meeting demand for services (30%) and a reduction in public and government funding (26%).

The CAF survey titled Charities Aid Foundation Charity Landscape 2022 also found that 21% of charities polled said they were planning to use reserve funds to cover income shortfalls, instead of for capital expenditure – twice as many as before the pandemic in 2019, when it was 10%.

When asked about how optimistic they felt about the coming year, 81% of charity leaders said they felt optimistic about the future of their organisation, with more charities feeling optimistic about their own organisation than the charity sector itself (50%). Almost two-thirds of respondents said that they felt pessimistic about the level of support offered to them by the government (64%) however the pessimism was greater in England (74%) than it was in Northern Ireland (57%) and Scotland (42%).

Almost seven in ten charities said that they believe the government will view charities as service providers over the next five years.

Three-quarters of the charities polled revealed that in the first year of the global pandemic, the demand for their charity’s services increased, with 85% believing that services would be needed even more in the future. Eight in ten charities said they felt confident about their organisation meeting the increased demand for their services, however leaders were less optimistic about how the sector at large would cope.

When it comes to technology, most of the leaders polled (89%) said that they believe changes in technology and digitisation is 'relevant' to their organisation, with larger companies more likely to have bought tech solutions during the Covid-19 pandemic.