By Richard Lee
A lot of fundraisers will know this moment only too well.
A graph appears on a screen. One line is heading gently downwards. Another line is heading gently upwards. Neither line is fully understood by anyone present.
Then somebody points at the age profile of supporters and declares:
“Our audience is getting older!”
The room reacts as though a doctor has just entered carrying vital test results. Gasps are audible.
Within minutes there are discussions about rejuvenation, audience acquisition and digital transformation.
Someone mentions Gen Z. Someone else suggests a rebrand. There’s a murmur from the corner: how many followers do we have on TikTok?
And before anyone knows what’s happened, a hipster consultant with a rising inflection and a fixation with making every standard sentence sound like a life-changing question is explaining why the answer involves… an app.
Let’s just take five here and summon strength from a pause.
Before we diagnose the problem, we should probably ask a simple question:
Is an older audience actually the problem?
After all, the audience is getting older.
And so is the money.
That isn’t a criticism of younger people. It’s simply how life works.
Most people don’t spend their twenties accumulating wealth. They’re busy accumulating overdrafts, student debt, childcare costs and a deep appreciation for supermarket meal deals. By contrast, older supporters are more likely to have paid off a mortgage, built up savings and reached a stage in life where they can think about giving back.
Yet charities often behave as though the exact opposite is true.
Chasing the wrong prize
Spend enough time in the sector and you’ll notice a curious habit. We talk about younger audiences as though they are a vast, untapped reservoir of charitable income waiting to be unlocked by the perfect campaign.
If only we had the right platform. The right tone of voice. The right visual identity. The right engagement journey. The right digital product.
The implication is always the same: younger people aren’t giving because nobody has asked them properly.
The problem is that there is a difference between caring about a cause and being able to support it financially.
Many younger people care enormously about charities. They volunteer, advocate, campaign and share content. You’ll see them at Tesco’s shopping proudly with their free branded tote bag. All of those things matter.
But awareness doesn’t pay salaries, engagement doesn’t fund services and save lives, and likes can have a notoriously poor exchange rate.
At some point, fundraising still requires people to part with actual money.
That remains an awkward detail many organisations prefer not to dwell on.
Following the evidence
The data is not especially complicated.
Recent CAF research found that only 36% of 16–24-year-olds gave to charity in the previous year, the lowest participation rate of any age group. Giving among younger adults has fallen sharply over the last decade, while older generations continue to account for the largest share of charitable income and hold the overwhelming majority of personal wealth.
None of this means younger people are less generous. It means they are operating under very different economic conditions. If you’re choosing between a charitable donation and this month’s rent, the landlord tends to have a persuasive case.
Yet fundraising discussions often proceed as though younger audiences represent an overlooked growth market while existing supporters are somehow yesterday’s news.
That is a strange conclusion to draw from the evidence.
The great metric swap
Part of the problem is that we’ve become remarkably good at measuring things that aren’t income.
Followers, views, shares, downloads and engagement rates can all be tracked, graphed and presented in colourful dashboards that make everybody feel productive. They move quickly, produce satisfying upward arrows and fit beautifully into quarterly reports. Don’t get me wrong, it is useful information that can be exploited for benefit.
Income is much less cooperative.
Income requires asking. Income requires patience. Income requires maintaining relationships over years rather than weeks.
In short, income behaves like fundraising.
The danger comes when organisations start mistaking indicators for outcomes. A supporter who downloads a guide, signs a petition and follows you on social media is not necessarily becoming a donor. They may simply be someone who downloaded a guide, signed a petition and followed you on social media.
The distinction matters more than many strategy documents would have you believe.
Focus on the things that don’t change
Jeff Bezos once said that smart organisations focus on the things that don’t change.
It’s a useful principle for fundraising.
Platforms change. Technology changes. Audience behaviour changes. Entire social networks appear, become essential and then quietly disappear while everyone pretends they weren’t describing them as the future eighteen months earlier. Does anyone still use Blue Sky?
But some things remain stubbornly consistent.
People give when they trust an organisation, feel connected to a cause and can see the difference their support makes. They continue giving when they feel valued, informed and part of something meaningful. None of that is particularly fashionable, but then the fundamentals of fundraising rarely are.
Those truths survived direct mail. They survived email. They survived social media. They will probably survive whatever somebody is currently pitching in a conference centre near Birmingham.
Stay close
None of this means charities should ignore younger audiences.
That would be foolish.
Future supporters matter. Future donors matter. Every organisation should be thinking about how it builds relationships with the generations that will support it tomorrow.
But not at the expense of the people supporting it today.
Too many organisations treat existing supporters as a settled fact while viewing new audiences as an exciting opportunity. That’s backwards. Your current supporters are not the past. They are the present. They are the people funding the work. They have already crossed the most difficult bridge in fundraising and decided your cause deserves their support.
They are also the legacy pledgers and we know how vital that income is.
The job is not to take them for granted.
The job is to stay close.
To understand what matters to them and thank them properly and to make them feel part of something worthwhile.
Remarkably often, that’s where growth comes from. It’s not from chasing a hypothetical audience but from serving a real one better.
Real wins
The question charities should ask themselves isn’t whether they look younger or appear more modern. It certainly isn’t whether engagement has increased by 37 per cent among a demographic segment our visionary friend the uptalking hipster has highlighted in a PowerPoint presentation.
The question is whether more people gave.
Whether more supporters stayed.
Whether more people chose to leave a gift in their will.
Whether income grew.
Those are real wins. Never lose sight of that. Money talks, it changes lives and it saves lives.
Everything else is, at best, a supporting metric.
Fundraising has always been vulnerable to fashions. New platforms, language and trends arrive with impressive regularity. Yet successful fundraising remains remarkably unfashionable. It is built on understanding donors, building trust, staying close, focusing relentlessly on outcomes… and telling powerful stories that inspire, educate and deliver the revenues.
The audience may be getting older.
So is the money.
The smartest organisations recognise both facts and build their fundraising programmes accordingly.