• Fundraising
• How charities use your money
• Who regulates fundraising?
• How to make a complaint
• General vs. specific appeals
• Membership and sponsorship schemes
• Fundraising FAQs
• Fundraising factsheets
• Fundraising costs
• Fundraising case studies

• The sources of fundraised income - It costs much less to ask for grants from companies, trusts, government agencies and the National Lottery than it does to raise funds from the general public - but these funding routes are not available for every charity. Applications for funding do require a lot of staff time to prepare, but these costs pale into insignificance alongside the costs of buying advertising space, sending out a mailing and creating and managing a fundraising database. Those charities that get most of their income from grants will therefore report far better ratios than those working with the general public. Gifts made through people’s Wills are also important here, as charities sometimes receive high levels of legacy income that skews the figures.
• The ways the charity fundraises from individuals - The returns achieved will be a function of the media and/or methods employed. Mailed appeals generate very different returns from street fundraising, gala dinners or the sale of raffle tickets. The fundraising ratio will reflect the balance of activities - and not every fundraising method will be available (or perform as well) for every organisation so it is not always possible for every charity to access the most profitable techniques.
• The size of the organisation - There are economies of scale in fundraising activity that makes it cheaper for larger organisations to raise funds than smaller ones. Comparing the fundraising performance of the Dorset Wildlife Trust with the National Trust would be unfair.
• The nature of the cause - The British public have their favourite causes like children and animal welfare. There are many difficult social causes that the public does not find so attractive. That is not to say that these are any the less worthy, but they are not so imprinted on the national psyche. Some categories of cause find it more difficult to raise funds than others. It would be unfair to compare the performance of, say, a charity dealing with asylum seekers with that of a children’s hospital charity. The former would tend to find it more difficult to raise funds than the latter.
• Age/Experience - Charities new to fundraising, or new to the use of certain techniques will find it takes times to establish a reasonable pattern of performance. Many techniques require investment over a period of years before an adequate return on investment can be reported. The move by a charity to a new way of fundraising may adversely affect fundraising ratios in the short to medium terms.
• Volunteers – Some charities have a well-established base of volunteers prepared to fundraise at a low cost to the organisation. These are typically large national charities with regional groups and branches, or very small organisations where the community gets together to work to its mutual advantage. It isn’t possible for every charity to use volunteers for fundraising and the number of volunteers fully trained in fundraising is actually very small.
• The way the accounts are prepared - Some charities argue that when they fundraise, they are educating the public about their cause at the same time. As a consequence between 10 and 20% of the costs of fundraising can be taken out of the equation before ratios are calculated. These costs are then approportioned to programme costs, or direct charitable expenditure.
  
  To complicate things even more, some charities operate accounting practices that do the opposite. They believe their fundraising function benefits from the brand building and education work the organisation undertakes. They therefore charge fundraising a percentage of the costs of this activity, making fundraising appear between 5 and 15% more expensive than it actually is!
  
  If this is an area that interests you, ask the charity to provide you with the detail of what practice they follow.
  

It can otherwise be difficult to know which charities have adopted these practices, making direct comparisons between organisations impossible on the basis of their published accounts.