Where growth is coming from in 2026 - and what's making the difference?
Across the sector this year, some fundraising and engagement teams are delivering meaningful growth. Not everywhere, and not without effort - but enough to see what's working. And when you look closely, the patterns are worth paying attention to.
The first thing that stands out is focus. The teams making the most progress aren't trying to do everything at once. They've made deliberate choices about where to concentrate energy - supporter journeys rather than acquisition, a particular capability gap, a way of working that needed to change - and they've built momentum from there. In a sector where capacity is stretched and demands are high, that kind of disciplined prioritisation turns out to matter enormously.
The second pattern is sequencing. Growth strategies tend to underdeliver not because they lack opportunities, but because the conditions aren't yet in place to support them. The organisations getting this right are asking a harder question before they launch the next campaign or product: is our current setup actually capable of delivering what we're asking of it? Sometimes the honest answer reshapes the plan - and that's a good thing.
The third pattern is perhaps the most interesting. Some of the most significant shifts we're seeing aren't showing up in income strategies at all. They're happening in how teams are led, how decisions get made, how supporters are understood. Where leaders have created genuine permission to test, learn and stop - and where supporter insight goes beyond dashboards into real human understanding - the downstream impact on income can be substantial. These things often get labelled as culture. In practice, they function more like income constraints: address them, and other things start to move.
None of this is formulaic. What's working in one charity often doesn't translate directly to another - context, history and capability all shape where the real opportunities lie. The leaders navigating this well tend to be honest about their own specifics, rather than reaching for what worked elsewhere. We've found it helpful to think about this across nine broad levers of growth - from purpose and proposition through to people, systems and performance - not as a checklist, but as a way of seeing the whole inter-connected picture and making sharper choices about where to focus.
What those leaders also share is a habit of regularly taking stock. So as you head into the second half of the year (and inevitable budget planning!), here are three questions worth sitting with:
Are you focused on the right things? Not just what's urgent, but what will most shift your capacity for growth - and are those the same conversation?
Are the conditions in place? Before the next strategy or campaign, is your setup genuinely capable of delivering what you're asking of it?
Where is the real drag? Is it a product problem, an audience problem - or something in how you lead, decide and learn that's quietly limiting what's possible?
They're not comfortable questions. But the teams asking them and answering them honestly tend to be the ones delivering meaningful growth.
Drop me an email to hear more about the 9 levers (below), how they connect and how they help fundraising teams focus.
kevin@goodinnovation.co.uk
