Last month, the Charities Aid Foundation published a number I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Over the past decade, the UK charity sector has lost an average of 600,000 donors every single year. Not a bad year. Not a blip. Six hundred thousand people, every year, for ten years. The total giving shortfall that represents — compared to what those donors would have given if they'd stayed — is £12.4 billion. That's roughly equivalent to an entire year's worth of charitable giving in this country, simply gone.
And yet, when I talk to charity leaders, the conversation almost never starts there. It starts with the thing that's on fire this week.
I understand why. I've sat in enough charity leadership meetings to know that the distance between long-term strategic thinking and the immediate reality of a funding gap, an overdue grant report, or a board member asking an awkward question can feel insurmountable. You deal with what's in front of you. That's not weakness — that's survival. And in most cases, the short-term fix works. The fire goes out. You move on.
The problem is what happens in the background while you're doing it.
THE DEBT THAT NOBODY SEES
Every time a charity takes a quick technical fix to solve an immediate problem, it accrues what developers call technical debt. The term sounds abstract, but the reality is very concrete. It's the web page built in a hurry for one campaign that gets forgotten, left with a broken link and outdated information, quietly eroding the experience of every visitor who finds it. It's the CRM workaround that someone implemented one afternoon to handle this year's membership renewals, which then got embedded so deeply into how the team actually works that nobody remembers it was ever meant to be temporary.
Website debt accumulates slowly. Like damp in a wall, you usually don't notice it until something falls apart. A donor follows a link that goes nowhere. A page that was supposed to be removed three years ago still shows up in Google. The erosion is real, but it's gradual.
CRM debt is different. It moves faster and it bites harder — because a CRM workaround doesn't just sit in a system, it gets embedded in human behaviour. People build their working practices around it. It becomes load-bearing without anyone deciding it should be.
“The workaround stops being a workaround. It becomes the process.”
And then, one day, someone asks for what sounds like a simple thing. A new membership grade needs adding to the system. GDPR compliance requires capturing a new category of sensitive data. A funder wants a report that cuts across three different data fields. And suddenly the technical team is explaining, to a room full of people who just wanted a report, that the data was attached to the wrong record type two years ago. That fixing it now means restructuring the database. That in the meantime, there may be a GDPR exposure that needs addressing. That the simple request is going to cost five times what anyone expected, and take three times as long.
That’s the moment technical debt comes to collect. And it almost always arrives at the worst possible time.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
Total UK charitable giving in 2025, down from £15.4bn the previous year
%
of charities reporting higher demand for their services
%
of charity CEOs spending most of their time on short-term issues
Sources: CAF UK Giving Report 2026; CAF Charity Insights Report 2025.
Those three numbers tell a single story. Demand is rising. Income is falling. And the people responsible for navigating that gap are, by their own admission, mostly stuck in short-term mode.
The CAF data is clear that this isn't a temporary downturn. The decline in donors is structural — a decade-long shift driven by affordability pressures, rising disengagement, and a generation that no longer treats charitable giving as a default habit. The charities that are going to come through this in good shape are not the ones that respond to the crisis with more of the same. They're the ones that have built the underlying capability — the data, the digital infrastructure, the clean systems — that lets them understand their supporters, communicate with them effectively, and adapt when the environment changes.
And here’s the hard truth: you cannot build that capability in a crisis. The organisations that will have options in three years are mostly the ones making the right foundational investments now, even when there are more urgent things demanding attention. The ones that have been taking quick fixes for the past five years are discovering, right now, that their systems can’t do what they need them to do — and that fixing it is going to cost far more than it would have done if they’d addressed the debt when it was still small.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
The CAF report notes that the charities bucking this trend — the ones growing their income and donor base in a declining market — share a common characteristic. They have invested in the relationship. They understand their supporters. They have the data to know who is at risk of lapsing and when to reach out. They can tell an individual donor, with specificity, what their contribution has achieved.
None of that is possible without clean, well-structured systems behind it. And none of those systems stay clean on their own.
THERE IS A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT THIS
The ITIL 4 framework — the internationally recognised standard for managing digital services — includes a practice called Continual Improvement. Its premise is deceptively simple: improvement shouldn’t be a project you do when things break. It should be a regular rhythm, built into how the organisation operates.
The model asks seven questions in sequence and then starts again. Not because the work is never finished, but because the environment keeps changing. Donor expectations change. Funding requirements change. GDPR guidance changes. The system that was fit for purpose three years ago may not be fit for purpose today, and the only way to know is to ask.
| 01 | What is the vision? | Where do we want to be? Start with mission, goals and direction. |
| 02 | Where are we now? | Honest baseline assessment. What debt or gaps exist today? |
| 03 | Where do we want to be? | Set measurable targets tied to real outcomes. |
| 04 | How do we get there? | Build a practical improvement plan. Small steps, clear owners. |
| 05 | Take action | Execute the plan. Don't let good intentions stay on paper. |
| 06 | Did we get there? | Measure results against targets. Learn from what happened. |
| 07 | How do we keep the momentum going? | Feed insights into the next cycle. The loop restarts. |
ITIL 4 Continual Improvement model. Source: Axelos / PeopleCert. axelos.com
For most charities, this doesn’t need to be a formal programme. It can start with something much smaller: a quarterly conversation — not a project, just a conversation — where someone with technical knowledge sits with a senior leader and works through a single question. What are we working around right now, and what will it cost us if we leave it another year?
That question, asked regularly and honestly, is what separates organisations that stay ahead of their technical debt from those that don’t notice it until it’s become a crisis.
Six million fewer donors is a number that describes something that has already happened. What happens next depends on decisions being made right now, in organisations that are mostly too busy to make them.
That’s the part that keeps me up at night.