What fundraisers are thinking and feeling in 2025
Survey results are in!
Today’s article…
Is the big reveal of our 2025 reader survey!
What’s going well?
What are your biggest challenges?
Which biscuit can you not live without?
We’re excited to share the findings with you today. Big thanks to those of you who filled it out!
Have a super week,
Tony and Caroline
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What fundraisers are thinking and feeling in 2025
by Caroline Danks
Picture description - four women sat around a table in conversation
We like to take a sense check of our audience from time to time.
As a fundraising data geek, it’s fascinating, but also, it’s important for us to really understand where you’re at (so we can make sure that our articles actually support you in what you need).
So we asked a few questions of you, our wonderful Nest Egg readers.
100 of you answered (a very handy number for figuring out percentages and also, it gives the whole exercise a retro gameshow feel which we LOVE!)
Here are the results:
1. Your role
83% of you are fundraisers (including Heads of Fundraising and consultants)
13% of you are leaders (Director, CEO, trustee)
The remainder of you work in marketing, comms or finance.
2. What sort of fundraising do you do?
87% have trust fundraising as all or part of your role
Major gifts stands at 30% and individual giving is done by 29% of you
21% of you are doing corporate fundraising
Other types of income generation (corporate, commercial, events, legacies) accounted for less than 20% of your work
3. Topics for next year’s Nest Egg?
Sorted – with your brilliant help (thank you!)
You can read about our 2025 month by month content plan in this post.
Wins and fails
When it came to the next two questions, I was once again reminded of the huge variance of tasks, skills, joys and troubles we experience on the daily as non profit professionals.
Don’t forget to congratulate yourself for your adaptability and your multi-faceted capabilities.
What legends you are!
These questions allowed for free form writing. Whilst some of you wrote just one thing, others described multiple factors (and a few of you declined to answer at all).
So, what’s going well?
1. The top answer was that for 28% of you, fundraising is going well. You spoke of success with trusts, personal connections with supporters, a healthy pipeline of long-standing committed donors developed through great stewardship. GO YOU!
2. In a close second place, 27% of you wanted to shout about your ‘enthusiastic and passionate teams’ – both fundraising and operational colleagues who inspire and support you and who make going to work a joy.
3. Similarly, in third place (13%) was supportive and understanding leadership and not a micro-manager in sight. Hurrah!
4. In fourth place? 9% of you described how finding and maintaining a great work life balance is working well. You spoke of how taking care of yourself / taking regular breaks is helping you to be successful.
5. Finally, 7% of you cited the clarity which comes with a clear strategic plan, fundable projects and well evidenced impact as critical to your fundraising success
Other topics which came up included:
feeling a strong sense of purpose and connection to your charity’s mission,
joy in building new types of income (corporate, individual giving for a mention),
confidence in writing
how helpful new software / planning tools have been in streamlining your work and enabling collaboration.
Now for the doozies…
In answer to ‘What is your biggest challenge’, you didn’t hold back in listing all sorts of headaches.
1. Overwhelmingly the biggest challenge for 36% of you was the state of trust / grants fundraising. Many of you talked of the challenges of new business (and how demoralising it feels), the need to find new funders to replace those for whom you’re no longer eligible and the competitive nature of it all. Low success / conversion rates were mentioned a LOT.
2. In second place was a lack of resource / time with 20% of you struggling to keep up with workload. Some of you mentioned juggling multiple responsibilities and trying to do full time jobs on part time hours.
3. Next was a lack of a strategic plan, overall direction and focus – an issue for 8% of respondents. Hard agree – not a useful situation when you’re trying to bring the money in.
4. In fourth place was the old classic lack of understanding about fundraising – felt by 7% of you. It’s worth mentioning that unrealistic expectations, unwillingness to hear the truth about the current climate, silly targets, unsupportive trustees, short term thinking, risk aversion and slow decision making also got a mention.
5. In joint 5th was a frustration at the slow lead in times associated with new income streams and also mindset stuff relating to the current grant making climate (imposter syndrome and a lack of motivation were described).
Other things you’re finding hard right now include:
Feeling overwhelmed in a new role
Feeling distracted and lacking focus
Lack of confidence and feeling inexperienced
Pressure to secure larger, multi year grants
Organisational budget setting
Team stuff (instablility, changes in personnel, workflows needing attention, providing adequate support to team with multiple and diverse needs)
Cashflow, succession and sustainability
Most importantly though – what are your favourite biscuits?
Well firstly it was lovely to see diversity in your favourites across the biscuit sector. We had representation from Ireland, Germany and two shout outs for TimTams (all the way from Australia).
A lot of votes were cast for Fox’s Chocolate Cookies (who knew?), Jaffa Cakes, Shortbread (in various forms, chocolate chip, homemade…), Jammie Dodgers and Chocolate Digestives.
But overwhelmingly (and officially), the fundraisers biscuit of choice is the Chocolate Hobnob!
A strong choice.
We hope that these survey results are interesting to you. It’s nice to feel less alone.
Now go and eat a chocolate hobnob or two…
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