Why Small Charities? Raise Your Hands | Supporting Small Charities

Why Small Charities?

Small charities often work locally, so they understand the specific challenges faced. They’re better positioned to build relationships in the community, and help those hardest to reach.

Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they don’t do work with real impact.

Bigger isn’t always better

Small charities are specialists, working in a particular field like HIV or suicide prevention. That means they’re experts in what they do. Because they’re small they can work quickly and responsively to needs without the bureaucracy and politics of larger organisations.

Small charities often work locally, so they understand the specific challenges faced. They’re better positioned to build relationships in the community, and help those hardest to reach.

Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they don’t do work with real impact.

The challenges
small charities face

Small charities don’t have big marketing budgets and teams to reach lots of people. This means they have limited access to funds.

It also means small charities rely on larger pots of money from a small number of sources (major donors or grants). If just one of these falls through it can put a big hole in their budget. This makes income unpredictable and business planning difficult.

Other reasons small charities struggle

  • the money that they do raise is often restricted to work that helps people. Money to run the business on a day to day business can be hard to come e.g. budget to hire staff. Which actually makes the charity less good at helping people in the long run
  • the application process for grants is time intensive and success uncertain
  • the UK has seen a decline in the trust in charities, making fund raising more difficult, even for highly 
effective organisations

At Raise Your Hands, we support great charities by providing sustainable, unrestricted funding

Other benefits

The Raise Your Hands model

  • Raising funds and awareness frees the charities up to spend more time on their vital programme work
  • Working with lots of charities allows us to pick and choose the best to maximise impact
  • We can support a wide range of innovative work in different areas across the UK