Charities are teaching a generation that they're powerless.
In 2025 just 55 per cent of UK adults gave to charity, down from 69 per cent a decade ago. Among 16 to 24 year olds only 36 per cent gave last year, against 52 per cent in 2019. Ask them why and, alongside affordability, they say they were not interested, did not think about it, or were never asked. That last answer should stop the sector cold, because being unasked is not a mystery to be solved. It is a decision the industry has made, campaign by campaign.
It matters because of what sits underneath it. The pollster James Kanagasooriam argues that agency, the felt sense that you have real choice and control over how your life turns out, is becoming one of the defining fault lines in our culture, and that around a quarter of the public now feel they have very little of it. The people who feel it least are the young. Set that beside the giving figures and the overlap stops looking like a coincidence, because the generation with the weakest sense of control is also the one walking away from charity fastest.
Now look at how charities ask that generation to give. Most fundraising still runs on a single formula: show suffering, make it as unbearable as possible, and offer one move, three pounds a month to make the feeling stop. It works on older donors who have always given this way. But to someone who already feels powerless, an appeal built on guilt and helplessness does not inspire, it confirms what they already suspect about the world and pushes them further away. The formula was built for a generation that trusted institutions and answered the door, and it is being aimed at one that does neither.
Part of the reason charities keep making that campaign is that the whole trade looks backwards. The sector models what supporters did last time and builds the next campaign to repeat it, but young people have almost no giving history, so the data barely sees them, and fundraisers keep optimising for the people already on the file, which is to say the people already ageing out. It is a machine that is very good at measuring the past and almost silent on what is moving people now.
The alternative is not a softer ask, it is a smarter one, and agency is the idea that holds it together. In a campaign, agency means the audience has real choices to make and can feel the result of making them. In practice that means letting people choose where their money goes and then showing them what it did, this well, this classroom, this legal case, rather than a vague line about helping a community. It means offering supporters something to do beyond paying, whether that is campaigning, organising, lending a skill or simply turning up, because younger people in particular want to be inside the story rather than seated in the audience for it. And it means being open about the hard parts, the overheads and the failures and the money that did not work, because a low-trust generation reserves its loyalty for the organisations willing to treat it as capable of a real decision.
The same logic runs the other way too, towards the people charities exist to help. The pity shot, the outstretched hand and the passive recipient waiting to be rescued, is agency denial turned into a fundraising technique, and it has been the sector's default for the better part of forty years. A campaign that strips agency from the person on the poster tends to strip it from the donor as well, because both sit inside the same story, the one where the person being helped is helpless and the donor is a hero with a bank card. Turn the frame so that the people a charity serves appear as capable agents in their own lives, and the offer to the audience changes with it, from rescue to partnership and from saviour to backer, which is both truer to the way change actually happens and a good deal more durable.
None of this is the easy option. Agency-rich campaigns are harder to make and harder to measure, and they will not always beat a well-tuned guilt appeal on this quarter's conversion test. But that test is scored against a shrinking, ageing base, and winning it reliably is precisely how the sector is managing to lose. At their best, charities are in the business of showing people that what they do changes the world, which is the most powerful thing anyone could offer a generation starved of agency. Right now too many are offering the opposite.
Give people the wheel. I think they will drive further than we expect.
