Buried in the CAF UK Giving 2026 report is a figure that’s been prompting a sharp intake of breath in fundraising circles. Only 3% of donors said an email from a charity prompted their last donation! Meanwhile, the report shows Word of mouth from a friend or family member delivered 17%. Cue the hot takes: “email is dead”, “stop sending email appeals”, “move everything to social”…
It’s worth pausing before you update the strategy deck.
The CAF question only measures what prompted the last donation, not what made it possible. Those are different things. A supporter who has been receiving your impact updates for six months, reading your stories, watching your beneficiaries on social media, and quietly forming a view that your charity does exactly what it says it does, may well get the final nudge to donate because a colleague mentions your appeal in passing – and it’s that final nudge that gets the attribution. The six months of relationship-building gets nothing. Last-touch attribution is a misleading lens through which to judge any single channel.
The more interesting question is what the 3% figure actually tells you about the state of most charity email programmes. Because there is a version of it this that is genuinely concerning, and it looks like this:
A list built up over years, rarely cleaned, minimally segmented, and used primarily to ask for money.
Supporters may have received nothing from the charity until a campaign needs to go out. GDPR prompted a flurry of “we’ve updated our privacy policy” re-permission activity a few years ago, but many organisations ran that campaign, trimmed the list slightly, and then resumed exactly the same comms patterns. The consent got tidier; the messaging, relationship, & engagement did not change.
There is also the context of how email arrives to be considered, versus how social media content arrive. Email interrupts. It lands in a tray full of other competing demands, often when the recipient’s mind is in “task mode”. Social media, whatever its flaws, reaches people who are in a receptive, browsing state, open to having their attention caught. A friend sharing that they have just donated, accompanied by a story of impact, lands in that context. It carries the weight of social endorsement too – someone using their own reputation to say “this matters to me”. The signal is weaker from an email that cost a charity next-to-nothing to send, and recipients know it.
None of this means email is the wrong tool. It means the question worth asking is: what is your email programme actually doing for your supporters between asks? Do they hear from you with stories, with outcomes, meaningful/useful information… with reasons to feel proud of giving you support? And, crucially, when someone donates, does anything happen next that makes them more likely to tell a friend?
Word of mouth does not magically manufacture itself. It grows from a foundational combination of trust, emotional connection, and a supporter who feels genuinely informed and engaged. The last nudge may be a CTA but email, done well, is one of the best tools available for building all three foundations to make the final nudge more successful.
The charities seeing 3% are, quite likely, only emailing when they need something. The ones doing it better are giving something before they ask – and turning donors into advocates who do the rest of the work for them.
The question for most organisations is less “which channel” and more: does your donor journey, across every touchpoint, give someone a reason to stay close, stay proud, and eventually tell someone else?