Around 75% of UK companies provide no charitable support of any kind, according to the Corporate Giving Report 2025 (Charities Aid Foundation). What giving does exist is heavily concentrated among large corporates, with a small number of FTSE firms accounting for a disproportionate share of total corporate philanthropy.
The challenge, in our experience working with finance firms and asset managers across the UK, isn’t willingness — it’s structure. And the same handful of structural failures appear again and again.
1. There’s no structured strategy — just a collection of moments
A Christmas charity raffle. An annual volunteering day. A donation in response to a disaster appeal.
These aren’t bad things. But they’re not a corporate giving programme — they’re a collection of moments. And they rarely move the needle on what most companies actually want: a genuine culture of social impact that employees feel proud of and clients notice.
CAF research is clear on this: companies with structured corporate giving strategies are associated with higher overall contributions and greater employee participation than those without formal programmes. Yet most firms — particularly smaller ones — never get past the ad hoc stage.
A structured programme doesn’t need to be complex. For a 30–50 person finance firm, it means:
- An annual giving strategy agreed at leadership level, with employee input
- A defined budget (1% of pre-tax profit is a widely cited benchmark, though the right figure varies by firm size and maturity)
- Clear ownership — a named person or small committee, not a responsibility distributed across whoever has time
- Quarterly check-ins on participation and impact
- An annual review that feeds into the following year’s plan
A one-page strategy and a clear calendar of touchpoints is enough to create the consistency that builds culture over time.
2. Nobody owns it
Structure without ownership is just documentation.
In many firms, CSR responsibilities are added to existing roles — HR, office management, executive support — meaning delivery becomes inconsistent and deprioritised whenever the day job gets busy. The Road Ahead 2025 report (NCVO) highlights a broader sector-wide issue of limited capacity and resource constraints, reinforcing how quickly programmes stall without dedicated ownership.
This is one of the most common things we hear from finance firms: “We keep failing every time we try to organise something ourselves.” It’s not a motivation problem. It’s a resource and accountability problem.
Dedicated ownership doesn’t mean a full-time hire. It means one person with protected time, a clear remit and visible senior support — or an external partner who handles the operational delivery so the internal coordinator isn’t doing it alone.
3. The giving mix is too narrow
Corporate philanthropy is evolving. The Corporate Giving Report 2025 (CAF) reports a shift in corporate giving behaviour, with companies increasingly balancing cash donations, in-kind support and structured engagement programmes.
Yet many firms default to a single channel — usually a one-off donation or a single annual volunteering day — and wonder why it doesn’t gain traction.
The highest-engagement programmes combine multiple giving channels:
Match giving is one of the most consistently effective and underused tools. When companies match employee donations pound for pound, participation rates increase significantly. The psychology is straightforward: employees feel their personal contribution matters, and the impact doubles at relatively low cost to the company. Many firms don’t offer it at all; those that do often wrap it in so much process that staff don’t bother.
Payroll giving allows employees to donate directly from gross salary before tax — meaning a £10 donation costs a basic rate taxpayer around £8. Uptake in the UK remains low relative to the US, largely because it’s poorly communicated rather than because employees don’t want to give.
Skills-based volunteering — where employees contribute professional expertise rather than time — is typically more valuable to small charities and more engaging for finance professionals than generic manual tasks.
4. The charity partner isn’t right
There’s a meaningful difference between donating to a well-known national charity and building a genuine partnership with a smaller organisation where your contribution has real leverage.
A £5,000 donation to a major national charity may represent a rounding error to them — and will feel like one to your staff. The same amount to a grassroots charity serving your local community can fund an entire project, generate direct staff involvement, and create a story worth telling.
When selecting a charity partner, the criteria that matter most:
- Size relative to your contribution — will your support be meaningful to them?
- Geographic relevance — is there a connection to where your staff live and work?
- Cause alignment — does it connect to something your employees genuinely care about?
- Capacity for partnership — can they accommodate volunteering, not just donations?
- Governance and safeguarding standards — smaller isn’t automatically better; due diligence is essential
Charity due diligence takes time and requires knowing what to look for. It’s one of the areas where working with an experienced intermediary protects both the company and the cause.
5. Impact is never communicated
Ask most employees what their company’s charitable giving achieved last year. They won’t know.
Companies donate, volunteer, match-give — and then communicate nothing about what it produced. The result is that the programme feels performative, even when it isn’t. Staff disengage. The coordinator struggles to justify next year’s budget.
Good impact communication doesn’t require a 40-page ESG report. It needs three things: a specific number (hours volunteered, people reached, funds raised), a human story (one person, one charity, one outcome in their own words), and a connection back to the team — “Your 120 hours of pro bono support helped this charity expand its service by 30%.”
For finance firms navigating increasing scrutiny around ESG and ethical investing, documented community impact is also a business asset — supporting recruitment narratives, investor relations and client conversations as institutional investors increasingly ask about a firm’s values in practice, not just on paper.
What firms that get it right have in common
The companies that build corporate giving programmes that last share a few things: they started with their people, not a charity shortlist. They built in flexibility from the start. They measured and communicated impact honestly. And they treated it as an ongoing commitment, not a project.
None of this is complicated. But it does require intention — and the honest acknowledgement that running an effective programme alongside a demanding day job is genuinely hard.
About Raise Your Hands Partners
Raise Your Hands Partners works with finance firms, asset managers and private equity houses across the UK to design corporate giving programmes that employees genuinely engage with. We handle the charity due diligence, employee engagement structure and impact reporting — so the person who was handed this as a side project isn’t doing it alone.
If your firm has been meaning to get this right, or has tried before and found it harder than expected, we’d be glad to talk.
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