A different way to find, assess, and fund the work that matters.
Applications have increased 400% in five years. Approval rates have fallen to 6%. Every funder is drowning in the same broken process — and so are the charities on the other end of it.
You already know some of this. That’s why you’re here.
Applications are up 400% in five years. Approval rates have fallen to 6%. Every foundation, every trust, every giving programme repeats the same due diligence — assessing organisations that have been assessed dozens of times elsewhere. And at the end of all that effort, £726 million is spent on unsuccessful applications in the UK alone every year — charity staff time, funder overhead, and capacity burned on bids that never succeed.
The consequences go further than wasted time and money. When the overhead of giving is this high, funding flows towards the organisations that are easiest to assess at scale — the larger, more established charities with professional fundraisers and polished applications. 92% of charitable income goes to just 13.5% of organisations.
The other 86.5%? The ones keeping communities alive from the inside — often doing the most important work of all. The ones hardest to find, hardest to assess, and hardest to fund well.
This isn’t a funding gap. It’s an infrastructure failure.
400%
Increase in grant applications in the last five years
6%
Average application approval rate
92%
Of charitable income goes to just 13.5% of organisations
They’re not the ones you see on TV. They don’t have a fundraising team. Often they don’t have a website worth looking at.
But they’re inside people’s lives in ways that larger organisations simply cannot reach. They’re in the church hall on a Wednesday evening. They’re the outreach worker who knows every family on the estate. The community garden that gives an elderly person somewhere to belong. The youth club that keeps a teenager off the street on a Friday night. The small mental health service that already knows your name when you walk through the door.
These organisations are irreplaceable. They do the work closest to need, at the smallest scale, with the least resource — and they do it with a depth of local knowledge and human connection that no national charity can replicate.
They’re also — under the current system — the most expensive organisations to fund. A small grant to a small charity generates the same due diligence overhead as a large grant to a large one. Without shared infrastructure, the economics push funders towards bigger organisations and bigger grants. Not because the work is better — because the process makes small-scale giving prohibitively costly.
The result is a sector that talks constantly about unrestricted funding, trust-based philanthropy, and reaching underserved communities — but whose infrastructure has never made that possible at scale.
Raiser changes the economics. When due diligence is done once and shared across the sector, the cost of funding small organisations falls dramatically. What was previously prohibitive becomes viable. The funders who want to back the work closest to need — and always have — finally have the infrastructure to do it.
Leave your details and we’ll be in touch to book a demo — no sales pitch, just a conversation about your grants programme.
One reason small charities are hard to compare and assess is that there’s never been a shared language for impact. Every funder has their own framework. Every charity describes their work differently. The same mentoring programme might appear as “youth intervention”, “early prevention”, “community support”, or “pastoral care” — depending on who’s writing the form.
Raiser solves this at the infrastructure level.
Charities on Raiser describe their work in their own words. The Open Impact Standard — designed by Beckie Denny, Raiser’s co-founder and evaluation specialist — maps that description to a shared taxonomy of activities, outputs, and outcomes. Charities don’t learn a new language. The system translates for them.
The result: a common, searchable, comparable record of impact across thousands of organisations. Five hundred charities working with young people in Manchester can be found, compared, and assessed side by side — because they’re all mapped to the same underlying standard.
Crucially, this standard is community-built. Every charity that joins enriches it. Every funder that uses it helps shape it.
You’re not buying access to a database. You’re contributing to the sector’s shared impact infrastructure — a verified ledger of outcomes that grows more valuable with every organisation that participates, and that cannot be reconstructed retroactively by any new entrant.
We want funders to be active partners in developing the Open Impact Standard. If you have a view on how impact should be measured in your area of giving, we want to hear it.
Launching June 2026 — we’re onboarding funders now.
Raiser gives you a dedicated agent that understands your giving priorities and works on your behalf across the full grants lifecycle.
Funder Agent — conversation surfacing a mission-fit charity (coming soon)
Tell your agent what you fund — the causes, geographies, and kinds of work that matter to your programme. It searches across Raiser’s growing network of verified organisations and surfaces the ones most likely to create the impact you’re looking for.
No speculative inbox. No application pile. Just the organisations worth your attention — including the small, harder-to-find ones doing the most important work.
Every charity on Raiser builds an Impact Story™ — a verified, structured profile of their work, their people, their evidence, and their outcomes. Charities build it once. Any funder can read it. No bespoke forms. No duplicate submissions.
You can mandate your applicants to submit their Impact Story™ in place of your existing application form — simplifying your intake process and giving you richer, more comparable data from day one.
From first contact through to final report — decisions, payments, grant conditions, reporting milestones, and outcome updates. The whole relationship, tracked and searchable, in one place.
Impact Stories are living documents. Charities update them as their work progresses. You see outcomes as they happen — not twelve months after the grant closes.
Charges per seat, per tier, or per feature. Tells you how many applications you processed. Doesn’t tell you whether any of them made an impact. Your applicants are still writing bespoke forms from scratch. The cost sits on their side of the ledger, invisible — and the economics keep pushing your money towards the organisations with the slickest bids.
More bids, faster. Which means more applications for your team to review at lower average quality. Both sides investing in opposite ends of the same broken system. Volume increases. Understanding of impact falls further. The charities closest to need — the ones without a bid writer — lose out even more.
The only two-sided service connecting funders and charities on shared infrastructure. Free for charities — so the whole sector can participate, not just the ones who can afford tools. Value-based pricing for funders — so cost scales with impact, not with seat count. A community-built impact standard that gets richer with every organisation that joins. And a way, finally, to fund the small, vital, hard-to-reach organisations that the current system leaves behind.
“Raiser has the potential to reform an inequitable system that gets in the way of brilliant, impactful work.”
Raiser is designed around a set of principles that we think represent the best of modern grant-making. If these resonate with how you want to give, you’re in the right place.
Impact evidence and ongoing relationship, rather than compliance theatre and annual reports nobody reads.
Find the organisations doing the most important work — including the ones who’d never write a speculative application — rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Trust charities to know how to spend money on their mission, with the continuity to plan beyond a single grant cycle.
The infrastructure to fund dozens of small organisations without drowning in process — because the work closest to need deserves the resources to sustain it.
Every funder that uses Raiser contributes to the shared impact infrastructure the whole sector benefits from. You’re not just managing a grants programme. You’re helping build something the sector has needed for a long time.
If this is the kind of funder you are — or the kind you want to become — we’d love to talk.
Raiser isn’t a concept — it’s live. Before the platform was formally built, two charities paid for a manually simulated version for eight months. One of them won a £240,000 grant using it.
£240,000
Core grant with the Raiser approach
“We're seeing a massive increase in our capacity to win funding.”
Simon Wallwork, Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust
“Raiser has the potential to reform an inequitable system that gets in the way of brilliant, impactful work.”
Kate Symondson, The Symondson Foundation
Most grant management software charges a flat subscription regardless of how much you actually give. We think that misaligns incentives.
Raiser charges 1.5% of your annual grant-making. No application limits. No feature tiers. No per-seat charges. The more you give, the more you contribute to the shared infrastructure that makes giving work for everyone.
| You give per year | Raiser per year (ex-VAT) |
|---|---|
| £50,000 | £750 |
| £100,000 | £1,500 |
| £250,000 | £3,750 |
| £500,000 | £7,500 |
| £1,000,000+ | Let’s talk |
Full pricing breakdown, VAT details, and comparison with alternatives →
Tell us a little about your giving — the kind of funding you provide, the organisations you’re trying to reach, and what’s frustrating about the way the process works today. We’ll be in touch to book a demo.
