The honest podcast about running a small charity — for the 90% of the sector that everyone else seems to have forgotten.
You know the one. Senior leader of a national charity with a nine-figure income. Brilliant person, fascinating story — but the organisation they run looks nothing like yours.
Their campaign that raised £4 million. Their rebrand with a proper agency. Their comms team of twelve. Their fundraising director who used to work at Oxfam.
It’s the same in the textbooks. When Luke was training for his Chartered Institute of Fundraising diploma, he noticed that almost every case study — every worked example, every “here’s how it’s done” — featured the kinds of charities that most people in the room would never work at. The room was full of people running community projects, small housing charities, local arts organisations, mental health services with three staff. The examples were RNID, RNLI, Cancer Research.
The gap between what’s studied and what’s real is enormous. And it matters — because when the only available blueprint is built for organisations ten times your size, you either adapt it badly or give up entirely.
90% of charities in the UK are small organisations. They make up the majority of the sector, do some of the most important work in it, and are almost entirely absent from the conversation about how to run it well.
Bigger Slice exists to close that gap.
Bigger Slice is a podcast exclusively dedicated to the experience of running a small charity. Not inspiring stories about giant campaigns. Not expert advice that assumes you have a team. The real, honest, sometimes messy reality of keeping a small organisation alive, growing it sustainably, and doing meaningful work with limited resource.
We talk about fundraising — a lot — but we go wherever the conversation needs to go. How to hold onto volunteers. What it feels like to lead an organisation through a funding crisis. How to make the case for your impact when you don’t have an evaluation team. What good governance actually looks like when you’re also making the tea.
The format is loose by design. Sometimes it’s an interview. Sometimes it’s the founders thinking something through out loud. Sometimes it’s an opinion piece that needed to be said. What it’s always about is the bigger slice of the sector — and how they deserve more: more money, more attention, more examples, more of everything.
18 June 2026 · Katie Potter
In this episode of Bigger Slice, we dig into the realities of funding a small charity that looks, from the outside, like it must be “sorted” because it sits alongside a major heritage asset. Spoiler: It's not always as it seems.
Find Bigger Slice on Spotify or YouTube — subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Bigger Slice isn’t only for listening. We want to talk to the people actually running small charities — not about them from a distance, and not through the lens of organisations ten times your size.
If you’re leading a small charity and have something worth saying — a hard lesson, an unexpected win, a funding crisis you survived, a question you can’t stop turning over — we’d love to hear from you.
You don’t need to be polished. You don’t need a comms team or a rehearsed story. You just need to be honest about what it’s really like to do this work. That’s the whole point of the show.
Raiser is a free service for small charities — built to help them raise more money, with less of the process that makes grant fundraising so painful.
We started this podcast for the same reason we built Raiser: because small charities deserve better tools, better infrastructure, and a bigger share of the conversation. If you’ve found us through the podcast and want to know what Raiser does, you can find out below.
