Not tweaking it. Rebuilding it — with the people it's failed the most.
The Raiserlution is Raiser's commitment to something bigger than a product: a movement to make funding faster, fairer, and more human.
That’s how much the UK alone burns through unsuccessful grant applications every year. Funders spending months reviewing them. Charities spending weeks writing them. Most of which end in a no.
The average small charity spends 38% of its grant income just on applying for grants. Not delivering services. Not changing lives. Filling in forms.
We don’t have a funding shortage. We have a power imbalance dressed up as a process.
The grant application process was broken long before large language models existed. The forms, the duplication, the power imbalance — none of that is new. What’s new is that a significant technological moment has arrived, and the sector deserves a thoughtful response to it.
Most of what’s happened so far has been the wrong response: bolt AI onto the charity side of an already broken system, produce more applications faster, watch approval rates fall further. The arms race nobody wins. Our belief — manifesto point 05 — is that the solution isn’t better forms. It’s no forms. AI is what makes that structurally possible for the first time.
We also take seriously the legitimate concerns the sector has about how AI gets built and who it serves. Energy use. Data sovereignty. Dependence on a handful of US tech companies with values that don’t align with ours. These aren’t abstract worries — they’re real, and we think about them constantly. Our direction of travel is towards self-hosted, open-source models on UK infrastructure — not because it’s easy, but because we think it matters. How we build and our tech stack explain where we are and where we’re headed.
James Poulter, one of Raiser’s non-executive directors and one of the UK’s most prominent voices on responsible AI adoption, helps make sure we stay honest about this.
These are the principles behind everything we build.
Our communities are held together by millions of daily acts of generosity — time, money, expertise freely given to educate, heal, protect, and empower. This is charity. Raiser exists to make it easier.
When small charities receive adequate, sustained income, they are the most efficient organisations for addressing society's deepest needs. We build for these unsung heroes — because no-one else does.
Nothing else is worth getting out of bed for. Everything we build is designed to make difficult things easier, stupid things smarter, and to smash the barriers that good people face as they try to solve the world's problems.
We don't have a funding shortage — we have a power imbalance. There's enough money to go round. We exist to make the transaction between those who hold it and those who use it more equitable, by building foundational trust on both sides.
AI-drafted bids have simply shone a spotlight on how absurd the traditional grant application already was. The solution isn't better forms. It's no forms. It's time for a fundamental rethink of how money gets to where it's needed.
300 words or 300 characters? With spaces or without? Does-this-count-as-one-word? It's absurd. And it needs to stop. We welcome funding partners who want to give small charities headspace, not headaches.
A gift creates freedom. A grant creates dependence. Real philanthropy trusts expertise instead of controlling outcomes, backs people instead of projects, and supports the rule-breakers who refuse to play by the rules of broken systems.
And that's fine. We have opinions about the things that are making life hard for small charities — and we'll say them out loud. If you disagree, let's move on. If you agree, let's collaborate.
The paradigm needs an urgent redesign — but it won't change overnight. We're here until it does. No quick exit. No VC-fuelled growth-and-dump. Just slowly building something that serves the sector, for good.
We think out loud. Here’s what’s on our minds.
The pattern is always the same. The Industrial Revolution promised an end to physical drudgery, but workers just found themselves in factories working longer…
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Read piece →The podcast about the reality of running a small charity.
Not another panel of sector experts from the big names. Not another roundtable where everyone agrees. Bigger Slice is about the real, unglamorous, occasionally maddening experience of leading a small charity — from the people actually doing it.
The sector runs on passion, goodwill, and caffeine. We think it deserves a proper seat at the table. This is that table.
In this episode of Bigger Slice, we dig into the realities of funding a small charity that looks, from the outside, l...
The Raiserlution isn’t something we’re doing to the sector. It’s something we’re building with it.
Every charity that joins makes the case that there’s a better way. You get a powerful, free fundraising service. We get another voice in the movement.
Right now, information about funders is scattered, outdated, and paywalled. We’re changing that — by letting every Raiser user contribute to a shared, community-maintained database of funding opportunities.
When you add a funder to your pipeline, you can share it with every other charity on Raiser. The more people contribute, the better it gets — for everyone.
This isn’t a commercial directory. It’s a public good, built by the sector, for the sector.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: there are probably hundreds of charities in your city doing similar work to yours. Youth mentoring. Food distribution. Mental health support. But because every charity describes what it does differently, and every funder asks about it differently, that knowledge is invisible.
We’re building a shared taxonomy — a community-built library of activities, outcomes, and impact — that lets charities describe their work in a common language. When you set up a project on Raiser, you’re contributing to it. Over time, it becomes a map of what civil society actually does: searchable, comparable, and impossible to fake.
It starts with something as simple as: “What kind of activity are you running?” → “Mentoring — did you mean this?” Yes. Now that’s connected to every other mentoring charity on the platform, and every funder looking for mentoring programmes.
This is how we build evidence, at scale, that the sector can own.
“As a trust-based funder and champion of grassroots and small charities, I feel frustrated by the funder-fuelled norms of application processes and impact reporting. Raiser is a much needed leveller and has the potential to reform an inequitable system that gets in the way of facilitating brilliant, impactful work.”
Kate Symondson
The Symondson Foundation
Raiser was built by two people who have spent their careers inside this sector — on different sides of the same broken problem.
Luke Wilkinson is a fundraiser and former charity CEO who spent 18 years inside the sector wishing the tools were better. He grew a youth mentoring charity from £45,000 to £300,000 in turnover over eight years — then watched it close in 2023 due to funding failure.
Not because the work wasn’t good. Because the system for connecting good work to money is broken by design. He built Raiser because he couldn’t find what he needed, and he was tired of watching good organisations exhaust themselves on paperwork.
Beckie Denny is an impact evaluation specialist who has spent her career helping charities prove their worth to funders — and watching funders make decisions based on paperwork rather than evidence.
She built a national impact evaluation framework for the 1851 Trust that was adopted by the UK Department for Transport as a national standard. Named Social Entrepreneur of the Year at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards in both 2024 and 2025.
Together, they cover both ends of the same broken system. Luke knows why charities can’t access funding. Beckie knows why funders can’t find the organisations most worth funding. Raiser exists because they both know the answer isn’t a better application form — it’s replacing the infrastructure underneath.
We’re backed by sector insiders — trustees, funder CEOs, evaluation specialists, and fundraising thought leaders — who understand this problem from the inside and are tired of watching good money go to waste.
We’re not neutral observers. We’re participants. We’ve been there. And we’re not leaving until it’s fixed.
Join the charities already raising more — and the movement making sure the next generation of small charities doesn’t have to fight this hard for every penny.
