What are your charity’s New Year’s resolutions for 2026?

Drawing on insights from thousands of charities, Ben highlights three key priorities for 2026: tackling growing fundraising pressures through smarter income strategies, strengthening impact and visibility through better communications, and protecting staff wellbeing with sustainable, flexible ways of working.

Here at DSC, we support tens of thousands of charities every year, with everything from leadership training to funding databases, and from the countless conversations, meetings and enquiries we’ve received towards the end of 2025, it’s clear that LOTS of charities are focusing on three main areas of improvement for 2026.

Tackling income and fundraising pressures

For most organisations, 2026 will bring more competition for grants and contracts, donors watching their own budgets, and less room for error in fundraising. That means revisiting your income mix, testing new fundraising approaches and being more strategic about where you put precious time and energy.

DSC’s fundraising training, conferences and books can help you build or refresh a coherent fundraising strategy that matches your capacity and ambition. Funds Online gives you access to over 8,000 funders with the potential to give billions, helping you find realistic prospects instead of spending evenings trawling random websites. Used together, these tools can help you diversify income and open up new funding sources in a structured way.

Boosting external impact and visibility

When times are tough, cutting back on communications and marketing can feel like the obvious saving – but it often makes fundraising and influencing even harder. Strong storytelling, clear messages and a confident digital presence are critical to demonstrating your impact to funders, supporters and partners.

DSC offers training, books and events on marketing, communications, social media and reporting, helping you sharpen how you talk about your work and evidence your value. If you need something more tailored, DSC trainers can design in-house workshops for your team, focused on your audiences, your channels and your real-world capacity. Find out more about our in house services and get in touch here.

Protecting and improving staff wellbeing

None of this is sustainable if the people doing the work are exhausted, anxious or burning out. Many charities are exploring more flexible working, including four-day weeks, alongside better policies, practical wellbeing reviews and realistic learning and development plans. Done well, these changes can improve retention, morale and performance – done badly, they can simply add confusion or more pressure

DSC has been at the forefront of experimenting with new ways of working, including moving to a four-day week, and shares learning through blogs, training and other resources on wellbeing, remote working and flexible practice. You can draw on this experience through courses, publications and consultancy support to design policies and no-fuss L&D plans that actually help your people thrive, not just survive. You can find out more about our personnel-focused support here, and read about our 4-day week (or 3-day weekend!) here.