In September, Equitable Philanthropy and EP Law is back with Faith, Finances and Fundraising, our webinar (with The Education Network) for faith-based organisations on managing donations, bequests and deductibility.

Since our last webinar in 2025, I didn’t think they’d be many changes, how wrong was I!

Kirstie Le Lievre, our Senior Lawyer at EP Law, helped me to update our extensive white paper and materials and we’re looking forward to the webinar on 7 September. Let us know if you’re joining us!

Two changes we wanted to flag here: a change to the deductibility threshold, which has shifted the micro-donation landscape and recent cases illuminate an ever-practical lens to will interpretation by the courts.

Every so often a change to the tax law gets a run in the media, and the version that reaches the pews is not quite the version that made it into the legislation. The removal of the $2 minimum for tax-deductible donations is a textbook example, and it is where we will start. The question has already landed on our desk: “So does this mean our church offerings are now tax deductible?”

The short answer is no. The longer answer is worth a few minutes to help protect your religious organisation.

What actually changed

From 1 July 2026, the long-standing rule that a gift had to be $2 or more before a donor could claim a deduction is gone. That floor had been in place since 1927, so its quiet removal is a genuine piece of history.

In plain terms, there is no longer a minimum dollar amount standing between a donor and a deduction.

What did not change, and this is the part that matters

Here is the point we cannot stress enough. Removing the $2 floor did not make more gifts deductible. It only removed a threshold that applied to gifts that were already deductible in the first place, that is, gifts to an endorsed deductible gift recipient, or DGR.

Ordinary church giving was never deductible, and it still isn’t. If I place $50 in the offering on Sunday, that gift is generally not tax deductible. That remains true even if the church is a registered charity, even if it is income tax exempt, even if the money funds vital ministry, and even if I am handed a receipt.

The reason catches a lot of people out. Being registered as a charity with the ACNC and being endorsed as a DGR are two different things. “Advancing religion” is a charitable purpose, but it is not a category the law allows for DGR endorsement. The ATO’s position has not shifted: a deduction requires the recipient to hold DGR status.

So where does the change actually help?

If your church operates, or gives through, a DGR fund, think of a school building fund, a public benevolent institution arm, or a necessitous circumstances fund, then the removal of the floor is useful.

The small gifts that used to fall below $2, the tap-and-go donation, the app round-up, the loose change, are now deductible where they go to that fund. As giving goes digital, that is a real, if modest, benefit.

The practical task is to make sure your receipting and your giving platforms keep the deductible stream, the DGR fund, clearly separate from the non-deductible stream, the general offering. The change is a good prompt to check that they do, and to make sure nobody starts marking tithes as deductible on the strength of a headline.

2025 cases reveal the courts’ practical leaning to interpreting wills

There is a second area where good intentions and the legal position part ways, and two decisions from 2025 put it in sharp relief. What happens when a gift left to a church can no longer be used the way the donor intended?

The instinct is understandable. Circumstances change, a project stalls, a building falls into disrepair, and the temptation is simply to move the money to where it is needed now. But a restricted charitable gift is not the church’s to redirect at will. There is a doctrine with an old French name, cy-près, meaning roughly “as near as possible”, that allows a court to apply the gift to a purpose close to the donor’s original intention. It applies only where the donor had a general charitable intention, and ordinarily only with the court’s blessing.

In Wesley Community Services Ltd (trading as Wesley Mission) v Smith, a property that had been left for respite care had deteriorated over some thirty years to the point where using it for that purpose was no longer practical. The Court did not let the gift fail, and it did not let the charity quietly repurpose it either. It found a general charitable intention to help those in need, and approved a scheme to sell the property and direct the proceeds to four existing Wesley Mission programs. A faith-based charity, on facts a great many churches will recognise.

Another interesting case law update was in Re AM McClelland Estate, where a 1961 will had set up a trust for an art gallery on the condition that the public be admitted free of charge. By 2025 that very condition had made the gallery financially unsustainable. The Court approved a scheme that allowed admission fees and gave the trustees broader powers, while carefully preserving the core restriction that protected the underlying property. Relief, but not a blank cheque.

What both cases tell us is encouraging and cautionary in equal measure. Encouraging, because the modern test for relief is more flexible than the old one. A court can now act where the original purpose has ceased to be a “suitable and effective” way of using the gift, rather than only where it has become strictly impossible. Cautionary, because the path still runs through the donor’s intention and, ordinarily, a court, not through a board resolution. A church holding an older restricted bequest, perhaps funds left decades ago for a specific facility that can no longer viably proceed, should take advice before it acts, not after.

The thread that ties it together

Whether it is a $2 rule that grabbed a headline or a bequest written a lifetime ago, the same principle holds. What a gift feels like it should do, and what the law allows it to do, are not always the same thing. The organisations that manage this well are the ones that ask the question early, before the receipt is issued or the funds are moved.

Join us on 7 September

This article is a small sample of a very comprehensive session we are running with The Education Network.

If donations, bequests and deductibility are live questions for your organisation, we would love to see you at our webinar, Faith, Finances and Fundraising: Managing Donations, Bequests and Deductibility, on Monday 7 September 2026, 11am AEST (10.30am SA and NT, 9am WA).

I will cover:

• honouring donor intent;

• the tax treatment of tithes;

• offerings and designated gifts; and

• when a church can and cannot issue a deductible receipt.

PLUS Lawyers and advisers can claim 1 CPD unit!

Full details and registration are here: https://www.tved.net.au/live-webinars/lbfsep26/live-webinar-faith-finances-and-fundraising-managing-donations-bequests-and

This article is general information, not legal advice. For advice on your organisation’s specific circumstances, please get in touch with Senior Lawyer Kirstie (kirstie@eplaw.co) or Catherine (catherine@eplaw.co) for EP Law’s dedicated legal advice for charities, funders and purpose-led organisations.

A month ago, EP Law opened its doors as the specialist legal practice for philanthropy, charities and impact, led by our Senior Lawyer, Kirstie. This week Kirstie gave our advisory council an excellent update on how that first month has gone, and the numbers, and the stories behind them, are worth sharing.

Why we built EP Law

Equitable Philanthropy has always sat in the middle of the philanthropic marketplace, advising both charities and funders rather than picking a side. EP Law extends that same thinking into legal work. Charities and funders alike are too often priced out of specialist advice on governance, structuring and partnerships, and we saw an opportunity to close that gap with legal support that understands the sector from the inside, and is priced so that the organisations doing the work can actually access it.

The first month, in numbers

In four weeks, EP Law has provided services to 17 unique clients across 23 matters. Much of that work has come from our existing retainer clients seeking industry-specific advice, particularly around structure and governing documents, and support negotiating partnerships.

Building our name in the sector

Our launch coincided with the Global Impact Summit in Sydney, which gave us the chance to introduce EP Law to peers in philanthropy and social impact at exactly the right moment. Kirstie has since attended the ACNC’s Governing for Good conference, and is working her way through one-on-one meetings with our retainer clients’ key teams, as well as a growing list of potential referrers across the sector.

On 6 August, Lawyers Weekly covered our launch in a piece titled “New legal practice aims to remove barriers to philanthropy”, giving EP Law visibility across an audience of legal professionals that Lawyers Weekly puts at 150,000 to 200,000 readers nationally. We have also published two Substack articles this month, on partnerships and on the ACNC’s updated guidance on affordable housing investment, each written to help charities and funders think through practical questions they are facing right now.

What clients are telling us

Nothing means more to us than hearing that the advice has actually helped. Two pieces of feedback in particular stayed with us this month. The Chairman of a Community Foundation client wrote to thank us for “comprehensive, thoughtful and timely advice.” The CEO of a national not-for-profit told us, “I really appreciate the time and care you’ve put into preparing this advice. Even from an initial read-through, it’s clear how valuable the Executive Summary and recommendations will be in guiding our next steps.”

That is the standard we set out to meet, and the standard we intend to hold ourselves to as EP Law grows.

Congratulations to Kirstie, such wonderful feedback in the first month!

Where we’re headed

Behind the scenes, we are also investing in the technology and processes that let Kirstie spend her time on judgment and advice rather than administration, so that specialist legal support stays efficient and, in turn, accessible. That work will continue quietly in the background as EP Law scales. As you know, we are a big fan of AI when it is human led and governed.

We are also planning out our event series, so that we can share more with our clients and partners and keep sharing relevant information - so stay tuned for more on that.

And if you want to hear us speak on faith, finances and fundraising, we’ll be live on the 7 September for an event with The Education Network, check it out here:

https://www.tved.net.au/live-webinars/lbfsep26/live-webinar-faith-finances-and-fundraising-managing-donations-bequests-and?srsltid=AfmBOorT2t1ZZ2r724ZxVv56-__Px-zeP6wXBdcf0sC4Gho4V5pnPNRK

More on that to come soon.

One month in, we are genuinely proud of what has come together, and grateful to the clients, referrers and peers who have made it possible. If your organisation is thinking through governance, structuring, partnerships or any of the legal questions that come with doing good well, we would love to hear from you.

Kirstie@eplaw.co

Catherine@eplaw.co

Thanks again for your support.

Last week I presented to a Community of Practice made up entirely of leaders in the health prevention space. Chairs, CEOs, heads of strategy, the people carrying the weight of some of the most important and hardest-to-fund work in the country.

At the end of the session, someone asked a question that I loved considering and answering (so I thought I’d share it here too): what’s the one mistake you see charities make that we could actually stop making, when it comes to liaising with philanthropists?

People probably expect me to say something about relationship management, or timing, or the ask being too big or too small. I didn’t. I said lack of clarity.

Here’s what I mean by that. In over two decades of sitting across the table from charity leaders and funders on both sides of this relationship, I can count on one hand the number of CEOs or board chairs who can tell me, in under three minutes, the following:

1. who their organisation is;

2. the need it meets; and

3. the three priority projects that need funding right now.

Not a mission statement. Not a potted history. A good pitch that takes half an hour.

Three minutes, three things: identity, need, and the ask.

Why this happens to good organisations

This isn’t a failure of competence. The leaders we work with are, almost without exception, deeply capable people who understand their sector, their communities, and their impact better than anyone else in the room. The lack of clarity isn’t about knowledge. It’s about proximity.

When you have lived inside an organisation’s work for years, every program feels essential, every outcome feels connected to every other outcome, and the whole thing becomes one large, interdependent system in your head. That’s exactly as it should be for running the organisation well.

But for a funder meeting, where someone is trying to understand where their money will do the most good, quickly enough to compare you against everything else competing for their attention, clarity and succinctness is so helpful.

The truth is, when a philanthropist asks “so what do you actually need funded,” if the answer is a tour of the whole organisation rather than a clear set of options funders won’t push back on this in the room. They just quietly find it harder to say yes, and harder still to know what saying yes would actually fund.

What clarity actually requires

The three-minute test is deceptively hard to pass, because it forces three separate disciplines that most organisations have never had to practise together.

The first is being able to state, in a single sentence a stranger could repeat back to you, who you are and why you exist. Not your vision statement. The actual, specific need in the world that would go unmet if your organisation didn’t.

The second is naming that need precisely enough that a funder can picture it. “Improving health outcomes for vulnerable communities” describes almost every organisation in the prevention space and therefore tells a funder almost nothing.

The organisations that get funded are the ones that can say something closer to the specific gap they are closing, and why it matters now.

The third, and the one I see missing most often, is having exactly three funding priorities ready to name. Not one big undifferentiated ask for “support.” Not twelve, because twelve tells a funder you haven’t done the work of prioritising for them. Three, because three is enough to show range and specificity, and few enough that a funder can hold all of them in their head and make a real choice.

Getting all three of these into three minutes means giving something up. It means leaving detail on the cutting room floor that you, as the person who lives inside this work, find genuinely painful to cut. That’s precisely why so few leaders do it. Clarity at this level is an act of discipline, not communication skill, and discipline is what tends to fall away under the pressure of everything else a CEO is juggling.

Why it matters more than almost anything else in the room

Here is the part that I think gets underestimated. Philanthropists, particularly the more sophisticated ones, are not primarily evaluating your cause when they meet you. Causes in the prevention space are, almost by definition, worthy.

What they are evaluating, sometimes without fully realising it, is whether you understand your own organisation well enough to direct their money with precision.

Clarity is a proxy for competence.

A CEO who can deliver the three-minute answer is signalling, whether they intend to or not, that they have done the harder internal work of prioritisation, and that the money will land somewhere specific and considered rather than into a general operating fog.

This is, in my experience, the single biggest difference between organisations that build lasting funder relationships and those that have to keep starting over with new introductions. It is rarely about the strength of the cause. It is about whether the person representing that cause can make it legible, fast, to someone who did not spend the last five years living inside it.

The good news is that this is entirely fixable, and it doesn’t require a rebrand or a strategy overhaul. It requires sitting down, forcing the cut, and rehearsing the answer until it takes three minutes and not fifteen.

How to build the three-minute pitch

The process for getting there is simpler than most CEOs expect, and it starts with the CEO alone, not with a working group or a communications agency. Before anyone touches a slide, sit down and answer four questions in plain writing.

Who is the organisation, in one sentence. Not the vision statement, the actual reason it exists, stated the way you’d say it to someone at a dinner party who has never heard of you.

What is the need, told through two data points. Without us, this many people go without this outcome. The specificity is the point. A number a funder can picture will always outperform a paragraph they have to interpret.

What is the funding ask, and is it specific. Not a range, not a general appeal for support, but one project, one amount, one timeframe.

Why does it matter now rather than eventually. Every strong ask carries a reason the timing itself matters, whether that’s a closing window, a matching opportunity, or a need that is growing rather than holding steady. Without that, even a specific ask reads as optional.

Run this same exercise for each of the three priority projects, so you end up with three tight, comparable answers rather than one long one.

Once that draft exists, it stops being a solo exercise. Take it to the executive team and pressure test it, because the people closest to service delivery will catch the places where precision has quietly slipped back into breadth. Take it to the board next, particularly the chair, since board members are often the ones fielding these questions from funders directly and need to be able to give the same answer the CEO would. Finesse it together until every sentence earns its place and nothing is there out of habit rather than necessity.

Then do the part almost everyone skips. Practise saying it out loud, together, more than once, until it consistently takes three minutes and not fifteen.

From Pitch to Impact - the course that fast-tracks this process for you

We built this exact process into a course called From Pitch to Impact, because watching CEOs and chairs work through it live taught us something consulting engagements hadn’t made as obvious. The four questions are the easy part. The hard part is what happens between the CEO’s first draft and the version that comes back from the exec team and the board.

In the cohorts we’ve run so far, that first draft almost always comes back longer, not shorter, once everyone else has had a say, unless someone in the room is holding the line on the three-minute limit itself, not just the content inside it. That turns out to be the biggest single thing we provide, more than the frameworks or the templates. It’s a designated outsider whose only job for the program is to keep saying “that’s not it yet” until the room agrees it actually is.

If this is the mistake you recognise in your own organisation, the next From Pitch to Impact program runs across four live sessions this October, from 7th October 21st October, and that includes a personalised coaching session and the precedents that will support you complete the exercise mentioned above. Details and registration are here: communitydirectors.com.au/training/from-pitch-to-impact.

A recent leader who completed the course said:

“Great content, structure, group size, relevant material and very engaging presentation style - I felt energised and focused at the end (which is rare for 2hr online sessions). It confirmed the work that I need to do (that I haven't prioritised until now) and made it seem doable because there is a roadmap.”

Hope you can join us for this upcoming program and let me know if you’ve got any questions: catherine@epadvisory.co

Original article was published 21 Jan 2026 and this is now the updated version as of Aug 2026

TL;DR: Who’s Funding AI Programs Right Now

Before we get to the safety and governance argument this piece was originally built around, here is the practical answer for charities and funders wanting to know who is backing applied AI work today.

Amazon Web Services and Google.org are currently the fastest and most explicit sources, through the AWS Imagine Grant and Google.org's Generative AI Accelerator respectively, both open to health and community service use cases.

In Australia, the clearest trust and foundation move is the Ian Potter Foundation's AUD1.25 million, five-year Major Grant to Infoxchange, announced in December 2025, to lift the whole charitable sector's capacity to adopt AI safely through its NFP Digital Futures Initiative.

Government remains a channel too, particularly the Medical Research Future Fund's Digital Health Mission, though it typically requires a research partner.

And AI developers themselves are starting to fund this space directly, OpenAI ran its own AI and Mental Health Grant Program in early 2026.

For Australian charities and funders, the practical takeaway is that AI program funding is currently easier to find offshore and from technology companies than from local trusts and foundations. That will likely shift as more Australian funders build AI literacy, but for now, the fastest path to funding an AI-enabled program is often a well-targeted global corporate philanthropy application rather than a domestic trust.

More detail on all of these sits under "But Who's Funding AI Programs More Broadly?" below, alongside the updated picture on AI safety funding specifically.

Here’s the full and updated article:

AI capability is advancing rapidly. Investment in innovation, infrastructure and deployment is accelerating. Yet alongside this growth, a quieter question is emerging:

What role does philanthropy have in funding AI safety and security?

Recent research from Coefficient Giving suggests that while billions are flowing into AI development, funding for AI safety, security and governance remains comparatively small. Coefficient Giving estimates that philanthropic funding for climate risk mitigation was around USD9 to 15 billion in 2023, roughly 20 times greater than philanthropic funding for AI safety and security in 2024. This imbalance raises an important issue for philanthropy, not about whether to fund technology, but about how to fund the systems that govern it.

What Do We Mean by AI Safety and Security?

AI safety and security is not about resisting innovation. It is about ensuring that increasingly powerful systems are:

• Aligned with human values

• Governed responsibly

• Secure from misuse or unintended consequences

• Transparent and accountable

This includes:

• Technical research on alignment and robustness

• Policy and regulatory design

• Ethical frameworks and standards

• Civil society capacity-building

• Public-interest oversight and accountability

In many ways, this work resembles other forms of social infrastructure philanthropy, essential, preventative and often invisible.

Why This Question Is Coming Up Now

AI systems are scaling faster than most governance frameworks can adapt. At the same time:

• Private capital is driving rapid capability growth

• Governments are still developing regulatory approaches

• Decision-making power is concentrating

• Civil society capacity in this space is thin

Philanthropy has seen this pattern before. Innovation races ahead, guardrails arrive later, often after harm has already occurred.

The question is whether philanthropy engages earlier this time.

What Philanthropy Is Uniquely Positioned to Do

Philanthropy cannot, and should not, replace government or markets. But it plays a distinct role when new risks emerge.

Historically, philanthropy has been most effective when it:

• Funds work before it becomes politically or commercially attractive

• Supports independent research free from market pressure

• Builds capacity in under-resourced public-interest fields

• Takes long-term bets beyond election cycles

• Convenes across sectors and disciplines

AI safety and security sit squarely in this space.

Why AI Safety Is Also a Compelling Philanthropic Endeavour

AI safety and security aren’t just important, they’re intellectually rich, strategically powerful and genuinely exciting areas for philanthropy to engage in.

For funders who care about:

• systems change

• leverage over scale

• shaping the future rather than reacting to it

this space has enormous appeal.

1. It’s a High-Leverage Field

Small amounts of well-deployed philanthropic capital can have outsized impact.

Funding early research, policy design or governance frameworks can influence:

• how entire industries operate

• how governments regulate

• how norms are set globally

This is classic catalytic philanthropy.

2. It Attracts Exceptional Talent

AI safety sits at the intersection of:

• technology

• ethics

• law

• public policy

• social impact

The people working in this field are often deeply mission-driven, intellectually rigorous and globally connected. For funders who enjoy engaging with ideas and thought leadership, not just outputs, this is a rich space.

3. It’s About Power, Not Just Programs

Much philanthropy funds services. AI safety funds governance of power.

It asks:

• Who decides how systems behave?

• Who is accountable when they fail?

• Who gets a voice in shaping the future?

These are big, consequential questions, and philanthropy is one of the few actors able to engage with them independently.

4. It Shapes Multiple Causes at Once

AI safety isn’t a standalone cause. It intersects with:

• health

• education

• climate

• human rights

• democracy

• inequality

Funding AI safety strengthens every portfolio it touches. Few philanthropic investments offer this kind of cross-cutting impact.

5. It Signals Leadership and Foresight

There is also a signalling effect.

Funders who engage in AI safety are seen as:

• future-focused

• serious about systems

• comfortable with complexity

• willing to fund prevention, not just response

For philanthropists thinking about legacy, this matters.

Where Philanthropic Funding Can Add Value

The Coefficient Giving research highlights a critical point: this is still an early-stage field. That means philanthropy does not need to match the scale of private investment to matter.

The funding picture has moved quickly since this piece was first published. In October 2025, ten major US foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Omidyar Network, launched Humanity AI, a pooled USD500 million, five-year commitment aimed at ensuring people retain meaningful influence over how AI is developed and deployed. Its first grants, worth approximately USD8 million and including support for nine organisations and an AI civics programme, began rolling out through 2026, with a further USD10 million open call to follow. The focus is on democracy, education, culture, labour and security rather than technical safety research itself.

A second initiative, Current AI, backed by a coalition of governments, philanthropic foundations and technology partners, raised USD400 million in mid-2026 to build public interest AI infrastructure, an attempt to ensure the foundational layers of AI are not left entirely to a handful of commercial actors.

Coefficient Giving, the funder behind the research cited above, also scaled its overall philanthropic deployment substantially, directing more than USD1 billion across its full portfolio in 2025 and drawing in more than USD200 million from co-funders beyond its anchor donor, Good Ventures. Even so, only a fraction of this is earmarked specifically for AI safety and security, which suggests the imbalance the original research identified persists even as total philanthropic capital in the AI space grows.

A further development is worth watching closely. In January 2026, Anthropic’s seven cofounders publicly committed to giving away 80 per cent of their wealth, a pledge that could direct tens of billions of dollars towards causes including AI safety research and efforts to address AI-driven inequality. None of this capital has moved through traditional trusts and foundations yet, but it represents a significant new pool of AI-related wealth that the philanthropic sector will need to engage with as it is deployed over the coming years.

None of this changes the underlying scale problem. Global spending on AI infrastructure is running at an estimated USD700 to 800 billion in 2026 alone, with some forecasts placing cumulative spending above USD3 trillion by 2030. Set against that, even a coordinated USD500 million philanthropic commitment, welcome as it is, remains a rounding error, which is precisely the imbalance this piece set out to name.

What’s Happening In Australia?

Closer to home, Australian trusts and foundations have not yet made a comparable coordinated move. Philanthropy Australia’s 2026 conference program includes a breakout session on unlocking the opportunities of artificial intelligence, a modest but telling sign that the conversation is starting to reach local funders even before the funding has caught up.

High-value entry points include:

• Independent research and policy institutes

• Civil society and regulatory capacity-building

• Ethical frameworks and governance innovation

• Cross-sector convening

• Public education and transparency

This is less about funding “projects” and more about funding infrastructure for the future.

But Who’s Funding AI Programs More Broadly

Everything above sits within the safety and governance layer, still a small slice of total AI-related philanthropy. A second, faster-moving tier of funding has opened up over the past eighteen months: money for charities and social purpose organisations using AI to actually deliver services, not to govern the technology itself.

The most active funders in this tier are the technology companies themselves. Amazon Web Services runs an annual Imagine Grant program for nonprofits, including an Australia and New Zealand round, offering cash funding and cloud credits specifically for organisations building AI, machine learning or cloud-based solutions, with no restriction on cause area. Google.org has committed USD30 million to a Generative AI Accelerator, funding nonprofits and social enterprises building generative AI tools for health, education and community services, and has already backed projects in mental health training and clinical decision support. Both sit well outside the grants directories most Australian charities would think to check first.

Traditional health and community trusts are moving more cautiously, but they are not standing still. The clearest Australian example is the Ian Potter Foundation’s AUD1.25 million, five-year Major Grant to Infoxchange, awarded in its December 2025 round, to run a NFP Digital Futures Initiative aimed at lifting the whole charitable sector’s ability to adopt AI and digital technology safely.

It is a telling model, rather than funding one organisation’s AI tool directly, a major Australian trust chose to fund sector-wide capability building instead, working through an intermediary rather than a re-granting pool. Other health and philanthropic funders, including Victoria’s Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and corporate health foundations like HCF’s Research Foundation, remain open to funding a good idea that happens to use AI, without yet running a dedicated AI category of their own. Government remains a channel too, particularly through the Medical Research Future Fund’s Digital Health Mission, though this typically requires a university or research partner to access.

The newest, and perhaps most telling, category is AI companies acting as funders in their own right. OpenAI ran its own AI and Mental Health Grant Program in early 2026, a USD2 million pool funding research into the risks and benefits of AI in mental health contexts. It is a small program, and one focused on research rather than service delivery, but it signals something worth watching: the organisations building these tools are starting to fund the study of their own effects, alongside, and sometimes instead of, the philanthropic sector.

For Australian charities and funders, the practical takeaway is that AI program funding is currently easier to find offshore and from technology companies than from local trusts and foundations. That will likely shift as more Australian funders build AI literacy, but for now, the fastest path to funding an AI-enabled program is often a well-targeted global corporate philanthropy application rather than a domestic trust.

What’s at Stake for the Social Sector

For charities and funders alike, AI is no longer a future question. It affects:

• how donor and community data is handled

• how automated decisions are made

• how bias and exclusion are mitigated

• how trust is maintained

It also increasingly affects how services get delivered. More charities are building or adopting AI tools of their own, chatbots, triage systems, service navigation, than are actively engaging with the AI safety and governance debate. Boards and funders are increasingly being asked both to oversee AI use and to fund AI-enabled programs, often without the tools to do either well.

Philanthropy has a role in building both kinds of capability, the governance capability to manage AI responsibly, and the funding literacy to back AI-enabled programs with the same confidence funders bring to any other proven intervention.

A Question for Funders

Rather than asking whether AI fits neatly into existing portfolios, whether as a safety and governance question or a program funding one, a more useful pair of questions may be:

How does AI intersect with the outcomes we already care about, and what role can philanthropy play in shaping that intersection responsibly? And where charities are already using AI to do that work, who is going to fund it well?

Final Thought

Philanthropy often steps in where systems lag, not to replace them, but to strengthen them.

AI safety and security offer a rare combination:

• moral importance

• strategic leverage

• intellectual depth

• and long-term relevance

But the sector’s job does not stop at governance. The same rapid shift that has funders like Coefficient Giving scaling up, and new coalitions like Humanity AI and Current AI pooling hundreds of millions of dollars, is also opening a second front, real, accessible money from AWS, Google.org and now Australian trusts like Ian Potter, for the charities already using AI to do their work better and more safely. Who governs this technology and who helps deliver its benefits responsibly are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation, at different altitudes.

The role philanthropy chooses to play now, in both registers, funding the guardrails and funding the good the technology can do, will help determine whether AI deepens inequality, or becomes a force for public good.

That role is still being written.

It is one of the first things we assess and comment on as part of our due diligence and funding strategy development when we start working with a charity partner: how much an organisation is committing to its fundraising and marketing team or teams.

Why? I think it says a lot about two things: how willing leadership is to invest in a strategy and an implementation plan, since we have to be careful to ensure the strategy we recommend matches the capability funding it, and whether leadership understands what it actually takes to grow diversification of funding.

But there is no black and white answer, or even a reliable rule of thumb, for how much a charity should be spending on these functions, or what it should expect to get back in return.

In fact, there is no regulator in Australia, the UK or the US that sets a fundraising expense ratio, and the research base, once you actually go looking for it, tells a far more interesting story than the shorthand suggests.

TLDR: how to actually set the budget: skip the percentage and build it bottom up from your real income streams, since each one costs a genuinely different amount to raise a dollar. Set targets by channel and by year rather than one blended figure, and treat the resulting ratio as an input to an ROI conversation, not the test the whole budget has to pass. For each stream, ask what the spend is expected to return and by when, and what it costs you not to invest in donors never acquired or relationships never built.

How much should a charity actually spend on fundraising and marketing?

There is no correct percentage. Not in Australia, not in the UK, not in the US.

The ACNC says so directly: there is no one size fits all ratio, and comparing two charities on this measure alone can be actively misleading. The three US bodies most responsible for popularising the overhead ratio, GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, jointly renounced their own methodology back in 2013.

Yet the 10 to 15 per cent heuristic persists in boardrooms across the sector, often applied regardless of funding mix, growth stage or cause.

A mature bequest program can run at 5 per cent of income raised. A capital campaign in its establishment phase can defensibly run at 40 per cent. Blend these into one number and hold every organisation to it, and the heuristic breaks down fast.

So the question worth asking your board or your CFO isn’t “what is our fundraising ratio.” It’s “what would it take to grow our major gifts pipeline by 20 per cent, and what is the payback period on that investment.”

I’ve written the full piece here, covering the ACNC position, the research behind the nonprofit starvation cycle, and what Dan Pallotta’s AIDS Rides still teach us about the double standard the sector applies to itself.

Why regulators have quietly walked away from setting a percentage

The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, which sits closest to this question of any Australian body, is unambiguous on the point. Its public guidance states plainly that “there is not a one-size-fits-all standard ratio or percentage to measure what might be deemed as reasonable spending on administration,” and goes further to warn that using administrative or fundraising costs to compare the impact of two charities can be actively misleading, since a health service provider will carry a fundamentally different cost structure to a volunteer-run op shop, without either being less effective (ACNC, Charities and administration costs).

The Fundraising Institute of Australia has made a similar argument more bluntly. Chief executive Rob Edwards has pushed back publicly on the reflexive criticism charities cop over fundraising spend, pointing out that the sector is held to a standard no for-profit business would tolerate: expected to run world-class programs, employ qualified staff and compete for donor attention, while also being punished for spending money on the staff, systems and campaigns needed to do any of that (Pro Bono Australia, “Stop Bashing Charities Over their Fundraising Costs”).

Research cited by Australian Philanthropic Services makes the same point with harder numbers. The “Paying What It Takes” body of work found that the true indirect costs of running an effective not-for-profit average around 33% of total organisational costs, well above the 20% ceiling that many funders and boards still assume is the acceptable maximum, and the piece is direct about the consequence: chronic underinvestment in indirect costs does not make an organisation more efficient, it makes it more fragile, less able to attract untied funding and more prone to the exact inefficiencies a low ratio is supposed to prevent (Australian Philanthropic Services, “Assessing a charity’s overhead and administration costs”).

The United States has had this argument in public, and at volume. In 2013, GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, the three organisations most responsible for popularising overhead ratios as a proxy for charity quality, jointly published an open letter to the sector renouncing their own methodology.

Their message to donors was unequivocal: the overhead ratio is “a poor measure of a charity’s performance” and should be abandoned as the primary basis for a giving decision (GuideStar/Candid, “BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator, and GuideStar Join Forces to Dispel the Charity ‘Overhead Myth’”).

Charity Navigator has since backed that position with action, overhauling its rating methodology so that overhead ratios no longer drive a charity’s score in the way they once did, a change significant enough that roughly a quarter of the charities it rates saw their scores shift as a result (Chronicle of Philanthropy, “27% of Groups Scored by Charity Navigator Will See Ratings Change”).

The BBB Wise Giving Alliance, for its part, still publishes a formal threshold, capping acceptable fundraising expense at 35% of related contributions under its Standard 9, but even that figure is framed as an outer limit for gross inefficiency, not a benchmark of good practice, and the standard explicitly allows charities to exceed it where they can demonstrate reasonable cause, such as a new program still building its donor base (BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Standards for Charity Accountability).

The most forceful voice in this debate remains Dan Pallotta, whose TED talk on the subject has been viewed by millions and is still the single most cited provocation in this space. Pallotta’s company ran the AIDS Rides and the breast cancer 3-Day walks between 1994 and 2002, and by his own company’s accounting the events generated $582 million in charitable donations over that period, of which $305.6 million was ultimately retained by the charity partners after event and marketing costs, a figure critics have since contested as presented but which nobody disputes ran into the hundreds of millions of net dollars.

Public criticism of the cost structure behind that spending eventually forced the events to close, despite the scale of net funds they delivered (Nonprofit Quarterly, “Buchanan: Pallotta’s TEDTalk ‘Rooted in Fallacy and Distortion’”; TED Blog, “Correcting the Overhead Myth”). His argument is not that overhead does not matter, but that the sector applies a double standard that would be considered absurd in any commercial context: a for-profit company is praised for spending heavily on talent and marketing in service of growth, while a charity doing the same is accused of waste, even when that spending demonstrably grew the pool of net funds reaching the cause.

The academic research behind all of this has a name: the nonprofit starvation cycle, first documented in depth by the Urban Institute’s Nonprofit Overhead Cost Project and popularised by Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Their data is worth reviewing.

Surveys at the time found that more than half of American donors believed charities should run on 20% overhead or less, and nearly 80% believed it should stay under 30%, figures wildly out of step with what the same researchers found charities actually needed to operate effectively, including basic functioning computers and appropriately trained staff. The result is, seemingly, a genuine cycle: funders and donors demand unrealistically low costs, charities respond by underreporting or underfunding real costs to meet that expectation, which starves the very infrastructure, including fundraising infrastructure, needed to grow revenue and impact (Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle”).

The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s more recent, practitioner-facing guidance draws the natural conclusion for anyone setting a real budget: organisations that invest properly in development staff, particularly major gift officers, see contributed income rise by materially more than the added cost, and capital campaigns in their early years, when new donor relationships are still being built, can legitimately run fundraising costs as high as 40% before settling into a much lower ratio as the campaign matures (Chronicle of Philanthropy, “How to Budget for Fundraising Growth”).

The United Kingdom tells a similar story from the regulator’s side. The Charity Commission for England and Wales does not set a percentage ceiling on fundraising costs in its guidance to trustees, CC20, which was substantially rewritten and shortened in 2026 to focus trustees on proportionate judgement and proper oversight of fundraising activity rather than on any fixed ratio (UK Fundraising, “Charity Commission launches revised fundraising guidance, CC20”).

Sector-wide data from NCVO’s UK Civil Society Almanac puts the actual figure for the voluntary sector at large in useful context: the cost of generating funds across the whole of UK civil society came to £6.3 billion in the most recent year measured, around 10% of total sector expenditure, down slightly from 12% the year before (NCVO, UK Civil Society Almanac 2024). That aggregate figure sits comfortably inside the 10 to 15% range most Australian boards still reach for, but it masks enormous variation underneath, since a mass-market cause running direct mail and door-to-door acquisition will carry a far higher ratio than a legacy-heavy organisation living off bequest income built over decades.

What is genuinely useful from the UK is the most recent government-commissioned research into public trust, which got underneath the number to ask what donors actually expect. The finding should temper anyone reaching for a single figure: focus group participants generally wanted overheads kept as low as possible, with many independently landing on a figure “around 10% or less,” yet the same participants were willing to accept 20 to 25% for larger, more complex organisations once the reasoning was explained to them. Fifty five per cent of the public named “most money raised is spent directly on causes” as central to their trust in a charity, but 63% already believe that is happening, which suggests the live issue for most donors is not the ratio itself but whether the organisation can explain it clearly (UK Government, “Public trust in charities 2026”).

What this means in practice

Taken together, the regulators, the researchers and the donors are converging on the same answer, and it is not a percentage. It is a question: is this spend building a pool of funds, and future funds, larger than it costs to raise them, and can the organisation explain that clearly to the people funding it?

A well-run direct response acquisition program will often run at a genuine loss in its first year and only turn profitable as those donors are retained and upgraded over several years, which is precisely why judging any single year’s ratio in isolation is close to meaningless.

A mature bequest program can run at 5% of income raised. A capital campaign in its establishment phase can defensibly run at 40%. A regional charity relying on a handful of major donors and a well-attended annual gala will have an entirely different cost structure again to a national organisation running television appeals. Blending all of these into one number, and then holding every charity in the country to that blended number regardless of its funding mix, its stage of growth or its cause, is where the 10 to 15% heuristic breaks down.

Another approach is to build the fundraising and marketing budget bottom up from the actual portfolio of income streams and their genuinely different costs to raise a dollar, to set expectations by channel and by year rather than as a single blended figure, and to treat that figure as one input into a return on investment conversation rather than as the headline metric itself.

A board that asks “what is our fundraising ratio” is asking the wrong question.

A board that asks “what would it take to grow our major gifts pipeline by 20%, and what is the payback period on that investment” is asking the one that actually matters, and it is the question every one of the sources above, from the ACNC to the Charity Commission to Dan Pallotta, is ultimately making the same case for.

None of this is a licence for poor cost discipline, and boards are right to demand transparency, a clear rationale for spend, and evidence that the investment is converting into sustainable income rather than propping up an inefficient model indefinitely.

But the ceiling should be set by the organisation’s own strategy, funding mix and growth ambitions, tested against credible benchmarks for its specific channels and cause type, not borrowed wholesale from a rule of thumb that even the bodies who popularised it have since walked back.

The conversation with your CFO or accountant should follow the same logic. Rather than opening with a target percentage, start with the portfolio: what each income stream actually costs to raise, channel by channel, and what payback period is realistic for each. Ask what happens to income in year two and year three if this year’s investment is cut, since that is the number that actually protects the organisation’s financial position, not the ratio in this year’s accounts. Treat the fundraising and marketing budget the way you would treat any other capital allocation decision, as an investment with a return and a timeframe, and the ratio becomes a useful piece of context rather than the test the whole budget has to pass.

So before you next sign off on a fundraising and marketing budget, or query one, it might be worth asking a few different questions instead:

What is this spend expected to return, and by when?

What would it cost us not to make this investment, in donors never acquired or relationships never built?

And what does our own data, not a rule of thumb borrowed from somewhere else, tell us about what a healthy cost structure looks like for an organisation exactly like ours?

Would love to hear your thoughts, how do you set these budgets internally and do you have any tips you can share? Would appreciate your thoughts: Catherine@epadvisory.co

Funders love to speak with us about housing. So often it’s on their mind that the country they love is up against a formidable challenge, with an opportunity to make a huge impact for good.

For some funders, housing is already a focus of their giving. For others, housing sits underneath almost everything else they care about: caring for vulnerable families facing family violence, poverty, health, disability, education, employment, elevating regional communities and overcoming intergenerational inequality.

So, at Equitable Philanthropy, we were very interested to see the ACNC release an updated guide to interpreting community housing on 14 August 2026. We see this release reflecting consensus across the philanthropic sector that a much broader canvas is needed to create new, better and more affordable housing.

What can philanthropy actually do about it?

When it comes to practical solutions, funders have reflected to us that their options felt surprisingly narrow.

If you wanted to use charitable funds to address housing, the obvious pathways tended to be supporting homelessness services, crisis accommodation or traditional social and community housing. However, Australia’s housing problem is much bigger than homelessness and the lucky country includes:

· people who can pay rent but cannot find an affordable home;

· essential workers who hold neighbourhoods together with care, education and other essential services but cannot afford to live in the communities where they work;

· families who can service a mortgage but will never accumulate the deposit required to buy a home; and

· communities where a shortage of housing prevents essential services from operating.

One of the most significant aspects of the new guidance is that the ACNC recognises that charitable housing does not have to mean one particular model.

The Statement considers social housing, affordable rental housing, key-worker housing, home-ownership schemes, shared-equity arrangements, rent-to-buy models and mixed-tenure developments. That matters because if we define the housing problem narrowly, we inevitably define the solutions narrowly too.

The updated guidance gives charities and the funders who support them greater scope to think about the different points at which people become locked out of Australia’s housing system.

Philanthropy could help Australians become home owners

For us, one of the most interesting parts of the Statement is the ACNC’s recognition that helping someone into home ownership can be charitable.

A household does not necessarily need to be incapable of paying a mortgage to be experiencing poverty, distress or disadvantage.

Think about a family that can afford mortgage repayments but, after paying high rent and other living expenses, has little prospect of ever accumulating a deposit. Could philanthropy help bridge that gap?

The ACNC expressly contemplates models including deposit assistance, shared ownership or shared equity, rent-to-buy schemes, and low or no-interest loans. There need to be appropriate safeguards so that the private benefit remains consistent with the charitable purpose.

But conceptually, this is a significant development.

It means the philanthropic question can move from: How can we subsidise someone’s housing costs? To How can we help create lasting housing security?

For funders interested in economic mobility and intergenerational inequality, that is a very different conversation.

What about Australians who aren’t traditionally considered “poor” but face housing disadvantage

This is another important aspect of the ACNC’s new guidance.

The ACNC recognises that housing disadvantage cannot always be identified by applying a single income threshold.

Someone’s circumstances matter as does the local housing market.

A nurse, teacher, disability worker or aged-care worker might have a reasonable income on paper but still be unable to find appropriate housing in the community where they are needed.

That creates obvious problems for the individual. But it can also create much bigger problems for the community.

A regional town may have an aged-care facility but no affordable accommodation for its workers. A community may desperately need teachers or healthcare professionals but have nowhere for them to live.

The ACNC’s discussion of key-worker housing provides greater clarity about when housing can form part of a charitable response to those problems.

For funders interested in place-based philanthropy, regional Australia or strengthening essential services, that creates some interesting possibilities.

Can philanthropy unlock much larger pools of capital?

The updated ACNC guidance recognises that charitable housing projects can involve charities working alongside government, lenders and private investors, including through multi-party Special Purpose Vehicles.

It also recognises that charities can undertake commercial activities and that developments can combine social, affordable and market housing.

This creates the possibility of philanthropy playing a different role.

Instead of asking: How many houses can your donation pay for? we can ask: What could your philanthropic capital unlock?

A philanthropic contribution might help…

· acquire land;

· fund the early stages of a project that institutional capital considers too risky;

· provide patient or concessional capital;

· establish a shared-equity fund;

· enable an organisation to demonstrate a new model;or

· it might sit alongside government and private investment in a structure capable of delivering significantly more housing than philanthropy could fund alone.

In other words, the impact of the philanthropic dollar might not be measured by what that dollar purchases directly but in the flow-on, amplified effect of that investment.

So what does this mean for funders?

The ACNC’s new guidance doesn’t mean every housing project is now charitable. Far from it.

At Equitable Philanthropy, we think deeply about connecting genuine charitable purposes with public benefit and this updated housing guidance still rings true with those criteria.

Private benefits need to be appropriately managed. Commercial arrangements need to support the charitable purpose rather than overwhelm it. And the governance and legal structures matter.

What excites us the most is that for our funders who have wanted to contribute to solving Australia’s housing problem and felt constrained by the available pathways, the new guidance is important and the horizon of possible interventions is expanding.

These new models supported by the ACNC’s understanding of community housing create opportunities for philanthropy to do what it does particularly well: test ideas, fill gaps and demonstrate solutions that larger pools of capital can ultimately take to scale. Innovation with heart!

A bigger toolbox

Australia’s housing crisis is too large and too complex for any one sector to solve.

Government has a role. The community housing sector has a role. Private capital has a role. And philanthropy has a role.

Until now, the philanthropic toolbox has sometimes felt unnecessarily small.

The ACNC’s updated guidance gives us permission to start thinking more creatively.

For funders who have been asking “how can we meaningfully contribute to Australian housing?”, now might be a very good time to revisit the question and we’d love to explore that conversation with you.

Interested in exploring what this could mean for your giving?

At Equitable Philanthropy, we work with individuals, families and foundations to develop giving strategies and identify opportunities where philanthropic capital can have meaningful and lasting impact.

If housing is an issue you care about, we can help you think through where philanthropy can make a distinctive contribution.

Reach out: Catherine@epadvisory.co

Where the opportunity requires a legal or charitable structure, EP Law can advise on charity and DGR requirements, governance, philanthropic structures, partnerships and the legal architecture required to turn an idea into a workable model.

Reach out: Kirstie@eplaw.co

This article provides general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Whether a particular housing activity or funding model is charitable will depend on its specific circumstances and structure.

A corporate partnership can be one of the best things that happens to a charity, and it can give a corporate partner an inspiring sense of purpose in return. The charity gains new money and a bigger platform, the corporate gains a credible cause and a genuine impact story, and the people and causes the partnership is meant to serve get more done than either party could manage alone. In the best partnerships, impact is multiplied rather than simply shared.

This is precisely the outcome EP Law works to protect. The best partnerships are not a transaction dressed up as a cause, they are two organisations building something together that neither could achieve on its own.

What terms should we put into a corporate partnership agreement?

The big picture explains why both parties choose this path in the first place. The fine print is what holds each side accountable for actually delivering on it, which is why the details matter.

A document that only protects one side rarely produces the partnership either side actually wanted. Beyond good intentions, a well-drafted, fairly negotiated agreement translates goodwill into words, and into a practical, clear pathway for working together.

We review a lot of these agreements, for charities and for funders. The drafts that land on our desk are usually written by a corporate’s lawyers, and some would be best described as one-sided.

Recently, we worked with a national not-for-profit client where the corporate partner’s investment was fixed. Rather than let the agreement drift toward promising more than that investment could realistically support, we worked with our client to clarify scope upfront, so what was committed to on paper was something both organisations could deliver in full and be proud of. A corporate gets far more value from a partner who has been set up to deliver fully on a realistic scope than from one that has agreed to more than the funding allows.

Here are three things worth understanding before anyone picks up a pen to sign.

1. Understand what you are being asked to give up in exchange for exclusivity

Exclusivity is where charities most often give away value without noticing. A corporate will often ask a charity not to partner with any of its competitors for the life of the agreement, which is fair enough in principle. A partner making a genuine investment is entitled to know it will not be underwriting a competitor’s campaign next door. The problem is how widely “competitor” gets drawn, and whether the ask actually matches the investment behind it.

We have seen cases where a retailer’s investment was not proportionate to what it was asking a charity to deliver. In exchange for a modest sponsorship in one product category, the charity was being asked not to work with any provider across two or three adjacent categories as well, plus a first right of refusal on future deals in all of them.

Charities should read exclusivity clauses closely and ask a simple question: does the money on the table reflect the doors we are being asked to close? Where the answer is no, it is entirely reasonable to raise this with the corporate partner directly. Most corporates negotiating in good faith will agree to narrow exclusivity to the category they actually operate in, tie it to the initial term only, and treat the first year as a chance to test the relationship before either party commits further.

If a partner genuinely wants category-wide exclusivity, that is a legitimate commercial ask, and it should come with a fee that reflects it.

2. Turn a shared vision into a shared schedule

The pitch deck and the partnership roadmap are always inspiring. “We will explore”, “we will investigate the potential for”, “subject to feasibility”. Aspirational language, and unenforceable. The trap is that the warm words about everything the two organisations will build together usually live in a separate document that never quite makes it into the binding part of the agreement, which means the intentions both sides genuinely held when they shook hands are not the intentions the contract actually protects.

Charities are well placed to insist on a deliverables schedule inside the agreement itself: what each party will do, who is responsible, and by when. Converting exploratory language into firm commitments is not a defensive move against the corporate partner, it is what keeps both organisations honest about what the partnership will actually deliver. Wherever possible, connect the money to the milestones, so that at least part of the payment follows confirmed delivery. This gives the charity a clear basis for reporting impact back to its own board, and gives the corporate confidence that its investment is buying real, trackable outcomes it can point to.

Alongside the schedule, agree a check-in rhythm that matches the work. Quarterly catch-ups suit a steady year. If the first few months involve several concurrent workstreams, monthly meetings will keep both teams aligned and catch small problems while they are still easy to fix, rather than letting them become disputes about who was meant to do what.

3. Plan how the partnership will end, before it starts

A partnership built to create impact should also be built to end well, whichever party eventually decides to move on. Two things are worth particular attention.

First, broad and subjective termination triggers, especially the reputational ones. A clause that lets either party walk away immediately, with no chance to fix the problem, because it decides the other party has done something that “may impair its reputation” is enormously broad. For a charity whose whole job is public advocacy, that is a clause that could be pointed squarely at the organisation’s core work. At the very least, charities should require written notice and a genuine conversation before anyone can pull that trigger, and most corporate partners will accept this as a reasonable, mutual safeguard rather than a concession.

Second, look at what happens when the music stops. If an agreement lets a partner terminate with no notice period and no wind-down, and there are live campaigns and commitments in the water, an abrupt stop is rarely workable for a charity’s operations or for the people relying on the partnership’s delivery. Build in a short notice or wind-down period so the partnership can conclude in an orderly way. The time to negotiate a graceful exit is before signing the agreement, not once the relationship has already turned difficult.

The bottom line

Good corporate partners want a clean, fair agreement as much as good charities do. It protects both sides once the people who negotiated it have moved on, and it protects the impact the partnership was set up to create in the first place.

The pattern across all three of these points is the same: the document should serve the partnership, not sit above it. Done properly, a partnership agreement lets a charity and a corporate hold each other to the intentions they actually agreed to, plan with certainty, and build something worth renewing.

Legal documents in this sector should enable impact, not stand in its way, and that is the standard EP Law holds every agreement to.

Because we work with charities and funders alike, and EP Law reviews agreements from both sides of the table, we understand what a workable deal looks like for a corporate as well as for a charity, not just how to defend one party’s position. That dual view is what allows us to help charities negotiate confidently and productively with corporate partners.

If you are a charity, not-for-profit, foundation or purpose-led organisation considering a corporate partnership agreement, talk to EP Law about an independent review and practical next steps before you sign.

Reach out: Kirstie@eplaw.co

Disclaimer: This article is general and informative in nature only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as a substitute for advice about your own circumstances. If you are considering or negotiating a corporate partnership agreement, we encourage you to consult EP Law’s lawyers for advice tailored to your organisation.

I have been a Bupa member since my mid-twenties. Somewhere in the middle of those years I became a single mother, and anyone who has tried to manage healthcare while raising children alone will know exactly what it means when the people looking after you actually do. Bupa did. That is not a line I am writing for effect, it is close to two decades of being a member, and it is why what follows is personal before it is professional.

Equitable Philanthropy had the privilege of curating The Future of Global Health Impact, the stream we ran together with the Bupa Foundation at this year’s Global Impact Summit. Over the course of the day, five themes carried the conversation, prevention, access and equity, research and innovation, funding the future, and healthy ageing and longevity, each one built on the idea that health is not only a medical question but a systems one, and that the systems in question are built for, and by, people.

That focus on health is rarer than it looks. Global development assistance for health has halved in four years, from US$80.3 billion in 2021 to US$39.1 billion last year, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Closer to home, only 8.6 cents in every dollar distributed by Australian ancillary funds goes to health, against a disease burden that is the single largest claim on the public purse.

A corporate partner that chooses health, and stays with it, is doing something uncommon in this sector, not something expected of it.

What struck me most was not the scale of what Bupa Foundation funds, though that scale is real. It was the people doing the funding. I met Olivia Lynch, Senior Manager of the Bupa Foundation, who welcomed the room and opened our day, and heard directly from Andrea Christie-David, Bupa’s Director of Mental Health, who is leading the rollout of its Mindplace clinics, and from Mel Frost, Head of Health Services at Bupa Aged Care, who is building social prescribing into residential care.

Listening to them, and then listening to the charity partners who work alongside them describe what that partnership actually looks like day to day, it became obvious why Bupa Foundation does the work it does. This is not a logo on a lanyard. It is a genuine, long-held belief that health sits inside connection, community and dignity, not just inside a clinic.

One thread ran through almost every session: social prescribing, the idea that a referral to a walking group, a choir, a men’s shed or a community garden can play a meaningful role in supporting their health and wellbeing alongside clinical care. Bupa Foundation’s own funding reflects that belief.

Its community grants run across mental health, social inclusion, food security and environmental sustainability, and its strategic partnerships include the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO), Kids Helpline, and Black Dog Institute, among others. It was not a coincidence that people from those partner organisations were on our stage that day, Christine Stokes from NACCHO, Dr Lindsay Brown from Black Dog Institute, and Tony FitzGerald from yourtown, who run Kids Helpline. The Foundation also runs First Nations health scholarships to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students pursuing careers in health, helping strengthen the next generation of community-led health leadership.

That commitment is not limited to the Foundation’s own grants. Across the broader business, Bupa also partners with Landcare Australia through its Healthy Cities program, where last year alone more than 100,000 native trees, shrubs and groundcovers were planted across Australian communities. James Link, who heads corporate partnerships at Landcare, made that case himself on our stage in the panel, Beyond the Donation. It is an unusual thing to hear a health insurer’s name attached to a tree planting program, until you sit through the argument for why the two are the same thing.

The pattern held in the room too. Alma O’Leary, who moderated our Healthy Ageing session, has spent twenty years in aged care, most of it at Bupa! And Bupa Aged Care homes do not simply talk about connection, many of them also run intergenerational programs that bring residents together with children, schools and community groups to build connection, curiosity and shared understanding across generations. That belief in connection as a foundation for wellbeing surfaced throughout the Summit. Maggie Beer was sitting in the audience for the Healthy Ageing discussion and later returned to one of the day’s most memorable reflections in her closing keynote, quoting Christine Stokes from NACCHO: “Elders are our gifts.” It was a fitting way to conclude the Summit, reinforcing the idea that healthier communities are built when we value, learn from and stay connected to one another across generations.

It is easy to forget, sitting in a room in Sydney, that this is not a local story. Bupa operates across eleven markets, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Türkiye, Brazil, Mexico and New Zealand, serving more than 68 million customers worldwide. A foundation with that kind of parent behind it could easily default to a generic corporate social responsibility program. Instead, on the day, we heard about locally led partnerships, chosen because they work, not because they are easy to put in an annual report.

I was not the only one who left the day feeling that. A Program Director at a global charity (one of our clients) wrote to us afterwards:

“It was such a lovely day. I learnt so much from the panels. Overall it was a very enjoyable and informative summit. Kudos to you and Bupa.”

The same warmth came back from across the room. In fact, a CEO of another national charity told us simply that the Summit “was a huge success.”

Over the coming weeks we will be sharing more of the individual speeches from the day on this Substack, including from the speakers in our own session, Belong or Break. For now, our thanks go to Bupa Foundation, to Olivia and her team, and to every charity partner who stood up and told the truth about what health actually requires. I am proud to be a Bupa member. After this Summit, I am prouder still.

Dr Natalie Kaine of Vision Australia delivered this address on 6 August 2026, as part of Belong or Break, a session within The Future of Global Health Impact, the stream Equitable Philanthropy curated in partnership with the Bupa Foundation at the Global Impact Summit.

The session was built as a deliberate counterweight to the systems thinking that dominates most health conversations, asking five speakers to bring the room back to the individual behind the statistics, and to answer, each through their own work, why lived experience matters, why connection is our only way forward, and why meaningful impact depends on considering the whole person, not just the condition being treated.

Dr Kaine has spent 25 years working with children with blindness or low vision and their families at Vision Australia. For this session, she chose to view belonging through the lens of future employment, tracing how a child’s sense of what they could become starts forming long before anyone hands them a résumé, and how unconscious bias, more than disability itself, is often what narrows that sense of possibility. What follows is her speech in full.

Global Impact Summit, “Belong or Break”, 6^th August 2026

“Good morning.

I’d like to start with a question.

When you were a child, what did you want to be?

When I was four, I wanted to be a nurse because I saw them wearing pink, and I love pink. But a child with little or no vision, how would they learn what a nurse wears?

When I was eight, I decided to be an archaeologist after watching people excavate Pompeii on television. And then, like most children, my ambitions changed, but those early ideas mattered. They were the beginning of identity and imagining my place in the world.

For 25 years, I have worked with children with blindness or low vision and their families.

Today I wanted to view our topic of “Belong or Break” through a future employment lens.

Employment doesn’t begin when someone submits a résumé. It begins in early childhood, the moment a child starts asking, “Who could I become?”

Children learn about work long before anyone teaches them. They see fire fighters, builders and people working in offices or shopping centres. They collect thousands of tiny details every day, a process called incidental visual learning.

Children I work with at Vision Australia don’t have access to that same constant stream of visual information. Imagine trying to understand jobs without being able to see them – they need to learn to use their other senses to compensate.

That’s why I am so proud of our work at Vision Australia. We help families develop ambitions and prepare for the future. From diagnosis, our team of experts walk alongside them, helping them build confidence, independence and the skills that sighted children can pick up just by watching. We coach parents. And we talk about jobs. We open up their world by mitigating the impact of vision impairment with practical strategies, and hope.

With advances in mainstream and accessibility technology, career possibilities are endless.

People with blindness or low vision are lawyers, software engineers, scientists, performers, healthcare professionals, chefs, business owners. At Vision Australia, 15% of our workforce has blindness or low vision. That’s our normal.

Yet despite the advances in education and technology, employment outcomes for Australians with blindness or low vision remain disappointingly low. Employers still hesitate.

The barrier is not only disability. It’s imagination and sometimes fear of doing the wrong thing that leads to inaction.

A few years ago, we ran a campaign featuring a young girl who was eight. She proudly listed all the jobs she wanted to do when she grew up: farmer, coder, writer, astronaut, the list was long.

The responses I received stayed with me.

“She can’t be an astronaut,” they said. “She’s blind.”

I remember thinking, “She’s eight! She’s probably going to change her mind a million times.”

And she did. Today, at 15, Haya is interested in sociology and anthropology. She presented here yesterday.

But what fascinates me wasn’t that her dream changed. That’s typical development. It was that people felt compelled to inform me what she couldn’t do.

No one ever questioned my dream of becoming a nurse. No one challenged my ambition to become an archaeologist.

But somehow the imagination afforded to sighted children is not always afforded to a child with a vision impairment.

That’s unconscious bias in action.

Beliefs shape aspirations and expectations which, in turn, shape behaviour.

Research tells us, for every organisation willing to offer work, 20 say: “Sorry, it’s not possible.” This is usually code for, “We don’t know how.”

What if, instead, we responded with “Interesting… Let’s explore that.”

I want to tell you about a remarkable young man, Max. Max had vision and hearing loss and came to our office at 17 for work experience. I had been his OT for about 7 years, and we’d prepared extensively.

He thrived on placement, embracing responsibility, making new friends, testing out a seeing eye dog, honing his employability skills.

Sadly, the cancer that took his vision and hearing as a child returned 2 years later. Even when Max was in palliative care he wanted to work. He helped with fundraising mailouts and kept regular work hours that gave him purpose each day.

Occupation is never only about income. It’s identity, contribution, connection, belonging. We all want to know that we make a difference.

Before I finish, I would like to ask something of you. If a young person with blindness or low vision, or any disability, approaches your organization about work, resist the reflex to say no.

Instead, pause. Give them the opportunity. Let them surprise you.

When we unlock possibilities for employment, we create stronger communities, where people belong and can live their lives without unnecessary limits.

Thank you.”

To support Vision Australia and their work helping people who are blind or have low vision please reach out and we’ll connect you to their amazing team, including Ian Finlayson who heads up the fundraising team: Ian.Finlayson@visionaustralia.org

Or feel free to reach out to me:

catherine@epadvisory.co

Did you miss out on the Global Impact Summit? Or perhaps just our stream on Global Health? Well don’t worry, we are collating a collection of the speakers insights and presentations that we have had permission to share beyond the day.

In this session, Dr Donna Lyon spoke as part of Belong or Break, a session within The Future of Global Health Impact, the stream Equitable Philanthropy curated in partnership with the Bupa Foundation at the Global Impact Summit on 6 August 2026.

The stream as a whole was built around a single question: what actually creates healthier societies and how do we scale it, treating health not as a matter of medicine alone but as a systems challenge spanning prevention, access and equity, research and innovation, funding and healthy ageing.

Belong or Break was conceived as a deliberate counterweight to that systems framing. Where much of the day dealt in strategy and data, this session brought together five speakers, each drawn from organisations working at the frontline of trauma, loneliness and ill health, and asked them to return the room to the individual behind the figures.

Each speaker was asked to answer three questions in their own way and through their own work:

1. why lived experience matters

2. why connection is our only way forward, and

3. why any meaningful response to global health has to consider the whole person, not just the condition being treated.

The brief for the session was explicit that this should be the most human and most moving segment of the program, delivered without slides, in under five minutes, built around a single specific story rather than a run of statistics.

Dr Lyon spoke in this context as founder of Left Write Hook, the Australian program that combines boxing and creative writing to support survivors of trauma and abuse, work grounded in the same conviction the session was built to test, that belonging may be one of the most powerful forms of prevention available to us.

But one of the reasons this was a stand-out for me is because Donna questioned our proposition, and posed a series of questions back on us.

Here’s Donna’s speech, published with permission (thank you for sharing Donna!):

“My talk today is about the double bind of connection: the thing we may need most can also be the thing that feels least safe for some.

I’m Dr Donna Lyon, founder and CEO of Left Write Hook, a survivor-led charity supporting adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and gendered violence through creative writing, non-contact boxing and peer connection.

I’m also a survivor and before Left Write Hook became an organisation, it really began as something I was trying to understand in my own body: why I wanted connection so deeply, and why connection could also feel terrifying.

I once wrote:

“I connected and I disconnected. I fell down a black hole, a spiral of darkness. It felt safe. I found out later it was dissociation.

I connected and I laughed as though it was the most freeing experience.

I connected and I broke down. I shivered and shook.

I connected and I ran.

To connect is to get hurt. A paradox because to connect is what I desire, is what I need to feel and move on, yet I sit scared in the corner, looking out through a long lens telescope, eyeing the situation.”

That writing later appeared in the Left Write Hook book and documentary (check it out on Netflix) , alongside the stories of other survivors who took part in our first creative arts writing and boxing project.

For many survivors, like me, the idea of connection is not simple.

Research says healing is relational, and I believe that deeply. But we need to be careful not to turn connection into another demand placed upon people who have already survived so much.

Connection may be what we need, but it may not yet feel possible.

For someone whose trust has been profoundly violated, being seen can feel dangerous. Being in a room with others can activate shame, fear, dissociation, bodily memories, or the urge to run.

Sometimes disconnection is not failure. It may be the very strategy that kept a person alive.

This is one of the reasons lived experience matters in health and wellbeing organisations. People with lived experience can often recognise behaviours that systems might misread as disengagement, resistance or failure.

So at Left Write Hook, we do not force connection.

We try to create the conditions for connection that is safe enough.

In our 8-week program participants write, they reflect, then they learn the art of boxing as a movement of strength and empowerment.

Some participants connect through words and others connect first through punching a bag.

Connection often happens when they hear another person say something they thought only they had felt or experienced.

Some survivors connect by returning the following week, even though every part of them wanted to isolate and stay home.

Trauma does not live only in language. It can live in posture, breath, muscle tension, silence, memory, movement and our relationships.

So the work we do brings together mind, body, story and community.

The writing gives shape to what may have felt unspeakable. The boxing offers movement, agency and the experience of taking up space. And the group offers recognition: the experience of being witnessed without having to pretend that recovery is simple.

Our work is led by lived experience because survivors need to be seen more than as a consumer. They need to experience themselves as people with knowledge, agency, creativity and something valuable to offer.

So connection is our way forward, but it’s not connection at any cost, it has to be with choice, dignity and without judgement about what it looks or feels like.

Working with survivors means understanding the paradox of connection -that someone may reach towards you and pull away at the same time.

It took years for me to find connection through writing, boxing, and safely sharing the impact of my experiences.

But that did not stop me from showing up, making an award-winning documentary and building a research-informed charity led by survivors.

Connection may already be there, even when it is not yet integrated, fully realised or embodied.

The process of discovering connection is part of the connection itself.

My invitation to this room is simple.

Our task is not to expect people to simply connect.

Our task is to create the conditions in which we can discover, together, what connection might make possible. Thank you.”

Next week I’ll stand in front of a room of succession lawyers at the Law Institute of Victoria’s annual conference, wearing my hat as a board member of Generous You, a philanthropically funded, five year national initiative helping lawyers, accountants and financial advisers bring giving into the client conversations they’re already having.

The rest of the day’s program is exactly what you’d expect from a room full of succession lawyers and judiciary: recent case law developments, the use and misuse of subpoenas in estate litigation, cross-border estate planning, family provision claims, and how AI is reshaping the workflow around all of it. Justice Hannon of the Supreme Court will speak on where practice is heading in 2026. It’s a serious, technical program, carefully curated - and includes my ex Partner in crime Jennifer Dixon, Practice Leader at Moores (the legend that pulled me back into a Partnership meeting when I was breastfeeding, normalising the juggle!).

But somewhere between the tax session and the AI panel, I’ll be asking this room to think about something that doesn’t show up on a CPD points sheet.

It’s an unusual pairing on paper. But if there’s one room in the legal profession where this conversation belongs, it’s this one.

Wills and estates work is where people are already asking the biggest questions about what they want their life to have meant, and what they want it to make possible for the people and causes they care about.

And therein lies the work of Generous You.

Generous You is an independent, philanthropically funded initiative helping financial advisers, accountants and lawyers build the confidence to have meaningful conversations about philanthropy and structured giving.

As Australia enters the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in its history, we support professional advisers to explore values, legacy and purpose with their clients. Making giving a more natural and informed part of professional advice.

By equipping professional advisers with education, resources and practical support, we aim to strengthen client outcomes, increase charitable giving and help build a more generous Australia.

Generous You exists because giving can change what’s possible for individuals, families, communities and the environment we all depend on. Sarah lost her eighteen month old son in an unintentional incident, and now works with Kidsafe to help other families avoid what she still lives with every day. Bali was sold into marriage at thirteen for two hundred dollars, not because her parents wanted to sell her but because poverty had left them with no other options. With support from Plan International, she found work as a truck driver and at thirty one she’s broken the cycle for her family. Her daughter is in her second year of engineering at university.

Stories like these are the reason the work matters. But the opportunity to be part of them often starts with something much smaller than a grand strategy. It can begin with one question: would you like to consider making a gift to a charity or cause that matters to you?

That question can arise almost anywhere in legal practice, not just in a will. For a wills and estates lawyer, it might surface while discussing what a client wants to leave behind, and what they hope the people they love will understand about the choices they’ve made. For an M&A lawyer, it might come up during the sale of a business, when a client is weighing what comes next and what they want the proceeds of years of work to fund.

The lawyer doesn’t need to become a philanthropy specialist to ask it. They just need to recognise the opening and know who to bring into the room once the answer is yes.

None of this replaces what a good lawyer already does. As I’ll tell the room on Tuesday:

“technical competence is the baseline clients expect. What they remember is the adviser who noticed something they hadn’t said out loud, and who helped them work out what their life’s work should make possible for the people and causes that mattered to them.

AI can produce a document in seconds. It can’t have a meaningful conversation with a client and help them set up a legacy that right’s for them and their family.”

So if you’re a lawyer, accountant or adviser and this is the first you’re hearing of Generous You, I’d love for you to look us up. And you can follow Dan (CEO of Generous You) on substack:

Generous You Substack

Expert philanthropy education for financial advisors, accountants and lawyers

By Dan @ Generous You

And come say hi to Mel at the conference, she’ll be there all day and would love to tell you more about our free training for lawyers, accountants and financial planners.

Want us to come to your firm and run free training? Feel free to reach out to Mel here: Mel Courtney <mel@generousyou.com.au>

And want to learn more about what I’ve been up to, apart from my Board Member role at Generous You, check out:

https://www.epadvisory.co/

and

https://www.eplaw.co/

Cheers

Catherine

Catherine@epadvisory.co

Development assistance for health has halved in four years. Here is why we asked for a whole day of the Global Impact Summit to talk about it.

On Thursday, the Global Impact Summit will give an entire day to global health. Six sessions, one stream, curated by Equitable Philanthropy, alongside the Bupa Foundation. That is an unusual amount of real estate but I want to use this piece to explain why we asked for it, and why the organisers agreed.

The short answer is that the numbers underneath global health moved faster in the last four years than in the previous forty, and whilst it gained some headlines, the solutions seem far off from a fix.

The floor gave way

Development assistance for health, the money governments and multilateral agencies put into health systems, vaccines, disease programs and research in the world’s poorest countries, fell from US$80.3 billion in 2021 to US$39.1 billion last year. That is according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, whose Financing Global Health series is the field’s authoritative annual account. In IHME’s own words, that is less than half. Twenty-one per cent of what remained disappeared in the single year from 2024 to 2025 alone.

This was not one government having a difficult budget cycle. The United States cut its own health aid by 67 per cent. The United Kingdom cut close to 40 per cent, France a third, Germany just over a tenth. Sub-Saharan Africa lost a quarter of its health assistance, US$4.6 billion, in twelve months.

Total global aid recorded its largest annual contraction on record in 2025, according to the OECD.

Then, in 2025, something happened that had never happened before. The Gates Foundation gave more to global health than the government of the United States. Not more than most governments. More than the government that has underwritten global health funding since the Marshall Plan.

Philanthropy cannot backfill this

It would be comforting to think philanthropy can simply step into the gap. It cannot. The Gates Foundation has committed US$200 billion over the next twenty years, the largest philanthropic commitment ever made, and has announced it will close its doors at the end of 2045. That commitment is less than five years worth of the aid that has just been withdrawn.

So the honest starting point for Thursday’s conversation is not who is going to replace the money. Nobody is, not at the scale it left. The starting point is what we choose to build with what remains, and who gets to decide that.

Australia is already in this

It is tempting, from Melbourne, to treat this as someone else’s crisis. It is not. Australian charities distributed almost $2.5 billion in grants and donations for use outside Australia in the most recent reporting year, close to one in every five dollars they gave away, according to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.

Whether we think of ourselves as global health funders or not, we already are. The question was never whether Australian philanthropy participates in this system. It is how deliberately we point that capital at the foundations of health, rather than letting it land wherever the last good pitch happened to be.

And the same instinct that has hollowed out global health funding shows up in how we fund health at home.

Australia spends about half a billion dollars a year trying to prevent mental illness, and $9.2 billion a year treating people in whom it has already taken hold, according to the Productivity Commission.

Why a whole day

Put those three facts next to each other, the global contraction, Australia’s existing overseas giving, and our own domestic underinvestment in prevention, and a single session starts to look like the wrong amount of time.

Six sessions gave us room to move from the big structural argument about prevention, through how corporates and charities actually work together, into what belonging and connection do for a person’s health, into how funders decide, into what actually travels across borders, and finish on what it means to age well rather than simply to age long.

• Prevention

• How corporates and charities can work together to invest in healthy communities

• what belonging and connection can do for a person’s health

• how funders decide what to invest in

• what travels across borders and scales

• what it means to age well

The organising idea is simple. Health is not a sector of its own. It is the foundation the rest of philanthropy stands on, whether the sector has noticed that or not.

You cannot build a resilient community, in Melbourne or Vanua Levu or Dhaka, on a population that is sick. And every cause competing for a donor’s attention this year, education, disability, disaster response, ageing, is downstream of it.

What Thursday looks like

The stream runs from 9am to just after 3pm, opening with the numbers above and closing on healthy ageing. In between, funders, corporates and charities who do not normally share a stage will be asked the same blunt questions: what actually travels, what a decision maker really weighs, and what a company gets back that never shows up in a budget line.

I will be moderating most of it. If you are at the Summit on Thursday, come and find the room. If you are not, we’ll try our best to share what we heard and learnt so make sure you’re subscribed.

Can’t wait to see you there!

Catherine Brooks
CEO, Equitable Philanthropy

Our full schedule, Thursday 6 August

The Future of Global Health Impact runs from 9am to just after 3pm as part of the Global Impact Summit, curated by Equitable Philanthropy and the Bupa Foundation. Here is the full line-up.

9:00am–10:00am, Big Ideas for Better Health
Tim Diamond (Cotton On Foundation), Andrea Christie-David (Bupa)

10:20am–11:00am, Beyond the Donation
Liz Zamanis-Robinson (Katalyst Foundation), Biheng Zhang (Intrepid Foundation), Dr Karen McComiskey (World Vision Australia), James Link (Landcare Australia), Ada Taylor (Kay & Burton Foundation)

11:20am–11:50am, Belong or Break
Dr Natalie Kaine (Vision Australia), Lyndsay Brown (Black Dog Institute), Associate Professor Michelle Lim (Ending Loneliness Together), Dr Camila Guindalini (Gallipoli Medical Research), Dr Donna Lyon (Left Write Hook)

12:10pm–12:40pm, Funding Beyond Borders
Ryan Brown (RCH Foundation), Vedran Drakulić (Victoria Police Blue Ribbon Foundation), Denise Cheng (UBS Optimus Foundation), Clementine Lucas (Morgan Stanley)

1:30pm–2:30pm, Impact in Action
Dr Morseda Chowdhury (Opportunity International Australia), Craig Hodges (Orygen), Professor Greg Leigh AO (NextSense), Dr Erin Lalor AM (Alcohol and Drug Foundation), Tony FitzGerald (yourtown), Laura Buck and Amy Whitehead (RCH Foundation)

2:50pm–3:20pm, Healthy Ageing
Tanya Buchanan (Dementia Australia), Susie Meagher (Equity Trustees), Christine Stokes (NACCHO), Mel Frost (Bupa)

I am moderating four of the six sessions, Andrea Christie-David moderates Belong or Break, and Alma O’Leary moderates Healthy Ageing.

The Summit itself closes later that afternoon, in The Neilson.

4:30pm–5:00pm, For the Love of Food
Maggie Beer AO, Maggie Beer Foundation

For the Love of Food, dignity, connection and quality of life. What role does food play in helping us live well, and age well? In this session, Maggie Beer AO explores how food can nourish far more than the body. Drawing on the work of the Maggie Beer Foundation, she shares why good food is fundamental to dignity, connection, health and wellbeing, particularly for older Australians. From aged care reform to the simple power of sharing a meal, this conversation looks at how food can help us maintain quality of life at every stage of the ageing journey.

What a morning. Equitable Philanthropy was proud to partner with the Fundraising Institute of Australia (Victoria) for a Professional Development session on winning grants, and winning the hearts of the grant makers who assess them. The room was full of fundraisers keen to sharpen their approach to one of the sector’s most competitive funding channels, and the conversation more than delivered.

Our thanks go to the sector leaders who gave their time and candour to join me on the panel: Leonie Boxtel GAICD, and Gill Whelan. Between them they brought decades of experience from both sides of the funding relationship, as grant seekers and as grant makers, and that dual perspective is exactly what made the session so valuable.

We also want to thank our sponsor for the morning, Tammy from Balanced Effect, whose support made the event possible. Tammy captured the session brilliantly in a LinkedIn wrap-up, with her five key takeaways here:

1. Include a short summary of your pitch in the email copy itself. Many people will never open the attachment if their interest isn’t piqued first.

2. Know your audience. Research the person reading your application, whether that’s a board member or a CEO, and speak directly to their interests and experience.

3. Get your board members to events and brief them well. Funders notice who’s in the room.

4. Your Case for Support should have images and infographics, and stay under six pages. Nobody wants to read an essay.

5. Philanthropists don’t owe you money. Be grateful, and thank, thank, thank every donation, big or small.

These takeaways speak to something we say often at Equitable Philanthropy: successful fundraising sits at the intersection of strategy and relationship. The technical elements of a grant application matter, but so does the human understanding of who is reading it and why they should care. Sessions like this one, where charities and funders share a room and a genuine conversation, are exactly the kind of connection our sector needs more of.

There were a few threads discussed during the session worth pulling on further here.

The panel returned more than once to the purpose of a Case for Support. It is not there to tell a funder every last detail of your organisation and every project you run, it is there to open the door to a meeting. Treat it as an invitation to a conversation rather than an encyclopaedia, and you will find funders read more of it, not less.

We also talked about being fundable and findable (inspired by our friend Kevin Brown). Grant makers are doing their own research long before an application lands, so your organisation’s visibility matters as much as its case. A well maintained LinkedIn presence and short form video, showing your work and your people rather than just describing them, do real work in building the credibility a written application relies on.

One of the more personal threads that I spoke to was about showcasing genuine passion for philanthropy, and putting your money where your mouth is. Fundraisers spend most of their time asking, and it is worth also spending time learning what it feels like to be on the giving side, whether that is joining a local giving circle or simply making your own donations. It changes how you write and how you ask.

We also got a great question for a head of marketing and comms about who should actually be doing the grant writing, whether it is a dedicated specialist or a skill shared across the team. My view is that grant writing is a genuinely specialised skill, so a dedicated grant writer is the ideal setup where an organisation can support one. Where that is not possible, AI tools built on your own strategy documents, project business plans and Case for Support materials can help draft strong applications, provided there is always human oversight and judgement applied before anything goes out the door.

You can find free AI resources at our website here: https://www.epadvisory.co/resources

We also spoke at length about using a due diligence checklist before going to market, to make sure the information funders want to see is in order before an application is submitted rather than chased down after a funder asks for it. Our own Due Diligence Checklist covers exactly this, see it here.

Finally, we talked about the six T’s of fundraising as a way of bringing board members properly into the fundraising effort, and about the importance of board members being part of donor stewardship, not just the ask. Boards that thank and engage donors alongside the fundraising team make every grant application that follows a little easier, because the relationship is already real.

See our previous substack here for more on the six T’s of fundraising:

Thank you again to FIA Vic for hosting, to our speakers for their generosity, and to Balanced Effect for backing the morning. We’ll be back with more sessions like this one soon.

If you have any questions as always feel free to get in touch: Catherine@epadvisory.co

A few weeks ago I wrote about capacity and inclination, the two things every fundraiser is taught to look for in a prospective donor or funder. Does this person or organisation have the means, and do they have the appetite. It is a useful frame, but our wise friend Amy Waters, CEO of the Geelong Community Foundation, read that piece and got in touch with a reflection that she has let me share with you.

Amy has just led the launch of the Geelong Women’s Impact Collective, a giving circle bringing together women and allies across the region to fund local, place-based solutions to the inequities women and girls still face there. Equitable Philanthropy is a proud member.

In its first few months the Collective attracted 104 Founding Members and has already funded the inaugural Women’s Impact Grant of $40,000 to McAuley Community Services for Women for their Safe at Home Program. In a region where the rate of family violence runs 25 per cent higher than the Victorian average, that is not a small thing.

What Amy shared with me is that she too has been thinking a lot lately about alignment. In Amy’s view, charities need to understand what the individuals and funders they are approaching care about most, and then be able to articulate how their work aligns with those values and priorities.

For Amy, that is what shifts the conversation from funding to partnership. The question should not be will you fund this. It should be how can we work together to create change.

When the Collective was being built, Amy and her team spent time sitting with women across Geelong, listening to their stories, their fears and their hopes for a better future. They shared the Collective’s purpose, the change they wanted to create and how they hoped to achieve it.

Where there was alignment, they made a simple invitation: would you like to join us and be part of this work. The women, and a handful of men, who became members did not just make a financial contribution. They became partners.

As Amy put it publicly at the launch, philanthropy has historically been seen as the domain of the wealthy, and often of men, but that is changing. What she and her members are proving in Geelong is what becomes possible when people come together, bringing not just their financial contributions but their time, their energy, their networks and their leadership, to address the issues they care about most.

So in Amy’s lesson, alignment does not just open a door to a gift. It changes what the gift means to the person giving it. A donor who feels genuinely aligned with a cause is not writing a cheque and stepping back. They are investing themselves, and they stay invested because they feel part of the outcome, not separate from it.

Which brings me to the addition Amy offered to my original framework, and one I think belongs in every fundraiser’s thinking from now on.

Capacity tells you whether someone can give.

Inclination tells you whether they are open to it.

But there is a third step that determines whether the relationship lasts: investment.

Not investment in the narrow financial sense, but investment in commitment and ownership. It is the point at which someone moves from being on the outside looking in, to feeling like they are part of the team and sharing responsibility for creating the impact.

“I love what you say about Capacity > Inclination, and I wonder whether there’s one more step.
Perhaps it becomes Capacity → Inclination → Investment.” Amy Waters, CEO Geelong Community Foundation

Capacity, then inclination, then investment.

It is a small addition to make to a framework, but it changes the work. It means the goal of a first conversation with a funder is never simply to secure a gift. It is to find the point of genuine alignment between what they care about and what your organisation is trying to achieve, and then to build towards a relationship where they feel the outcome belongs to them as much as it does to you.

The Geelong Women’s Impact Collective did not grow to 104 members in a matter of weeks because Amy and her team made a compelling ask. It grew because they did the slower work first, listening for alignment before ever making an invitation, and then building something people wanted to own.

For those of us who advise charities and funders across this sector, that is the lesson to consider.

The best fundraising strategies are not built around better pitches. They are built around finding where an organisation’s purpose genuinely meets a funder’s values, and then having the patience to let that alignment turn into investment.

Amy and her team have shown what that looks like when it is done well. Thanks for sharing your insights Amy and thank you for your commitment to making the Geelong community a more equitable place.

Most organisations trying AI for grant writing are doing it the same way, and it is the reason so many are disappointed by the results. They open a chatbot, paste in a set of guidelines, ask it to write a response, and get back something generic, slightly hollow, and unmistakably not written by anyone who actually knows the project. Funders can spot it immediately. I wrote recently about what it looks like from the other side of the desk, and generic, AI-flavoured language is one of the fastest ways to lose a funder’s confidence.

The problem is not the tool. It is that a single prompt with no memory and no context will always produce a single, forgettable answer. What we have built at Equitable Philanthropy is different, and it is why our clients are seeing genuinely better, more tailored submissions, and results to match.

Give it a home, not just a prompt

The first thing we do for every client is set up a dedicated project file, in our case using (the paid subscription enterprise level) Claude. This is not a one-off chat that disappears the moment you close the tab. It is a cleverly set up and persistent workspace that belongs to that client and holds everything relevant to their fundraising, so that every conversation and every draft builds on the last one rather than starting from zero.

Feed it the real work, not the marketing version

Into that project file, we load the organisation’s actual project business plans (that we have often written with our charity partners), the detailed, unglamorous documents that set out the budget, the timeline, the risks and the outcomes for each specific piece of work they are seeking funding for. This is the material that makes a submission credible, and it is exactly the material most generic AI use skips over. A tool that has never seen your budget cannot write convincingly about your budget.

Train it on judgement, not just information

This is the part that actually makes the difference, and it is also the part that takes the most discipline. Over time, we sit with the CEO or the organisation’s grant writer and capture how they think. Why they framed an ask a certain way. What they cut from an early draft and why. How they responded when a funder pushed back. That tacit knowledge, the kind that normally only lives in one person’s head and walks out the door if they leave, gets written down and fed into the project so the AI is learning the organisation’s actual judgement, not just its facts.

The result is a capability that improves every time you use it. The tenth application it helps draft is noticeably sharper than the first, because it now understands not just what the organisation does, but how the organisation thinks and argues and makes its case. That is a fundamentally different thing to a chatbot answering a one-off question, and it is why the submissions coming out the other end read as tailored and sophisticated rather than templated.

Side-note: for a real example, we have worked with one CEO for over 18 months now. Every time she reviews and edits of application drafts, we give the feedback to our agent and so it now knows how she writes, what language she prefers etc. It’s led to a much quicker and better output (plus winning grants!).

The human is still the author

None of this replaces the person doing the writing. We use AI the same way I have written about before, as a rigorous reviewer and a very well-briefed first draft partner, not as the author of record. Every submission still gets shaped, checked and signed off by a human who knows the funder and knows the project. What changes is how much of the groundwork that human has to do alone.

We would love to help you build this

We have been running this approach with our clients for a while now, and we are seeing it translate into real results, better applications, and funders who can tell the difference. If your organisation wants to build this kind of capability internally rather than relying on one-off prompts, we would love to help you set up your AI tools for fundraising. Reach out to us at catherine@epadvisory.co and we can talk through what it would look like for your team.

Tomorrow morning I’m on stage at Melbourne Legacy for Winning Grants and the Hearts of Grant Makers, alongside Gill Whelan and Leonie Boxtel, hosted by FIA Victoria. Before we get into the room, I wanted to pull together what I’ve already written on the two things we’ll spend some time discussing: what actually gets a grant application funded, and how funders expect us to use AI while we’re writing them.

On grant writing

I wrote a practical piece on grant writing: ‘Before You Hit Submit’, which walks through what we at Equitable Philanthropy actually look for when a client sends us an application for final review.

The short version: most applications improve when 20 to 30 percent is cut, funders are assessing fit with a specific brief rather than your organisation’s whole story, and the strongest applications still sound human rather than corporate. A stranger reading your application cold should be able to follow it without knowing your acronyms or your history. And confused applications rarely get funded, not because the work isn’t good, but because uncertainty creates risk for the person deciding whether to back you.

The recipe for funding success goes a layer deeper. Great grant writing is a genuine skill, and it’s one of several ingredients, alongside leadership that can pitch, a clear ask, and real evidence of impact, that separates the organisations that win from the ones that come second again and again. No single ingredient fixes underperforming fundraising. It’s usually two or three quiet gaps compounding.

And in The 10% versus 60% problem, the piece I wrote to promote tomorrow’s session, I set out the number that underpins most of this thinking: cold grant applications succeed less than 10% of the time, while warm relationships can triple or quadruple those odds. Grant writing craft matters enormously, but it works best in service of a relationship, not as a substitute for one.

On AI and grant writing

Funders have been consistent about what they want here, and it isn’t more polish. In Before You Hit Submit, the guidance I give clients is to use AI as a reviewer, not the writer. Ask it where you haven’t answered the brief, where the language sounds generic, where impact is weakly stated. What you shouldn’t do is let it write the case for you. Funders can increasingly spot applications filled with generic language and polished but emotionally empty writing, and that recognition is only getting sharper.

More Writers, Fewer Support Staff? pushes this further. AI is only as good as the thinking you feed it. If your case for support is vague, AI will produce vague outputs. If your strategic thinking is disciplined and funder-aware, AI amplifies it. The organisations that will do well with AI in grant writing aren’t the ones with the flashiest tools, they’re the ones who’ve already done the hard work of writing their strategy and their story down clearly enough for a tool, or a new staff member, to learn from.

Side-note: We help our charity partners with strategic planning, writing project business plans and creating amazing Cases for Support so feel free to reach out if you need help in these areas!

I also wrote about the governance side of using AI in What I’m Seeing on the Ground, after a session with the Victorian Fundraising Sector Leadership Group. Boards aren’t asking what AI tools exist anymore, they’re asking how to choose the right ones, how to protect privacy, and how to bring governance along with adoption rather than after it. That’s as true for a grant writing tool as it is for anything else touching donor or funder data.

Side-note: We have a heap of free resources, tools and learning webinars on our website here and you can brief our senior lawyer Kirstie for AI governance and legal support here: https://www.eplaw.co/about-eplaw

And if you want the longer (perhaps more futuristic!) view on AI in fundraising, Fundraising Squads is a substack where I sketched out what max use of AI could look like at scale, with AI agents sitting alongside fundraisers as teammates rather than replacements (that’s what each of us has at Equitable Philanthropy), freeing people up for the relationship-building that still, and always will, decide whether a grant lands.

See you tomorrow

If you’re coming along tomorrow, I wanted to share this info with you first, so you can deepdive beforehand. And if you’re not able to make it tomorrow i’ll share a summary of the questions and my learnings post tomorrow’s session next week, stay tuned!

If you’ve got a question you want me to put to the panel, reply to this post or email catherine@epadvisory.co, there’s still time before we start.

Sources:

• Before You Hit Submit

• The recipe for funding success

• The 10% versus 60% problem

• More Writers, Fewer Support Staff?

• What I’m Seeing on the Ground

• Fundraising Squads

https://register.fia.org.au/VICgrants290726

Here’s a number that should change how you spend your week: cold grant applications succeed less than 10% of the time, while warm relationships can triple or quadruple those odds. Same charity, same project, same budget line items. The difference is the relationship.

That gap is the reason I’m looking forward to Winning Grants and the Hearts of Grant Makers, a panel discussion hosted by FIA Victoria at Melbourne Legacy later this month. It’s an in-person session built for fundraisers who want less scattergun grant writing and more of what actually moves the needle with funders.

I’ll be on the panel alongside Gill Whelan, CEO of Gill Whelan Projects, and Leonie Boxtel, Chair of Melbourne Women’s Foundation, with Jessica McLean moderating, and Balanced Effect and Pixo joining as sponsors for the morning.

We’re covering the ground that matters most right now: how philanthropy in Australia is shifting, what actually stands out in a proposal versus what funders quietly file under “not this time,” and how to build a funder relationship that survives beyond a single grant cycle. Gill and I will talk about power dynamics too, because the fundraisers who get the best outcomes are the ones who walk into a funder meeting as a problem solver, not a supplicant. Trust runs both ways, and the charities that treat every funder interaction as an opportunity, not just a transaction, are the ones building networks that pay off for years.

I’ve learnt a lot from Gill over the years we’ve worked alongside each other. She has a way of walking into any meeting with real confidence, not because she’s assuming the outcome, but because she genuinely believes both sides are there to solve the same problem. That mindset changes the whole tenor of a conversation. She’s also taught me the value of helping a funder see themselves in your story rather than handing them a rigid list of what you need. The best proposals leave room for the funder to picture their own role in the outcome, not just their cheque.

Another lesson that’s stuck with me came from my fellow panellist Leonie Boxtel at Melbourne Women’s Foundation, on the subject of budgets. She told me the budget needs to talk to itself. If a funder can read your budget in isolation, without the narrative sitting next to it, and still understand exactly what the project is and why every dollar sits where it does, you’ve built something strong. Vague line items are one of the fastest ways to lose a funder’s confidence, no matter how polished the writing is around them.

We’re also tackling the question every grant writer is asking themselves at 11pm with a laptop open: what’s the right way to use AI in grant writing. Funders have been clear about this. They want efficiency, not “AI slop.” The stories and the facts still have to be real. We’ll talk through where AI genuinely helps and where it quietly costs you credibility with the person reading your application.

Side note - I wrote on this topic after surveying our funders:

Back to the FIA session:

To put it plainly, expect us to cover

• what makes a proposal stand out,

• the behaviours that quietly put funders off,

• how to build a relationship rather than a transaction,

• power dynamics in funder meetings,

• the differences between corporate foundations, family trusts and community foundations, and

• where AI genuinely helps versus where it costs you credibility.

Whether you’re running a grants team at a large charity or you’re the one person doing everything at a small one, this session is built to be useful to you. We’re opening with real examples of what’s impressed funders and what’s put them off, so expect some frank, specific stories rather than theory.

There’s time set aside for audience Q&A if the schedule allows, and we’d rather answer the questions you’re actually sitting with than the ones we assume you have.

If there’s something you’ve always wanted to ask a funder directly, reply to this post or email me - catherine@epadvisory.co - ahead of time and we’ll do our best to work it into the discussion. The session won’t be recorded, so resources will be shared afterwards, but there’s real value in being in the room for this one.

It’s on Wednesday 29 July, 9:30am to 11am, at Melbourne Legacy, Level 1, 293 Swanston Street, Melbourne. Registrations are open now and spots are limited.

Register here: https://register.fia.org.au/VICgrants290726

If you’ve ever wondered why your beautifully written application went nowhere, or you’re trying to work out how to get in front of the right funder before you write a single word, this is the session for you. And if you’ve got a question burning a hole in your pocket, send it through, we’d love to put it to the panel.

A lot of people have been asking us about the launch of EP Law, thank you kind people!

So I thought you might be curious to know what types of questions have actually come across our desk in the first week and how we have been able to support our clients and the sector.

We launched EP Law with a simple intention: to make charity legal work accessible, and to build it around what the sector actually needs rather than what a traditional law firm assumes it needs.

We did not expect the queries to arrive quite this fast, or quite this broad. In its first week, before a single invoice has been issued, EP Law fielded eight substantive queries from across our client base, and the spread of them told us more about the state of legal support in the sector than any amount of market research could have.

Employment law query

A modern award classification question came in first, from an organisation trying to work out whether a role had been correctly classified under the relevant award. It is the kind of question that sits in the background of every charity’s operations until it suddenly does not, and it is rarely front of mind until payroll, a resignation, or a Fair Work inquiry forces the issue.

NB: This type of issue can cause alarming back-pay risks so make sure you do a modern award audit on an annual basis to minimise risk and liability for your organisation.

Fundraising laws and regs

Fundraising brought its own cluster of questions, and they were the ones closest to home for us. One client needed advice on a granting agreement, wanting to understand exactly what it was committing to before signing.

Another came to us with something more delicate: a gift left in a will that a family member intended to dispute, raising real questions about how the estate, and the charity’s entitlement under it, would be treated. Wills and bequests are one of the most sensitive parts of fundraising precisely because they surface after the donor is no longer there to clarify their intent, and disputes like this are exactly where good legal support and good fundraising judgement need to work together.

NB: You need a lawyer that understands the law but also how to act in a way that protects the organisations reputation - no matter how hard or complicated the dispute gets. There’s often a way to honour all parties intentions in the end.

Governance issues

Governance produced a constitution review, the unglamorous but essential work of making sure an organisation’s foundational document still reflects how it actually operates. It is easy to leave a constitution untouched for a decade or more, right up until a board decision, a merger conversation, or a funding application makes clear that it no longer fits.

Tax status generated two related but distinct queries. One organisation wanted to understand its options for disputing a DGR ruling it believed was wrong. Another was looking at the opposite problem from the other direction, working through what changes to its charitable entity structure would actually be needed to become eligible for DGR status in the first place.

Deductible gift recipient status sits at the centre of almost every serious fundraising strategy, and both queries are a reminder of how much technical nuance sits behind a status that donors and boards alike tend to treat as a simple yes or no.

Giving vehicles

The final two queries came from the world of structured giving. One was a straightforward request to talk through the establishment of a new giving vehicle, the kind of conversation that usually starts with a philanthropic family or individual asking what structure actually suits their intentions.

The other was a giving vehicle application already in motion, being processed by the client’s accountant, where our role was to make sure the legal foundations underneath the accounting work were sound.

Eight queries in eight days - with no invoices

Eight queries, spanning employment law, contract review, estate disputes, governance, tax status and structured giving, inside a single week, and every one of them handled at no cost. That last point was deliberate.

We wanted EP Law’s first fortnight to be about listening and proving value, not about metering out invoices before we had properly understood what the sector was actually asking for.

Charities and the people who fund them are used to legal advice being either inaccessible or generic.

What this first week confirmed for us is that the demand for legal support built specifically around fundraising, governance and philanthropic structures is real, it is varied, and it has been sitting there largely unmet.

That is precisely the gap EP Law exists to close, and if week one is any indication, we are going to be busy.

Want to go deeper?

EP Law sits alongside Equitable Philanthropy’s fundraising and philanthropy advisory work, which means the support on offer runs in both directions of the sector.

For charities, that means help with the legal foundations that fundraising and governance actually depend on: gift and grant agreements, bequest and estate matters, constitutions and governance documents, DGR status and structuring, and the employment and workplace questions that come with running an organisation.

For funders and philanthropic families, it means support with establishing and running giving vehicles, structuring gifts and grants properly from the outset, and working through the governance questions that come with giving well over the long term. If any of that sounds like something sitting on your desk, get in touch with our team.

We’d be happy to talk it through with you early and you don’t need to worry about any hidden or unexpected costs.

Here are our direct emails:

Catherine@eplaw.co

Kirstie@eplaw.co

EOFY has a rhythm most charities know by heart. The appeal goes out, the reminders follow, the final-days messaging gets sharper, and everyone in the organisation watches the numbers climb against target. Then June 30 passes, the campaign closes, and attention moves straight to reporting the result and planning next year.

Somewhere in that turn, the donor can get lost. They said yes. They gave, often at exactly the moment the organisation needed them to. And the natural next step, the one that actually protects the relationship, is not the next campaign. It is acknowledging what they just did.

This is the part of the cycle that gets skipped, not because charities do not care, but because the asking machine is so much more built out than the thanking machine.

Appeals have deadlines, approvals, and a whole calendar built around them.

Thank yous, by contrast, are often left to whoever has a spare ten minutes.

Given that the donors who feel appreciated are the ones who give again, that gap is worth closing immediately, while the gift and the reason for it are still fresh for both the donor and the organisation. And it’s just the right thing to do!

Not every thank you needs a strategy meeting. Some of the best ones take five minutes and cost nothing at all, they just need someone to actually do them.

Lisa Sargent, the fundraising copywriter and donor retention specialist widely known in the sector as the “Wizard of Thanking,” has built her career and her latest book, Thankology: How to Keep Your Donors Longer, and Giving Stronger, Through Gratitude, around exactly this idea. Her research is sobering. Donor-centred fundraising expert Penelope Burk has found that only four in ten donors say they always receive a thank you after giving, and Sargent cites fundraising scientist Adrian Sargeant’s finding that lifting donor retention by just ten percent can improve returns by up to two hundred percent. The upside is enormous and the barrier to entry is almost nothing.

Side-note - thank you David Sloan for putting us onto Sargent’s work as part of your webinars, loved that one!

As Sargent puts it, most charities do not need a bigger budget to thank well, they need to actually do it, promptly and with heart.

With that in mind, here are a handful of thank yous that take minutes rather than days, and that donors genuinely remember.

The 48-hour rule, kept simple. Sargent’s own research and audits of nonprofit thank you practices consistently point to the same insight: speed matters more than polish. A donor who hears back within a day or two feels seen. A donor who waits two weeks for a beautifully designed letter has often already moved on emotionally. The fastest, most effective fix any organisation can make this EOFY is committing to getting something out, even a short email, within 48 hours of a gift landing.

The THANKU check, run in sixty seconds. In Thankology, Sargent offers a mnemonic for what a great thank you should do: Thank the donor and confirm their gift arrived, Help them see what it is doing, Ask for something other than money, such as a reply to a quick question, Notify them how to reach you, Kindle good feeling by showing impact, and Update them on when they will hear from you next.

It reads like a lot, but in practice it is a sixty-second mental checklist before hitting send on even the shortest note, and it turns a throwaway line into a message with genuine substance.

The voice memo. A thirty-second voice message, sent by text or email, in the actual voice of the CEO or a program lead, takes less time to make than a written note and lands with far more warmth. It costs nothing, requires no editing, and for many donors will be the first time they have heard directly from someone at the organisation rather than reading a template.

The Friday gratitude sprint. Rather than waiting for a perfect system, Sargent recommends nonprofits start small: pull the week’s gift list every Friday and spend fifteen minutes writing a handful of short, genuinely personal notes by hand or by phone. It does not need to reach every donor every week to be worthwhile. A rotating handful, done consistently, builds a habit that a big, occasional stewardship push never will.

The one-line photo. A quick photo from the field or the office, a staff member or beneficiary holding a small handwritten sign with the donor’s name or a simple “thank you,” sent directly by email or text, takes two minutes to produce and reads as far more genuine than a designed graphic. Informality is the point.

Side-note: We are regular donors to Monkey Baa, and they often send us postcards from the field. The kids and I love receiving the little notes and images from far flung places, reminding us why we give - ensuring children’s theatre is accessible for every child around this massive country.

The unscripted phone call, kept short. Not every call needs to be the chair reaching a major donor. A junior staff member calling a mid-level donor just to say the gift arrived and made a difference, with no ask and no agenda, takes three minutes and is rare enough in this sector that donors remark on it for years.

The specific reply, not the generic one. When a donor replies to an appeal or thank you email with a question or comment, answering it personally and promptly, rather than routing it into a general inbox, is one of the fastest and cheapest stewardship wins available. Sargent’s own mystery-shopping research found charities routinely fail to respond to donor emails at all, which means simply replying puts an organisation ahead of most of the sector by default.

None of this requires new systems or new budget. It requires deciding, this EOFY, that gratitude gets the same five minutes of attention as everything else on the to-do list.

Sargent’s work makes the case better than most: thanking well is not the soft, sentimental part of fundraising, it is one of the highest-leverage things a charity can do, and most of it takes no longer than reading this substack article!

For anyone who wants to go deeper, Thankology is available through Civil Sector Press, and Lisa Sargent’s newsletter, The Loyalty Letter, is a genuinely useful ongoing resource on donor communications and retention.

Want to go deeper?

If this has you thinking about how your own organisation handles gratitude, we have two free resources that take it further. Our Donor Stewardship Plan sets out how to build a proper stewardship rhythm across the year, covering donor segmentation, an annual stewardship calendar, touchpoint design, and how to measure whether it is working, download it here.

And because EOFY thank yous matter most for the donors who matter most, our Top 20 Donor Strategy and Relationship Tracker helps you identify your most strategically important donors, assign clear ownership, and plan meaningful engagement with them across the year, download it here. Both are also available on our resources page.

And we wrote about it in our earlier posts here:

and here

Love to hear your thoughts, have you managed to find the time to thank your donors yet?

What other innovative ways have you got planned to thank your supporters? Would love some more ideas!

In our recent piece we made the case that earned revenue is not a compromise, it is clever (not for profit) business, and that the Australian evidence backs it, with the social enterprise sector drawing around 86 per cent of its income from trade rather than grants. The response we heard was a fair one. The principle is convincing, but what does it actually look like for my organisation?

So here is the practical follow-up. Across the not-for-profits we work with, the same handful of moves come up again and again. Most organisations are sitting on at least one of them without realising it. None of these is a magic switch, each requires real commercial discipline and honest modelling before you commit, but each is a genuine, proven path to income you own rather than income you wait for. Here are the five we see most.

1. Turn your expertise into paid training and accreditation

The most common asset charities undervalue is what they know. If your team holds specialist knowledge that other organisations need to do their own jobs properly, that knowledge has a market price.

A disability support organisation that has spent years learning how to support the siblings of people with disability holds insight that health and disability providers across the country lack. A perinatal support service understands new-parent wellbeing in a way that employers desperately want as they build out parental-leave and return-to-work programs. The play is to package that expertise into accredited training, professional development or certification and sell it to the sectors that need it.

Dementia Australia’s dementia-friendly business training is the proof point most people recognise, a respected charity funding its mission in part by teaching the corporate world to do better.

The watch-out is quality and capacity. Training is a real product with real delivery costs, and a half-built course will damage the brand it is meant to fund. This play rewards organisations willing to invest in proper design before they sell.

2. Sell your programs to corporates and schools

Many charities deliver a program to their beneficiaries for free and never consider that a version of it has clear commercial value to a paying audience. Corporates and schools both have budgets, and both are actively looking for credible, mission-aligned content.

A youth resilience or leadership program can run as a paid school incursion or a corporate development workshop, with the surplus cross-subsidising the community delivery. An organisation whose research and frameworks address something every employer now worries about, loneliness, mental health, inclusion, is closer to being a consultancy than it thinks. The trick is to recognise that the same intellectual property can serve two audiences at two different price points, one paying and one supported.

The watch-out is mission drift. The paid offer has to remain a faithful expression of the mission, not a watered-down version chasing corporate dollars, or you erode the very credibility that made it sellable.

3. Build or scale a trading enterprise

This is the most ambitious play and the one with the highest ceiling. Here the trading activity is the impact. STREAT’s cafes train and employ marginalised young people. Good Sammy’s op shops create supported employment for people with disability, the Australian cousin of the Goodwill model. The commercial operation and the social outcome are the same activity, which is exactly why these ventures tend to perform on both fronts.

For an organisation supporting people facing barriers to work, a social enterprise gym, a catering arm, a maintenance crew or a retail operation can move it from delivering a free program to running a business that funds itself and employs the people it serves. An organisation already giving away meals might build a paid catering line that cross-subsidises the donated ones.

The watch-out is that this is a business, full stop, and it demands business capability, governance and patient capital that a grant-funded program does not. This is the play that most needs rigorous modelling before launch, and it is precisely the kind of work the federal Social Enterprise Development Initiative now helps fund.

4. Monetise what you already give away

Some organisations are quietly giving away assets that the market would happily pay for. The most common is content. A charity producing high-quality curriculum, educational resources or training material for free is often sitting on a licensable product that schools, corporates or government would pay a premium to access in a supported, ready-to-use form.

The arts sector is the clearest case of underused earned potential, where ticketing, venue hire, paid tuition and schools touring are natural revenue lines that are often left under-optimised rather than treated as core income. The point is not to paywall the mission, it is to notice where you are subsidising commercial users who could comfortably pay, and to let those payments fund the access you want to keep free.

The watch-out is access and equity. The model only works if you can charge those who can pay without locking out those who cannot, so tiered pricing and clear eligibility matter.

5. Charge fee-for-service on your core service

The simplest play is also the one Australian charities use least. Where you deliver a service that has a clear value to a paying party, a fee-for-service model can recover some or all of your costs while extending your reach.

An employment or skills organisation can charge employers a placement or success fee for the job-ready talent it produces, since the employer is receiving real value. Disability providers operating under the NDIS already have fee-for-service, professional training and assistive-technology retail as scalable lines. The principle is to identify who benefits from your work beyond the beneficiary, and to ask whether that party should be contributing to the cost.

The watch-out is your cost-to-serve. Fee-for-service only builds resilience if the fee genuinely reflects what delivery costs, which is why so many organisations that try it informally end up subsidising their paying customers by accident.

Where to start

If more than one of these felt familiar, you are not unusual. Most of the organisations we work with have at least one earned-revenue play hiding in plain sight, and the reason they have not pursued it is rarely a lack of opportunity. It is that moving from idea to viable model takes a different kind of work than writing a grant application, the unglamorous business modelling that sits underneath every successful social enterprise. Pressure-testing the revenue assumptions, understanding the true cost to serve, modelling the break-even point and being honest about the capability a trading entity demands.

That is the work we love doing, and with initiatives like SEDI making the capability investment more accessible than it has ever been, there has rarely been a better moment to take one of these plays seriously and model it properly before you leap.

If one of these resonated for your organisation, we would be glad to talk it through: Catherine@epadvisory.co