Delivering lasting impact: over a decade of investment in local charities

April 2026

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Delivering lasting impact: over a decade of investment in local charities

April 2026

We commissioned Charizone to evaluate our impact and they found that our investment doubles charity growth. This report looks at our investment between 2014 and 2025. Alongside funding, we've been providing organisational development and capacity building support.

Foundation backed charities doubled in growth This way of investing in community organisations shows that brilliant things happen when you back brilliant people. When we've invested in charities, they've:

Grown at double the rate of similar charities we didn’t fund.
Created almost 1,700 jobs – and that’s just at the bigger ones.
Attracted more money from other partners.

So they can ultimately help more people in England and Wales be in a good place.

This new, independent research is the first of its kind at scale and shows that how you back communities matters. With money, yes, but also the tools and resources they need to speed up and spark change.

Because this data shows it's the organisational development we offer that turbocharges the difference. Charities that took up our organisational development and capacity building support:

Grew even faster – 8.6% annually on average.
Were less likely to close.
Particularly benefited from our Skills Based Volunteering partnership with Lloyds Banking Group, with charities accessing this service growing by 10.6% annually.

Our strategic role has been accelerated because Lloyds invested in it. By funding us for three years it enabled us to both meet demand and allow the management team to do the strategic work which helped us to grow then and continue to grow now.

We’re in a position, probably for the first time in 40 years, where everything is in place, everything’s there for us to continue.

Dial Barnsley, deaf and disabled people’s charity, Yorkshire & Humberside

Read the full report

About the authors

Charizone is a UK-based data and technology platform that helps funders, donors and charities make confident, evidence-based decisions. Its mission is to bring greater clarity and transparency to the charity sector, building trust and amplifying impact.

Context

For 40 years we’ve been backing community-led organisations. We’re about to set our direction for the next nine. To make sure that what we do is led by evidence and grounded in the experiences of community-led organisations, we commissioned an evaluation of our investment between 2014 and 2025. During this time, we invested £157 million in nearly 3,000 grants to around 1,800 charities.

We’ve been listening to how we can do more to open doors for communities over the next decade, so they have the resources they need to speed up and spark change.

We’ll be launching our new strategy 27 May. Sign up to our newsletter to find out more.

Related reports

This report shares our learning from a decade of delivering skilled volunteering programmes so that other organisations can take up skills based volunteering, be it volunteers, employers or charities.

This report, commissioned by Lloyds Banking Group and its four charitable Foundations to mark 40 years of supporting communities across the UK and Channel Islands, seeks to better understand the role small charities play in supporting financially vulnerable people and how we can strengthen that support.

Read our evaluation of the Trading and Sustainability programme, which was delivered by the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE).

Delivering lasting impact: over a decade of investment in local charities

Delivering lasting impact: over a decade of investment in local charities

About the authors

Context

Related reports

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