How to Sell Services to UK Charities: A Supplier Guide

To sell services to UK charities, start with charities that look like the ones already paying you. Reach the staff member who owns the problem you fix, then the finance lead. Bigger or unusual commitments may also need trustee approval before anyone signs. Build your list from the free Charity Commission register for England and Wales, and ask for a short call in your first message.

If local authorities are also your buyers, UK councils buy under public procurement rules, and NHS and central government buyers follow their own routes.

How does a UK charity decide to buy a service?

Three jobs sit behind every purchase. A staff member feels the problem and asks for a fix. Someone holding the budget checks that it fits. For larger or new commitments, the trustees approve, often at a board meeting with its own calendar.

In a small charity the chief executive may do all three. The Charity Commission's guidance on internal financial controls notes that in smaller charities trustees are more likely to deal directly with most things. So expect a trustee to sit close to your deal.

In a larger one, with separate heads of finance, IT or fundraising, they are different people, and a routine purchase may never reach the board. But the same guidance says all trustees remain responsible for their charity's financial management and for implementing and monitoring its internal financial controls. The approval rules your buyer follows start with them.

Before I write anything for a new market, I go back through past deals and name the decision-maker on each one. For a charity supplier, record three names per deal, one for each job above.

Which charities should go on your first list?

Your current paying clients come before anyone new. Find charities built like them, matched on cause area, income category and operating area. Then filter in this order:

1. Lookalikes of charities that already pay you go first.
2. Charities too small to employ an in-house owner come off if your service needs someone to run it after the sale.
3. Charities that spend far less than they receive get parked. The Charity Commission runs a Revitalising Trusts program aimed at charities that have spent less than 30% of their income over the past 5 years (Charity Commission casework data, January to March 2026). Treat that as a prompt to read the accounts before you add the charity, not as proof it will not buy.
4. Famous charities with a different structure from your buyers wait for a later wave.

I tell founders the same thing every time: one offer, one audience, 12 months. Stick with it. "Hospices in the South East with a finance director" is an audience you can write to. Write to "charities" and nobody in particular feels the message is meant for them.

Which job titles recommend and approve?

• Operational owner: Head of IT, Head of Digital, Director of Fundraising or Director of Operations. Feels the problem and recommends a supplier.
• Finance lead: Finance Director, Head of Finance or Director of Finance and Resources. Checks the budget and often writes the paper the trustees read.
• Chief executive: stands in for the operational owner where no head of function exists, and carries bigger spend to the board.
• Trustees: approve far more often than they start a purchase.

Write to the operational owner first and the finance lead second. Keep trustees out of the first wave: a supplier who arrives through a trustee can feel imposed on the staff who will run the contract.

When I build a list, I cut generic titles first: Assistant, Associate, and Manager with nothing after it. In charities, Officer, Coordinator and volunteer roles go too, unless your service is made for that job. Then search with the sector's own titles from the list above, such as Director of Finance and Resources.

Our lists and targeting FAQ answers the usual questions on building and checking a targeted list.

What can the charity register tell you before outreach?

The Charity Commission registers and regulates charities in England and Wales (Charity Commission). You can search its register free by name, number, registration date or where a charity operates, and browse by income, income category, sector or the top 10 by income or spending. Each record shows name and address, trustees, work and aims, and finances (GOV.UK).

For hundreds of charities, skip the search page. The Commission provides a daily extract of publicly available register data in JSON and tab delimited formats (register download page).

The register names trustees but leaves out the staff who run finance or IT. Match each record to named people with Sales Navigator or Apollo; that beats any scraped list. If you sell to other UK sectors too, the same matching applies to UK B2B leads in general.

What are income bands and sector statistics good for?

At the end of March 2026, the register held 171,112 charities, with total annual income and total expenditure each about GBP 107 billion (Charity Commission casework data).

Most of the sector is small. NCVO's UK Civil Society Almanac 2024 found that 80% of voluntary organizations earned under GBP 100,000, 16% earned between GBP 100,000 and GBP 1M, and 4% earned more than GBP 1M. NCVO counts UK voluntary organizations, not only the register, so treat the split as a rough guide.

Use the income band as a size filter only. Check that the filtered list still leaves enough charities, because I want volume and fit together. If your band and region leave only a few dozen names, widen the region before dropping to a smaller band.

In our campaigns, 30 to 35 booked calls a month usually takes contacting at least 10,000 people a month, so a list of a few hundred charities is a slow start.

Do charity trading rules change who signs?

Primary purpose trading furthers the charity's stated aims. Non-primary purpose trading raises funds, and its profits are usually taxable. A charity mixing the two must record the sales separately (Charity Commission).

Some charities trade through a subsidiary company, which is taxed like an ordinary limited company (HMRC and Charity Commission).

For a supplier these rules matter in one place: whether the charity or its trading subsidiary is your customer. Ask which entity signs and gets the invoice before the proposal goes out. This is not tax advice.

How should the first message to a charity read?

Ask for a conversation and keep the service for the call. Pitching in message one is the quickest way to be ignored. Put one real result inside the message; for a charity buyer, the best proof is another charity of similar size and cause.

An invented example from a finance systems supplier to a hospice:

Subject: Finance system across your two sites

Hi Priya, your latest accounts show two community sites running alongside the main hospice. [Your proof line: one similar-sized charity you moved onto one finance system, and when.] Would 20 minutes help before this reaches your finance committee?

The bracketed line is a placeholder: use a real charity client of yours, with their permission, and never an invented result.

Open on LinkedIn, send the email after that first touch, and plan 5 or 6 touches or more across both channels. In our campaigns, the reply often comes on the third follow-up, once real time has passed since the second.

If the purchase waits for a board meeting, set the goal at conversations started, not calls booked. A good first call can still wait months for the next trustee meeting, so track conversations week by week.

Your first wave: lookalikes of the charities that already pay you, the operational owner and the finance lead at each one, and a first message that asks for 20 minutes.

Selling to charities and unsure who to write to first? Book a call and I will go through your first wave and title list.