Fundraising: working together to reach more young people

Whether we’re raising funds in our local area to support new equipment for our meeting place or winning government funding for a nationwide growth project, fundraising has always been a vital part of Scouts. 

Our central fundraising team is working to raise more funds from donors, aiming to better support your fundraising efforts in your area.

How can you get involved?

We’re looking for volunteers who’d like to join a movement-wide fundraising forum, where you can tell us what would be most useful to you when you’re trying to raise funds.

Do you need guidance about Gift Aid? Would you need a template proposal for grant applications? Would you like a beautifully branded product or event that you can use to fundraise for your area? Or, is it something else entirely?

You can also input on what we’re doing to recruit new supporters directly. If you'd like to join the forum, please email fundraising@scouts.org.uk for more details.

What are we fundraising for?

The fundraising team focuses on:

• Supporting you to raise funds locally: This is an area where a lot happens already. We run webinars and provide templates to help you win grants from government funding initiatives. We answer great questions and queries on all manner of fundraising issues. We process gifts left in wills and make sure they get to the right Scouts Group or area. But, we know we can do more. That’s where we need your help, so we can continue to support and help you in the right places.
• Raising funds to help grow the movement in new areas: We’ll be testing how to engage new supporters, such as Scouts ‘alumni’, who benefited from being a Scout in their youth, but aren’t adult members of the movement. By encouraging them to make a donation, we hope to re-engage them with Scouts. Maybe one day they’ll feel inspired to volunteer, too. 

You’ll see ads on social media and elsewhere, as we test methods and messaging, to see what draws those alumni back to Scouts. If you see this content on your digital platforms, please share it!

We’re also looking at how to encourage more people to give by working with a well-established provider to offer prize draws and/or a Scouts-themed lottery. This is a very popular way of raising funds among charities, with strict limits in place to prevent problem gambling.

We’ll also be looking at how we can win more high value corporate partnerships and secure more support from private trusts and other funders.

How do we raise funds?

Scouts raises funds from many sources to support work across the UK, including:

• Individual supporters, who make donations, who leave gifts in their wills to Scouts and take part in fundraising events, such as the London Marathon.
• Corporate partners, who bring their expertise into our programme, such as HSBC’s money skills or Nominet’s digital know-how. They also support the cost of creating our programme and offer discounts so Scouts can access great activities around the UK.
• The government and private trusts and foundations, who allow us to apply for funding for strategic projects to support inclusive growth and other priorities. Recent successes include £6.2m secured from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Uniformed Youth Fund supporting growth in levelling up areas, and helping the movement apply to the Youth Investment Fund’s capital grants scheme.

Our generous supporters have enabled Scouts to achieve amazing things. They've allowed us to deliver on our aims to reach more young people and help them gain skills for life.

Our finances are recovering well from the impact of the pandemic and we’ve recently benefited from the sale of Baden-Powell House, but if we’re to deliver on our ambitions, we need to keep building our income for the long-term.

And that means finding more supporters who want to donate to Scouts, directing their donations where they’ll have the most impact.

So please join our fundraising forum and let’s help each other raise more funds to grow the Scout movement.