Three months on from the Sport Fundraising Summit: what have we learned
When we packed up at Bounce at the end of February, the day had raised more questions than it answered. That felt right at the time. From the outset, we wanted this to be a space for honesty - about what’s working well, what isn’t, and where challenges lie. The discussions were practical, reflective, and at times uncomfortable - but in the very best way.
It also gave us our evidence base. We launched our 2026 Benchmark Report on the morning of the summit, drawing on responses from 142 sport for good organisations, and it named the tension that ran through every panel that followed: a widening gap between strategic intent and execution. Organisations know more than ever about what good fundraising looks like. Turning that knowledge into income is the hard part.
Three months on, with funders publishing firmer positions and the wider picture coming into focus, that gap and the themes around it have only sharpened. Four stand out.
AI and Grant-making
The sharpest debate of the day was how to stand out in a market where AI lets almost anyone produce a fluent, confident application in minutes. The conclusion in the room was that AI does not replace fundraising skill. It exposes what actually matters: relationships, beneficiary voice, and a specific, grounded understanding of communities.
Our own data made the point starkly. More than eight in ten organisations now use AI in some part of their fundraising, most commonly to draft and tailor bids. Yet the share hitting their targets has barely moved: 41% still fell short this year. Adoption has soared while performance has stalled. AI can accelerate the work, but it cannot manufacture the substance that wins funding: clear outcomes, credible evidence, and a case a panel can get behind.
Since February, funders have made that explicit. AI use in applications is now mainstream rather than fringe, with recent sector research suggesting nearly two-thirds of charities already use it when writing bids. More importantly, funders have started to say what they think about it. Several major funders, including the National Lottery Community Fund, have made clear that they assess applications on quality and evidence regardless of how they were produced, and that generic, AI-shaped text tends to score poorly precisely because it lacks specificity. Some funds now go further: the new UK Youth Fund asks applicants to confirm they have read its AI statement and that their answers genuinely reflect the organisation's own work.
The advice we took from February, to write clearly, be specific, and sound like a person rather than a template, is now close to funder consensus. The organisations that win will be the ones whose substance AI could never have invented, because it only exists in their own delivery.
The importance of youth voice
There was strong alignment across panels: funders want to hear directly from young people. Testimonials, videos, and first-hand perspectives are no longer just nice additions to funding applications - they are an essential component of a successful proposal.
This reflects a sector-wide shift towards authentic, co-designed projects that amplify the voices of the people they engage. It also raises important questions about how organisations can engage with young people in a meaningful way. Collecting the views, ideas, and perspectives of the next generation needs to be a genuine process, not a tick-box exercise.
That shift has hardened into practice. Funders are now building youth voice into the application itself rather than hoping to find it. The UK Youth Fund's full application includes a direct question on how organisations involve young people in their work. The Co-op Foundation went further again, handing young people full decision-making power over a fund, with shortlisting decisions made by the young people themselves.
For delivery organisations, the implication is clear. Embedding young people meaningfully, in design, in evidence, and increasingly in decisions, is becoming a condition of credibility rather than a flourish at the end of a bid.
Diversification and partnership for survival
In February, we talked about tradeable income and partnership-based applications as ways to stand out. The report showed the sector is already moving, and the wider climate has made that movement urgent.
The clearest shift in the data is corporate partnerships, which more than doubled as a primary income source over the year, rising from 14% to 32% and drawing level with grants from trusts and foundations. At the same time, concentration remains a real risk: nearly a third of organisations still rely on a single funder for more than half their income. It is no surprise that diversification is now the sector's stated top priority for the year ahead. Tellingly, it has also matured in how it is understood. The proportion of organisations crediting diversification for their growth fell from 71% to 36%, which we read not as a retreat but as a sign the sector has stopped treating diversification as a happy accident and started treating it as a deliberate, ongoing process.
The funding environment makes this non-negotiable. The OECD projects a fall of between 9 and 17% in official development assistance this year, following a 9% drop the year before, and sport for development has been hit hard as long-term programmes are deprioritised in favour of immediate humanitarian need. Building genuine, planned partnerships with organisations in areas like mental health, education or financial inclusion, and developing tradeable income through training, consultancy or events, are increasingly how organisations protect themselves. The honest caveat from February still stands: not every organisation has the capacity to do this alongside delivery, and the challenge is to be ambitious without quietly shifting risk onto the smallest players.
The sector still has to prove its worth to people outside the room
Perhaps the most lasting reflection from the day was about audience. Much of the sector already agrees on the value of sport for good. The harder task is convincing the people who are not yet in the room: decision-makers, policymakers and funders weighing sport against every other call on their resources.
The report points to why this is so often missed. The most common barrier to income is a shortage of fundraising skills, and the recurring pattern is organisations leading with what they do rather than why it matters to a specific funder, describing activities instead of articulating outcomes, and holding impact data they never turn into a narrative a panel can back. As our own Jess Shepherdson put it, the organisations that consistently win are not always the biggest, but the ones that tailor every application, ground it in evidence, and make it easy for a funder to say yes.
This is where the day's discussion of storytelling and data came into its own, not as rival tools but as two halves of the same case. Marisa Schlenker of the adidas Foundation made the point that storytelling is increasingly recognised as a form of qualitative data in its own right, capturing the lived experience, context and longer-term change that numbers alone struggle to show. The skill is in triangulation: bringing narrative, statistics and insight together so that each validates the other. Yvonne Henry of Women Win offered a practical route in, using data not simply to report outputs but to understand trends, identify gaps and build a fuller picture, with tools like dashboards serving both internal decisions and external communication. The honest counterweight came from Lin Wilson of Upshot, who reminded the room that doing this well is hard: collecting and using data effectively takes time, systems and skills that many smaller organisations do not yet have.
Meeting the challenge also calls for a more unified voice across the sector, so organisations can position their work within a recognised, credible framework rather than justifying the value of sport for good from first principles every single time. This is slow, deliberate work, but it is the difference between a sector that is understood and one that is merely busy.
What's next
If there is a single thread running through these four themes, it is intentionality, and the work of closing that gap between strategic intent and execution. The report set out four priorities that still hold: invest in fundraising skills and capacity rather than hoping they appear; diversify income in practice, not just in principle; keep testing new methods, even at a small scale; and treat strategy as a living process rather than a document that sits in a drawer.
That is the work we are focused on over the coming months, with the organisations we partner with, from fundraising readiness through to strategy and hands-on support with applications.
And we are already looking further ahead. The Sport Fundraising Summit will return, and we are delighted to confirm it will be back in October 2027. We will share more on dates, venue and programme in due course.
For now, our thanks go to every panellist, attendee and contributor who made February's conversations as open and honest as they were. The direction is becoming clearer, and we are looking forward to shaping what comes next with you.
Written by Lucy Wilkes