If your charity appeals for a specific thing, you must use the donations for that thing. Raise more than you need, and you cannot simply spend the difference elsewhere. Fall short, and your starting point is that donors are entitled to their money back. Both problems are solved by one sentence in the appeal wording, written before you publish, and both are expensive to solve afterwards.
That sentence is called a secondary purpose, and most small charity appeals do not have one.
Planning a December campaign? You can see how other UK charities are framing theirs on our campaigns page.
Why the wording matters more than the total
Charities appeal for specific things all the time. A defibrillator, a minibus repair, a walk-in fridge for the food bank, a roof. Naming the thing is good fundraising; people give more readily to something they can picture than to general funds.
Naming it also creates a restriction. The Charity Commission is direct about this: where you appeal for a specific purpose, the donations can be used for that purpose and nothing else. Not for a different project, not for core costs, not for the thing you turned out to need more.
The restriction only bites when the money and the target do not match. Close to the figure and there is nothing to sort out – you buy the thing you named, and the appeal is finished. The difficulty starts when the total lands well above or well below.
December produces more of both than any other month. Match funding can double a total overnight, and an appeal that catches on across Giving Tuesday and the Big Give week can clear its target days before it was due to close.
Consider a food bank appealing for £4,000 for a walk-in fridge. The campaign runs into the first week of December; a local business matches donations, and by the time it closes, there is £7,000 in the account. The fridge costs £4,000. The charity has £3,000 it did not ask for, cannot spend, and will now have to do paperwork about.
What a secondary purpose actually is
A sentence in the appeal itself saying what you will do with the money if you raise more than the target, or less.
That is the whole mechanism. The Commission’s examples of where surplus can go are a similar purpose, or the general work of the charity. Something like: if we raise more than we need for the fridge, or the project cannot go ahead, we will use your donation for our other food poverty work.
Where the wording is there, the position is simple. You must use the donations for the secondary purpose you stated, and you do not need to contact donors or the Charity Commission at all. The problem never becomes a problem.
The Code of Fundraising Practice, which took effect on 1 November 2025, covers this in its standards on behaviour when fundraising, and the Fundraising Regulator publishes separate guidance on what to do when an appeal raises too much or too little. If you have not looked at the Code since it changed, Evolve Catalyst’s guide to what it means for a small charity is a reasonable place to start.
If you raise too much and there is no secondary purpose
Manageable, and more manageable than most trustees expect.
You do not have to contact donors, and you do not have to return anything. What you do have to do is decide a new purpose for the surplus, and decide it properly. That means having regard to whether the new purpose can be similar to the original one, and to whether it is suitable and effective in current circumstances. You need to keep a record of what you relied on, and be able to explain yourself if the new purpose is not similar to the old one.
Then a formal decision. A resolution agreeing to the new purposes, passed by a majority of all your trustees under the rules in your governing document, with the reasoning written into the minutes.
The threshold that decides how much work this is sits at £1,000. If the total you want to redirect is £1,000 or less, the resolution takes effect the day you pass it, and the Commission never hears about it. Above £1,000, you have to ask the Commission to authorise the resolution, and it does not take effect until they do. That application goes to fundraisingappeals@charitycommission.gov.uk with your appeal literature, the value involved, your new purposes, your reasoning and a copy of the resolution.
So the £3,000 fridge surplus is a Commission application, a wait, and a board meeting. Not a disaster. Not nothing either.
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If you fall short, which is the worse problem
Here is the part that surprises people. Raising too little is procedurally heavier than raising too much.
With a surplus, nobody has to be contacted. With a shortfall, or where circumstances change so the project cannot go ahead, the starting point is that donors are entitled to a return of their donation. That changes the form of the whole exercise.
Assuming there is no secondary purpose, the process runs roughly like this.
- Donors who said at the time that they wanted their money back if the appeal failed must be contacted and repaid. You can deduct the reasonable cost of processing the return. If a donor tells you to keep it for other work, keep a record of them saying so.
- Some donations you do not have to chase. Cash collections – a bucket in a supermarket, a collection plate – and the proceeds of a lottery or competition are outside the donor-contact requirement. So are small donations, defined as an individual gift of £120 or less where you believe the same donor has given no more than £120 in total to that appeal in your charity’s financial year.
- What is left divides in two. For donations you plan to try to return, you must get the Commission’s written authorisation for how you intend to contact those donors before you do it – the method, and how long they have to claim. For donations where chasing would be unreasonable given the amount, the type or how long ago they were given, you must ask the Commission to authorise using them for new purposes instead.
- Only after all that do you reach the same resolution process as above, with the same £1,000 threshold.
An appeal that lands twenty per cent short can therefore generate more work than one that lands seventy-five per cent over. That asymmetry is worth knowing about in November rather than in February.
Writing the sentence before December
It takes about ten minutes, and it belongs in the appeal wording itself, not in a policy document nobody donating will ever see.
Three things to get right. Keep the secondary purpose as close as possible to what you originally asked for, because the Commission expects new purposes to be similar where that is possible and desirable. Cover both directions in one sentence – over and under – since wording that only mentions surplus leaves you exposed on the more difficult side. And put it where donors will actually read it: on the donation page and in the appeal copy, not buried in terms.
Two related points, since you are already in the wording.
Any figure you attach to a specific outcome needs evidence behind it. The Code requires appropriate evidence before you make a claim likely to be taken literally, and that includes claims about what things cost. If the appeal says £4,000 buys the fridge, you should have the quote on file. Nobody needs to see it publicly. You need to have it.
And keep your appeal records. The Commission folded its guidance on appeal wording and record keeping into CC20 in February 2026, and the reason it matters is practical: every one of the processes above starts with someone asking to see your appeal literature.
If you are already sitting on a surplus
Plenty of charities are, usually from an appeal two or three years ago that nobody wants to raise at a board meeting.
Two things worth separating out. Money that came to you restricted but not through an appeal – an underspend on a grant, or a donation for a specific thing you never asked for – is not covered by this process at all. Speak to the funder or the donor. And if the surplus is under £1,000, the board can resolve it at the next meeting and move on without involving anyone.
Above that, it is an email and a wait rather than anything worse. The Commission asks for false or misleading information to be taken seriously – knowingly or recklessly providing it is an offence under the Charities Act – but there is no penalty attached to having got the appeal wording wrong in the first place. Charities do it constantly. The failure the Commission notices is leaving restricted money unusable in an account for years rather than dealing with it.
Put it on the agenda before you write your next appeal, so you are not running two of these at once.
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