Fundraising after the reset How 2026 changes everything

By Harvey Duthie, CEO, Belmont Fundraising

As we get ready to attend The Humanitarian Finance Summit we reflected again on the fact that if Davos 2026 confirmed anything, it is that the humanitarian sector is no longer navigating a funding cycle — it is navigating a structural break.

Last year’s Global Humanitarian Assistance data already told the story many organisations were reluctant to fully internalise: the era of dependable aggregate growth in humanitarian funding is over. International humanitarian assistance recorded its largest-ever contraction, with public donor funding reversing course and future projections pointing to declines severe enough to reset the system by nearly a decade. The sector is not simply facing volatility; it is facing permanent constraint.

Against this backdrop, Q1 of 2026 is not “business as usual with tighter budgets.” It is the first operating period of what may become a fundamentally different fundraising environment.

Fundraising teams therefore face a critical question:

What do you do when the old assumptions about donor behaviour, government support, and revenue growth no longer hold?

Below are Belmont Fundraising’s four priorities that should shape fundraising strategy in the opening months of 2026.

1. Reframe the Case for Support around scarcity, not expansion

For more than a decade, humanitarian fundraising narratives implicitly rode on the expectation of system growth. Emergencies escalated, but funding volumes broadly followed. That relationship has broken.

The GHA findings show a system absorbing historic reductions while needs continue to rise. In such a landscape, traditional messaging centred on scale and ambition risks sounding detached from reality.

In Q1, fundraising teams should stress-test their core propositions:

• Are you still speaking the language of expansion?

• Do your donor materials acknowledge trade-offs and constraints?

• Are you explaining prioritisation, not just need?

Donors — institutional and private alike — are increasingly aware that organisations are making hard choices. Transparency about those choices builds credibility. Pretending abundance persists erodes it.

2. Prioritise donor retention economics ruthlessly

When overall funding contracts, retention stops being a metric and becomes a survival variable. Acquiring new donors into a declining system is vastly more expensive than protecting existing revenue streams. Yet many organisations still structurally favour acquisition because it feels like growth.

In early 2026, fundraising leaders should:

• Model revenue risk from even small drops in retention

• Increase investment in stewardship journeys

Retention is no longer simply about loyalty; it is about income stability in an unstable market. Teams that treat donor attrition as inevitable background noise will struggle. Teams that treat it as a controllable financial risk will outperform.

3. Rebalance toward fewer, deeper funding relationships

One of the quieter implications of large-scale donor cuts is concentration risk.

The GHA analysis highlights how heavily many response architectures depend on a small number of donors and channels. That fragility now affects NGOs’ own income portfolios.

Q1 is the moment to examine:

• Which donors or segments underpin disproportionate revenue?

• Where is your exposure to single-source shocks?

• Which relationships justify deeper strategic cultivation?

  
  

In constrained environments, diversification is not just about adding donors — it is about reducing vulnerability to sudden withdrawal. This often means shifting effort away from low-yield volume tactics toward higher-touch, longer-horizon partnerships.

4. Integrate finance reality into fundraising strategy

Fundraising strategies built in isolation from organisational finance models will increasingly fail.

Why?

Because programmatic capacity, cost structures, and funding volatility are now tightly coupled. The GHA report underscores that many agencies are already facing workforce reductions, programme retrenchment, and operational redesign.

Fundraising teams should therefore:

• Align targets with credible delivery capacity

• Understand cost-to-raise implications under different scenarios

• Avoid building plans dependent on optimistic funding rebounds

The question is no longer “How much can we raise?” but “What revenue profile is realistic given system contraction?” Financial realism is becoming a core fundraising competence.

Download the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2025 here - https://hfforum.org/resources/publications/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2025

Find out more about our global work here: www.belmontfundraising.com