Why Only 34% of UK Charities involve Service User Feedback

Only one in three UK charities actually bother to involve service users in designing and delivering services. An alarming 27% don’t involve beneficiaries at all – and even more are dabbling in occasional consultations rather than involving them on a regular basis.

That’s the chilling takeaway from Charity Digital’s probe into Beneficiary Feedback Mechanisms in 2025 – a pretty sobering picture of where the sector stands on co-design.

This article is aimed at UK charities who are using – or are thinking of using – a charity management system. You might be in the market for new digital tools, looking to revamp a referral pathway, or just trying to figure out why your staff are always grumbling about the systems you’ve invested in. Well, the link between co-design and confidence is pretty crucial to get your head around.

Co-design is about actively involving service users in shaping services, processes and digital tools – it’s not just a case of asking them after the decision has already been made. The basic argument is fairly simple: systems that haven’t had user input are destined to fail in practice. By bringing in beneficiaries through a co-design process, you end up with better services and more confidence among staff, trustees and funders.

Take the example of a medium-sized advice charity in the South West that rolled out a new case-management system back in 2022. But the staff just wouldn’t use it. No, they just reverted to spreadsheets and paper notes. The system was technically sound, but it had been designed around funder reporting requirements rather than how advisors actually worked with clients. It wasn’t until the charity went back to basics and ran some proper user testing sessions with beneficiaries and frontline workers in early 2023 that the system got reconfigured into something that people actually trusted.

The bits that follow cover the current state of user involvement in UK charities, why it matters so much for system confidence, some practical approaches to user testing and co-design, and some real-world examples from OPAL and LocalKind that your organisation can learn from straight away.

The Current State : How Many UK Charities are Actually Involving Service Users?

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers. Just a third of UK charities – that’s 34% – co-design or co-deliver with service users. At the other end of the spectrum, 27% of charities don’t involve users at all. And as for the rest, well, they fall somewhere in the middle – running the odd survey or focus group, but often only doing it when it suits funding applications rather than as an integral part of their day-to-day work.

These figures come from Charity Digital’s advocacy for Beneficiary Feedback Mechanisms and some sector surveys that were carried out between 2022 and 2023. And it shows that while most charities think it would be a good idea to get user feedback, they’re not actually putting it into practice.

Here are the three broad groups that we came up with based on this research:

• Co-designers (the 34%) : These are charities that have regular service-user panels, advisory groups, or co-created digital journeys. For these organisations, user input is a key part of how they develop and improve services.
• Occasional consulters: These charities run the odd survey, focus group or consultation, often around funding applications or major projects. Involvement is pretty hit-and-miss.
• Non-involvers (the 27%) : These charities just design systems and services internally – it’s usually a management team or external supplier leading the charge. And beneficiaries are just seen as recipients rather than participants.

So why do so many charities fall into those last two groups? Well, it’s often a case of time constraints, fear of raising expectations you can’t meet, or just assuming beneficiaries are “hard to reach”. Some charities might be worried about data protection when feeding insights into a UK charity management system.

The upshot is that most UK charities are still designing services and digital tools from the inside out. And that has all sorts of consequences for service quality, staff workload and trust in technology. The bits that follow explore why this matters so much and what you can do differently.

Why It Matters : Systems Built Without Users Rarely Work in Practice

A homelessness charity in Manchester decided to launch a new referrals process in late 2023. But this one had been designed by the operations team with input from their CRM supplier – no input from the people using the service at all. And the result was predictable. Rough sleepers were struggling to complete the online form – the language was all wrong, they were asking for information that people didn’t have to hand, and the confirmation emails were going to addresses that were rarely checked. Missed appointments went through the roof, engagement dropped, and staff ended up just taking referrals over the phone and filling in the data manually. Double work for them, and it just undermined confidence in the whole system.

This is not a one-off. When charities design without beneficiaries, you get a whole host of failure patterns:

• Forms and online journeys that are just too clunky for people with low digital literacy, or those accessing services on mobile devices under pressure.
• Appointment systems and comms channels that just don’t match real behaviour. A charity might default to email, but service users might be more comfortable with WhatsApp, SMS or just dropping in.
• Data capture built around funder requirements, not user experience. Which means frontline staff are just filling in fields to satisfy the system, rather than capturing any useful information. And then you’re left with incomplete or inaccurate records in your CRM software for UK charities.
• Safeguarding or consent processes that are technically ‘okay’ but still really unclear or intimidating for the people being helped – and that includes consent forms designed by lawyers that may well meet the rules but leave parents or young people completely bewildered about what they’re agreeing to.

When things go wrong because they haven’t been designed for people who are going to use them, confidence takes a hit in three key ways. Beneficiaries start to switch off or just provide the bare minimum of information. Frontline staff start to find workarounds which can mess up data quality. And managers lose trust in the reports and dashboards they’re getting because they know the numbers just aren’t reflecting what’s really going on.

This isn’t just a digital issue either. Paper-based processes, outreach models and governance structures can all suffer when the people who are supposed to be using them haven’t been involved in the design.

There’s a lot we can learn from public health co-design in this area. Studies on how to get parents on board with vaccine programs and tackle vaccine hesitancy in England have shown that getting communities involved in designing the materials and plans can really boost uptake and build trust. Research on the HPV vaccination program has shown that when you involve young people and families from the start, you get stronger outcomes than if you just send out top-down messages.

The parallel to social care and charity services is stark. If you want to improve young people’s access to mental health services, or help families navigate benefits systems, getting those groups involved in design is not just a good idea – it’s essential. It’s the difference between services that work and services that don’t.

Involving service users early is not about doing some tokenistic innovation – it’s about stopping avoidable failure.

Beneficiary Feedback Mechanisms (BFMs) – Turning Interaction into Insight

Beneficiary Feedback Mechanisms are structured ways for service users to share their views on services and systems, and for organisations to act on the insight that comes out of it. Charity Digital has been pushing the idea of using BFMs as a way to directly enhance service delivery by getting user voices into the heart of operational practice.

Any UK charity can implement simple, practical BFMs without breaking the bank. Here are some options to consider:

• Short, regular feedback requests via SMS or email after key interactions, such as advice sessions, group activities or events. Keep it to two or three questions.
• Physical feedback points in centres and community spaces. Comment cards, QR codes linking to simple mobile forms, and suggestion boxes still work well for different groups of people.
• Service-user panels or forums tied into governance, with clear routes for escalating issues to trustees or senior managers. These provide ongoing insights rather than just one-off snapshots.
• In-system prompts within a UK charity management system that allow staff to log user comments and suggestions in real time, linked to case records or activity logs.
• Anonymous digital suggestion boxes integrated with a charity’s website or client portal, giving people a safe space to provide feedback without being identified.

Effective BFMs have a few key characteristics in common. They’re easy for beneficiaries to use – using plain English, mobile-friendly and not requiring long surveys. They’re timely – asked soon after an experience while it’s still fresh. And they’re transparent – users are told how their feedback will be used and what’s been done as a result.

BFMs should feed directly into the charity’s CRM software or other central system. This lets feedback be analysed alongside outcomes, demographics and engagement patterns, turning individual comments into actionable evidence.

The confidence-building loop here is really important. Regular, structured feedback reassures staff and trustees that systems are working – or clearly signals where they’re not. That creates a culture of learning rather than blame, where spotting problems is valued.

Funders and regulators are increasingly expecting evidence that you’re listening to beneficiaries and responding to their needs. BFMs are not just a service tool – they’re also a governance and compliance asset, showing that the charity is taking accountability seriously.

Practical Co-Design Approaches for UK Charities

Co-design doesn’t have to mean big, costly projects. It can just be built into the way you work and into the adoption of a new UK charity management software. Here are some approaches that can work for small local charities as well as national organisations.

What makes co-design work in practice are three core approaches:

• User testing of digital tools
• Co-design workshops and working groups
• Ongoing feedback loops and iteration

User Testing of Digital Tools and Charity CRMs

User testing means watching real service users – and frontline staff – try to complete real tasks on a website, app or CRM software for UK charities, and learning from their struggles. It’s not about asking people what they think of a design – it’s about observing what they actually do.

Here are some concrete tasks you might want to test:

• A young person trying to self-refer to a mental health program via a web form on a mobile phone.
• A parent in Bradford booking an advice appointment using a portal linked to the charity’s case-management system.
• A volunteer recording a support visit in a UK charity management system after meeting an older person at home.
• A family trying to download and complete a consent form online before their adolescent children access a service.

Running low-cost user testing is a pretty straightforward process:1. Recruit 5 to 10 service users from different groups – people who are currently using or have recently used your service.

1. Give them something in return for their time – a voucher or a bit of expenses money – as per your charity’s rules and what’s right.
2. Use a simple script (“ok, show me how you’d book an appointment”) and record them on video, if they’re happy to be recorded.
3. Take note of where they get stuck, make mistakes, or just give up altogether. You want to see where users get confused, or make navigation mistakes, or have to bail out of the process because it’s just too hard. You’re looking for signs that your language is confusing, or that your system is asking for more than people can give.

What kind of things you want to find include any navigation errors, confusing language, points where users give up, and mismatches between what your system is asking for and what people are actually capable of giving.

The findings from your testing should then feed straight into making changes to the CRM software for UK charities, your forms, and the way your staff are trained.

Even a short afternoon of testing can spot some pretty major usability problems before you even roll out the new system – which can really boost your confidence in what you’re doing.

Co-Design Workshops and Service-User Working Groups

Co-design workshops are where you get all the different stakeholders together – service users, staff and sometimes even trustees – to work on shaping the service journey, content and policies. The whole point is to share the power and get the best of both worlds – professional knowledge and real life experience.

A typical workshop might look a bit like this:

• A quick and easy intro to the problem you’re trying to solve – eg: “how can we make our debt advice journey so people don’t drop out after that first call?”
• Doing some storytelling and journey mapping to get a real feel for what’s been going on in the service lately.
• Breaking into small groups to do some sketching and idea grabbing – and that might mean deciding what should be on the charity’s management system at each step.
• Then you get to prioritise those new ideas and decide which ones are gonna move forward.

The practicalities are pretty important too. The venue needs to be accessible, service users should get paid for their time, and you might need to get some interpreters or support workers in. And of course, you need to make sure that safeguarding boundaries are in place.

For digital projects – like choosing a new CRM software – the workshops should happen before you start looking for suppliers, and then again right before you go live. That way you can be sure that user needs are driving what you do, not just the final tweaks.

It’s well worth considering setting up a standing service-user working group or advisory panel that meets regularly – say, quarterly. That way you can make co-design a normal part of your governance, not just something that happens the odd time.

What you get out of a workshop – photos of the sketches, sticky notes, quotes from the users – you need to turn into clear requirements and user stories for your internal teams and suppliers. And by sharing some of the stories from these sessions you can get everyone on board with the co design process.

Feedback Loops, Iteration and Closing the Circle

Co-design is more of a cycle than a one-off event: you do the design, test it, refine it, roll it out, learn from it and then start all over again. That means that you need to be able to draw on some principles from systematic review and evidence-based practice – and that means using some of the same methods that researchers use when they’re designing studies.

What a feedback loop looks like in practice is pretty straightforward:

1. Get some feedback – either through big surveys, panels, user testing sessions or all of the above.
2. Look at what people are saying in your regular team meetings and governance reports.
3. Make some targeted changes to services, processes, or your charity management software.
4. Get the word out that you actually listened to someone and made a change.

It’s really useful to document those changes, and show how they came from user input. When staff and trustees see that you really do care about what users think, they’re more likely to invest their time in co-design activities.

You can even get some simple dashboards in place in your CRM software for UK charities to keep an eye on how feedback is going over time – things like satisfaction scores, completion rates, where people drop out. That gives you some real evidence to show your governors, and helps you figure out where to focus next time.

Start small. Take on one high impact journey – like the intakes and assessments process – and commit to doing three co-design cycles over the next 12 months. Once you’ve got things up and running, you can start to roll it out across more services.

The more you do it, the more of a culture you’ll build where it’s just normal to learn from users.

The Confidence Payoff: How Co-Design Strengthens Trust in Systems

Confidence in charities is pretty complex – its got three different levels.

Co-design helps with all three levels:

• Users get to see that their ideas really are being taken on board – and that builds trust and makes them more willing to engage.
• Staff who have seen users test out systems are more likely to trust the changes, and less likely to try to bypass the system by going back to paper or spreadsheets.
• Leaders get more reliable data from the charity CRM, because the forms and fields are actually usable – and staff are happy to keep records up to date.

So co-design is a win-win-win.

A 2023 Revamp of a London Youth Charity’s Referral Process

The youth charity took a long hard look at its online form and asked its young people where they thought it was getting in the way. Which bits of language were off-putting? What information were they being asked for upfront that they were really hesitant to share? After two rounds of reworking and retesting the form, it’s fair to say the results were quite remarkable – the completion rate went up significantly and people left the site less often. As a result, the charity had a much more accurate picture of things to begin with which made a big difference to the quarterly reports they send to the trustees.

And then there’s the external stuff – the charity has to account to funders and regulators as to how they got people involved in designing the system. Well, anyone who puts in the effort and gets service users involved in the co-design process will always have an easier time showing that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing and making a real difference.

Regulators and auditors reviewing governance tend to have more confidence in charities that’ve built co-design into their CRM for UK charities and risk management processes – and that’s especially true in sensitive areas such as domestic abuse, mental health, or immigration, where poor system design can do a lot of damage.

For a 66% of charities that aren’t consistently co-designing, this represents a missed opportunity to build trust, resilience and long-term sustainability.

Case Examples: OPAL and LocalKind’s Focus on Service Users

The following examples show how UK organisations have put co-design into practice and what benefits they’ve seen. We’ve kept the details fairly high-level to keep things private but the real practices underlying this stuff come from actual UK projects between 2020 and 2024.

OPAL: Putting the Focus on Older People in Their Support

OPAL is a regional UK charity that supports people aged 65 and over to live independently and stay connected. They get on with this through all sorts of stuff – social groups, befriending visits and signposting to local resources.

When it came to the design of their delivery, OPAL got their older service users involved in co-designing several bits and bobs:

• The format and timing of social groups and home visits.
• The questions and language used during assessments recorded in their charity management software.
• The communication methods for reminders and check-ins—phone calls, letters, or SMS depending on individual preference.

In 2021-2022, OPAL ran a few small group sessions with older people to map out what made a good visit versus a bad one. The participants discussed everything from how volunteers introduced themselves to what questions felt intrusive or irrelevant. These insights were then used to sort out the assessment templates and visit checklists.

The end result was pretty straightforward:

• Shorter, clearer assessment forms with fewer fields.
• Questions which were actually focused on what mattered to the older people – loneliness, mobility, confidence – rather than just what they needed to tick boxes for the funders.
• Recording of preferred communication channels and accessibility needs from the get-go.

The results were easy to measure. The older people reported feeling heard and respected, resulting in higher participation and retention in groups. Volunteers trusted the system because it reflected real conversations, not just abstract categories. And the managers got a lot more reliable data on social isolation and wellbeing, which helped a lot with funding bids in 2023-2024.

OPAL continues to run regular refresh sessions with service users to refine assessments and group formats, keeping the feedback loop alive.

LocalKind: Creating Personas and Journeys

LocalKind are a city-based charity network that co-design a modern digital presence and shared referral system in 2022-2023. Multiple small charities in a UK city wanted a common online front door for residents seeking help with debt, housing or food.

Their problem was clearly that their early prototypes, designed internally, were just too confusing. People started the referral process but then just gave up. The helplines got a load of confused calls from people who just didn’t know what the online system was asking for.

To sort this out, LocalKind used a co-design approach which included:

• Interviews and workshops with residents in specific neighbourhoods to understand their digital habits and barriers.
• Developing detailed personas based on real stories – “Amir, 24, zero-hours worker; Kelly, 38, single parent; David, 72, living alone.” Each persona included digital access habits, time constraints and preferred communication channels.
• Using these personas to sketch and test alternative online journeys and intake questions.

Their shared UK charity management system was configured based on these insights:

• Intake forms were shortened up and written in plain English, with optional sections for those who wanted to share more.
• The system allowed users to save and come back later – an absolute must for people juggling caring responsibilities or struggling to make ends meet.
• Staff views in the CRM for UK charities highlighted key risk indicators derived from persona research, such as risk of eviction or food insecurity, which helped to give a better steer.

The impact on confidence across the network was quite clear. Residents were more likely to complete referrals and knew what was going to happen next, which boosted trust. Frontline advisors trusted the system’s suggestions because they’d seen the underlying personas and user stories. And the trustees across the network felt more confident approving further investment in shared infrastructure, seeing clear evidence of user-centred design and improved outcomes over a 12-18 month period.

LocalKind’s approach is pretty replicable – any UK charity can start small with three or four co-created personas with service users and use them to inform system configuration.

From Not Getting It Right to Cracking It: Next Steps for UK Charities to Stand Out

With a worryingly low 34% of charities regularly involving service users in the design of their services and an alarming 27% not bothering at all, the scope for organisations to really make a difference and impress their funders is huge.

A step-by-step plan can make this a realistic goal:

Step 1 (In the next month or so): Have a think about where, if anywhere, service users are currently having any sort of say in how your organisation works—whether it’s services, processes or digital tools. Pick out one area where things are particularly clunky – perhaps that’s where most people tend to drop off or where staff keep having to work around the system.

Step 2 (Over the next 3-6 months): Give one or two small experiments a go – maybe a text message feedback system or a user panel, and one co-design activity, like a workshop or user testing session. And make sure you get people from different groups involved, so you get a good range of perspectives.

Step 3 (Within a year): Get feedback integrated into your organisation’s management system and governance reports. Show your staff and trustees how user insight has driven changes to the way things work. Use some concrete examples in board papers and team meetings to make it all feel more real.

Step 4 (After 12 months): Expand co-design to more areas of your services. Make sure it’s built into your organisation’s strategy, job descriptions and contracts with suppliers – that way, user involvement becomes the norm, not the exception.

Some extra things to bear in mind:

• Make sure you budget for co-design – time, facilitation and a bit of recognition for the people who take part.
• When buying new digital tools or CRM software, make sure to include user involvement requirements in your procurement criteria.
• Share what you learn and what you’re doing to involve service users with your peers, local infrastructure bodies and networks – lead the way and show others what can be done.

Charities that go beyond the 34% and make user involvement a key part of their everyday work will not only end up with better services – they’ll also earn the trust of the people they serve, their staff and their funders.

Think of one project coming up – a brand new online form, a new outreach service, a CRM upgrade etc. Decide now to involve at least five service users in design right through to evaluation. That decision could be the first step towards transforming your organisation, and how confident it is in the systems that support it.