ENCC London 2026: A Two-Day Dispatch from the Frontlines of Third Sector Digital
Over two days and dozens of sessions, there was one resounding message: The charity and non-profit sector is doing remarkable work — but at a moment when many of our long-held institutions are in peril, causes must work together to amplify their collective voice.
The Engaging Networks Community Conference (ENCC) returned to Central London on the 19th and 20th of May, bringing together charity professionals, campaigners, digital strategists, and agency partners for two days of case studies, keynotes, and workshops. Each session over the two-day gathering was framed with the kind of frank, practical conversation that only happens when like-minded people can bond in the same room.
Part conference, part reunion, ENCC has a way of feeling less like a professional event and more like a gathering of old friends who happen to share a mission. Colleagues who haven’t crossed paths in a year pick up mid-conversation. New attendees are folded in immediately. The energy is collegial, generous, and — perhaps especially this year — a quietly defiant kind of optimistic.
As Engaging Networks President and Chief Operating Officer, Clinton O’Brien, put it after day one: “Hanging out with — and learning from! — our inspiring charity clients is exciting and life-affirming. You come away feeling very hopeful about the tenacity and innovation that’s on full display.”
Leah Meers, Vice President of Client Success at Engaging Networks, put her finger on exactly what makes these gatherings worth the trip: “ENCC London is always an amazing opportunity to step away from the day-to-day and connect in person,” she said. “It was so energizing to see organisations ask real tactical questions, get practical, immediate answers, share inspiring campaign examples, and have honest conversations with others who truly understand the work. I’m grateful to be a part of a community that shows up so openly with each other.”
That spirit was felt across both days. One attendee — an advocacy campaign manager at Cancer Research UK — summed it up neatly on LinkedIn: “Informative, intriguing and inspiring. I’m feeling reinvigorated and excited to take cross-sector learning on tactics, tech, and working together back.”
Here’s what happened at ENCC London.
Day One: Wins, Hope, and Lessons from the Global View
The Morning: Advocacy That Delivered
The opening sessions made one thing clear: UK charities are winning. UNICEF UK and the End Child Poverty Coalition walked through how a near-decade of coalition campaigning finally abolished the two-child limit on Universal Credit, lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.
The MS Society recounted a rapid-response campaign that drew over 100 MPs to a parliamentary reception and, at the eleventh hour, pushed the government to drop planned restrictions to Personal Independence Payments — protecting up to £6,000 a year for over 22,000 people with multiple sclerosis.
Later, Young Women’s Trust showed how moving beyond petition volume toward genuine parliamentary relationship-building produces a different — and better — kind of impact.
A running theme across these sessions: The UK charity sector, long focused on advocacy, is now successfully fusing it with fundraising. These aren’t parallel tracks anymore. Done strategically, on the right tooling, both forms of campaigning reinforce each other, and the numbers prove it.
Borrow Globally, Act Locally
The breakout session that generated the most conversation was Paul Hayward’s “Fundraising Without Borders.” Paul, who has worked across the UK, Europe, the US, and Canada, made a compelling case that most organisations are only drawing on their own market’s strengths — and leaving a lot on the table.
Europe, particularly the Netherlands, has turned transparency into a growth strategy. Greenpeace Netherlands gives supporters dashboards showing campaign costs and outcomes. Trust in EU charities has been rising for a decade, but in the UK, it’s been falling. The correlation with giving is direct.
North American nonprofits, meanwhile, are masters of storytelling — making supporters the hero, not the organisation. Planned Parenthood’s supporter database is one of the largest in the world, built in part because over 40% of its total donor audience came from advocacy. Integrated teams with integrated asks.
Paul’s challenge to the room: Stop chasing platforms, find your audience. TikTok converts at 60% higher rates than Facebook ads. Gen Z and Millennials trust people, not institutions. And the real metric shift? Stop measuring cost per lead. Measure lifetime value. Paul advised that charities take note of what’s successful in other parts of the world, and poach the tactics that work best for individual charities.
The Afternoon Keynote: Why We Bother
If the morning was about mechanics, the afternoon opened with something more human. Stefanie Pfeil of Give Rise Consulting delivered a keynote that drew the room into quiet reflection before sending them back out energized.
Stefanie began with her own story of burnout — and her decision to find a different way through rather than walk away. Her core argument: Most people care about the world’s problems, but often struggle with what caring (and the next action) is supposed to look like. And the sector’s default responses — outrage, doom, jargon — are actively counterproductive. Angry campaigns close doors. “Doomy” content performs on social media, but underperforms in the donation box.
Her remedy was practical. “Hope is a practice,” she told the room. It requires deliberate cultivation: action (which tells your brain you have agency), awe (which recharges it), memory of how far things have already come, and curiosity about what didn’t work and why.
The concept she returned to most was the philosophy of African origin, Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — which emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals with their society. The concept was popularized in South Africa in the 1990s as the country transitioned from apartheid. Applied in practice to the charity world, Stefanie encouraged campaigners to embrace a vision of supporters as co-owners of the mission, not its recipients. Her message landed.
The afternoon’s case studies brought further momentum.
CPRE’s Rooftop Solar Campaign mobilised over 10,000 supporters behind a private members’ bill and secured recognition from more than half of UK MPs. Alzheimer’s Society set out to collect a few hundred consultation responses from people with lived experience; over 1,000 showed up. And Jason Potts of Delve Deeper closed the main stage day with a grounded look at how fundraisers are actually using AI — not as a buzzword, but to build audience profiles that make creative and segmentation decisions faster and smarter for campaigners with increasingly strained resources.
Day Two: Agility, Consent, and a Rallying Cry
The Morning: Growth, Email, and the Soft Opt-In
Day two opened with one of the conference’s most striking growth stories. Jimmy Perkins of Action Against Hunger UK described how his organisation grew its email list from 7,000 to over 110,000 in two years. These results were not through a single campaign, but through a structural change: a weekly cross-team meeting with partner agency Forward Action to scan the news and respond in real time.
When the war in Gaza escalated, they were ready. Their ceasefire petition drew over 250,000 signatures. Daisy chain fundraising asks generated over £80,000 in donations and recruited more than 2,000 new regular givers. For an organisation that had previously relied on restaurant partnerships for revenue — a model the pandemic quietly dismantled — digital had become the primary income stream.
Next, The Children’s Society made the case for a transition many Engaging Networks clients are now undertaking: moving from the platform’s legacy Email Classic module to the newer Marketing Tools module. Their rebuilt email programme — modular, scalable, better segmented — demonstrated that the investment in migration is worth it.
The soft opt-in dominated the mid-morning. The Fairtrade Foundation gave an honest, in-progress account of navigating the new UK law, and the room’s response confirmed this is landing squarely in many teams’ inboxes. The mood: cautious optimism. Real opportunity, approached carefully.
The Panel That Asked the Harder Questions
After lunch came the session that sharpened the conference’s emotional arc into something more urgent. “Are We Still Playing Catch Up?” — a panel featuring Ana Guzman of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Berry Cochrane of Forward Action, Paul de Gregorio of Rally, and Engaging Networks’ Camille Teasdale — picked up from last year’s mapping of the right’s digital playbook and asked what progressives have actually done about it since.
The answers were honest. And at times, uncomfortable. Paul observed that charities are still reluctant to enter the political ring, defaulting to neutrality when persuasion is what the moment demands. A single human voice telling stories with occasional political conviction, he noted, is now more powerful than institutions acting alone.
Berry pointed to a structural problem: Progressive organisations operate in silos while the right exploits the algorithm collectively, and some of the most harmful campaigns aren’t even ideological, just profit-seeking, which makes these voices harder to counter.
Ana then connected the dots to lived experience: Young people are increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs or relationships, and bad actors are filling that void with hate, blame, and disunity — bad faith weaponizing real societal issues.
The call to action from the panel was practical and pointed. Let’s meet people where they are. Speak plainly without talking down to them. Tighten your risk appetite and be willing to say clearly what you stand against. Stop waiting for the perfect progressive ally — the pressure to be ideologically pure is pushing away potential friends of your cause. And start planning now, while there’s still room to organise.
The phrase that crystallized it: “We can argue later.” Everyone is welcome in the movement. Unite first. Smaller differences can wait for when the storm settles.
Closing the Loop
The afternoon’s sessions returned to craft — Andrew Taylor-Dawson and Freedom for Animals on building supporter journeys that convert; RSPB’s “Postcards from Nature” campaign, which solved MP template fatigue by making every single letter unique and locally rooted.
And closing keynote speaker Keira Roth of The Developer Society delivered ENCC’s final provocation to advocacy campaigners in the UK: “The tools are fine. We’re the problem.”
Drawing on a year of interviews with MPs and parliamentary researchers after watching campaigns land from the other side of a ministerial inbox, Roth’s message was clear — campaigns are often poorly timed, targeted bluntly, and sent to people with no clear path to act. The technology isn’t the bottleneck. The strategy is.
Keira’s thoughts on an easier way: With the rise of AI-generated advocacy messaging creating more noise, MP offices are leaning on the same technology to respond to the mass of inbound messages. With the resulting machine-to-machine communication loop, it’s time to return to how humans actually operate and focus on personal connections.
Consider the following questions in crafting smarter, more effective messaging: Does the MP have the ability to act on the issue? Motivation — Do they care about the issue? Are they motivated to act promptly to do something about the advocacy motion? Engagement that prioritizes the MP’s self-interest (making them look good), quick wins for the MP, and local outcomes will be the most successful results.
Two Days, One Takeaway
Hope is the right frame for ENCC London 2026, but not the passive kind. The kind of hope that’s forged in campaign wins, honest conversations, cross-sector learning, and the willingness to work with people you don’t entirely agree with toward goals that matter. The kind that shows up when a room full of people who work on hard problems choose to share what they know with each other.
“We can argue later” is more than a conference soundbite. For a sector navigating a difficult political moment, it’s a strategy.
After a happy hour nearby, ENCC London 2026’s two full days came to a close.
A Thank You to Our Sponsors
ENCC London 2026 would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors, whose commitment to the sector makes these gatherings happen year after year: C6 Digital, Delve Deeper, Care2, Forward Action, Rosterfy, We Could Even, and Root Cause Collective.
Missed It? Watch the Sessions
Videos from the main stage sessions will be available soon here.
The Engaging Networks Community Conference also takes place annually in Toronto and Washington D.C. ENCC D.C. is coming up on October 14–15, 2026, at Convene, 1201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington. If you’re State-side, we hope to see you there!
