Charity Today

Charity Today is a Peterborough-based online news service dedicated to the United Kingdom's charity and voluntary sector, publishing news, features and campaign coverage for charities, fundraisers and the communities they serve. Founded and edited by Lee B. Rayment, it was created to give charitable organisations a dedicated news platform of their own — a place where a village fundraiser, a national appeal or a policy change affecting charities could be treated as the main story rather than a footnote. Around the news service, Rayment has built two national institutions: the National Charity Today Awards, established in 2014, and UK Charity Week, an annual campaign that mobilises charities across the country. Published by UK News Broadcasting Ltd and carrying its own ISSN, Charity Today operates as a small, founder-led title with an outsized footprint in the sector it serves.

Founder and purpose

Lee B. Rayment founded Charity Today to provide dedicated news coverage for the UK charity and voluntary sector, and remains its founder and editor. The founding premise was simple: Britain's charities — more than a hundred thousand registered organisations, plus countless community groups — generate news constantly, yet lacked a popular news outlet written for them and about them. Mainstream media tends to cover the sector at moments of scandal or celebrity involvement; Charity Today covers its everyday life: grants won, services launched, volunteers recruited, campaigns started, and the people behind them. Rayment has spoken openly about his own mental health journey and about doing the work, paid or unpaid, for the right reasons — an ethos that runs through the publication's celebratory, supportive tone.

Peterborough roots

The publication is rooted in Peterborough, the Cambridgeshire cathedral city listed as its base. Its flagship awards are presented in the city — the 2025 National Charity Today Awards presentation and lunch took place at the Holiday Inn Peterborough West — and its civic presence there is substantial. Rayment's work has been recognised locally with a Civic Leader Award, presented at a centenary gala that itself raised money for the Cambridgeshire Community Foundation, and with a Highly Commended distinction in the Change Maker category at the Peterborough Community Business Awards. These honours reflect a deliberate local anchoring: a national title with a home city, visibly contributing to its community rather than operating as a remote content operation.

What Charity Today publishes

The news service covers the full breadth of charitable life. National campaigns and appeals sit alongside community fundraising stories; charity appointments, mergers and service launches are reported alongside policy and regulatory developments affecting the sector, from fundraising regulation to government support schemes. Features celebrate individual fundraisers and volunteers, while practical material supports the sector's work — the publication's coverage around UK Charity Week, for instance, shares guidance for would-be volunteers and best practice for organisations recruiting them. A weekly newsletter complements the website, and media directories classify the title among the UK's leading charity news outlets, with an online platform reaching charity professionals and supporters nationwide.

The National Charity Today Awards

Established in 2014, the National Charity Today Awards have become the publication's flagship institution. The awards recognise outstanding individuals and organisations across the UK charity sector — charities, businesses and the people whose contributions often go unseen — with the aim of inspiring others to get involved in their communities. By 2025 the awards had reached their eleventh annual edition, culminating in a presentation lunch and dinner in Peterborough where finalists are honoured in person. The programme has been developed deliberately: Rayment has described taking development phases — stepping back to rebuild a stronger structure — before returning with a more ambitious programme, an approach later applied to UK Charity Week as well. Sponsorship and production partnerships support the event, which serves as the sector's annual celebration as much as a competition.

UK Charity Week

Rayment also founded UK Charity Week, an annual national campaign hosted by Charity Today that brings charities, businesses and communities together each December. The week runs on daily themes designed to give organisations of every size a way in: a Celebration of Charity day opens proceedings, followed by Give 5 Day — encouraging people to donate five pounds, five items or five hours of volunteering — a Charity BIG Bake Day of fundraising baking, a Volunteers' Day sharing inspirational stories and recruitment guidance, a Christmas Jumper Day of festive fundraising, a day spotlighting the Charity Today Awards winners, and a closing Fundraising Day examining the craft and challenges of raising money. Downloadable resources help charities run each day. After a decade of growth, the campaign entered a strategic overhaul, with Rayment arguing it must move beyond social media posts towards equipping charities with tools, guidance and visibility that produce measurable results — more money raised, greater awareness, more lives changed — while the daily themes remain unchanged.

Publisher and formal status

Charity Today is owned and published by UK News Broadcasting Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, and the site carries the registered ISSN 3050-0249 — the serial identifier that marks it as a continuing publication in the formal record. This structure distinguishes it from an informal blog: it is a constituted news title with a publisher, an editor and a decade-long institutional presence through its awards. Its registered office is in London, while its editorial heart and events remain in Peterborough — a common pattern for small digital publishers, and one that underlines the title's dual identity as both a local institution and a national service.

Tone and relationship with the sector

Charity Today's editorial stance is unmistakably supportive. Where much sector coverage in trade titles is managerial — governance, finance, regulation — Charity Today writes in a register closer to community journalism: positive, personal and campaigning for participation. It cheers successes, promotes fundraising efforts, and treats small charities' milestones as newsworthy. That tone is a strategic choice for a founder-led title whose influence depends on the sector's goodwill: charities supply stories, enter awards and join the campaign because the publication is visibly on their side. The risk of such closeness — softness — is balanced by utility: the news, guidance and recognition the title provides are services the sector demonstrably uses.

Recognition of the founder

The honours Rayment has received chart the publication's growing civic standing. The Civic Leader Award recognised impact beyond individual projects, within the wider community; the Change Maker Highly Commended distinction at the Peterborough Community Business Awards placed Charity Today's work alongside the city's businesses and community leaders. At these events the Rayment family has itself contributed to the fundraising — a detail the publication reports with the same openness it applies to its founder's reflections on mental health. In founder-led media, the editor's public character becomes part of the brand, and in this case that character — persistence, candour and community commitment — is central to how the title is understood.

Place in charity media

Britain's charity media landscape includes management titles for charity leaders, fundraising publications with roots in the 1990s, and the charity desks of national newspapers. Charity Today occupies the populist end of that landscape: an online news platform and newsletter aimed at the whole sector — trustees, staff, volunteers, fundraisers and supporters — rather than only its executive class. Its combination of news, national awards and a mass-participation campaign week is unique among UK charity titles, giving a small Peterborough operation a calendar of institutions that larger publishers might envy. For the directory reader, its significance lies in that reach into grassroots charitable life, where most of the sector's activity actually happens.

The road ahead

The publication's recent direction is consolidation and deepening: a rebuilt UK Charity Week intended to thrive for another decade, an awards programme in its second decade, and continued daily news from a sector under financial pressure, where rising demand and difficult fundraising conditions make visibility more valuable to charities, not less. Rayment's stated conviction — that the best is still to come — is the optimism of a founder who has already built, from a Peterborough base, a news service, an awards institution and a national campaign week. Whatever its next chapter, Charity Today has established the principle it was founded on: the charity sector deserves its own headlines.