Best Programme Management Software for UK Charities in 2026

Programme management software built for charities lets you coordinate multiple programmes, track participants across services, measure outcomes per programme, and report to funders — all from one platform. Generic project management tools like Asana and Monday.com were designed for commercial teams, not for charities juggling funded programmes with distinct participant groups, outcome frameworks, and reporting deadlines.

This guide compares the leading options for UK charities in 2026, explains what features actually matter, and helps you choose the right platform for your organisation.

TL;DR

• Programme management for charities is fundamentally different from commercial project management — it centres on participants, outcomes, and funder accountability, not tasks and sprints.
• Generic tools (Asana, Monday, Trello) lack participant tracking, outcome measurement, and funder reporting — the three things charities need most.
• Purpose-built platforms like Plinth, Lamplight, and Upshot offer charity-specific features, but vary widely in scope and approach.
• Plinth is the most comprehensive option, combining case management, AI-powered reporting, grant tracking, bookings, and surveys in a single platform.

What Is Programme Management for Charities?

Programme management in the charity sector means overseeing multiple, often interconnected programmes that serve distinct groups of people with specific funded outcomes. A youth charity, for example, might run an employability programme, a mentoring programme, and an after-school activities programme — each with its own funder requirements, participant cohorts, and success measures.

With over 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales and more than 1.2 million people employed across the sector, the scale of programme delivery is enormous. Yet many organisations still manage this complexity through spreadsheets, disconnected tools, or systems designed for entirely different purposes.

Effective programme management for charities requires tracking:

• Participants — who is accessing each programme, their demographics, referral sources, and attendance
• Activities — what sessions, workshops, or interventions are being delivered and when
• Outcomes — what measurable change is happening for participants in each programme
• Budgets — how funding is being spent against each programme's allocation
• Funder reports — progress updates tailored to each funder's specific requirements

This is a fundamentally different challenge from managing a marketing campaign or a software development sprint.

Why Charities Need Dedicated Tools (Not Asana or Monday.com)

According to the Charity Finance Group, 80% of charities are exploring cost-cutting measures including staff reductions, while demand for services continues to rise across the sector. In this environment, the wrong software choice wastes time and money that charities cannot afford to lose.

Generic project management tools are designed around tasks, deadlines, and team workflows. They are excellent at what they do — but what they do is not what charities need. Here is why:

No participant tracking. Asana lets you create tasks and assign them to team members. It does not let you record that Sarah attended six mentoring sessions, completed a CV workshop, and moved into employment. Charities need person-centred records, not task lists.

No outcome measurement. Monday.com can track project milestones, but it cannot measure distance travelled on a wellbeing scale or record that 73% of programme participants improved their confidence scores. Outcome frameworks are central to charity programme management.

No funder reporting. Trello boards look great for internal workflows, but they cannot generate a report showing the National Lottery Community Fund how many participants achieved sustained employment outcomes in Q3. Funder reporting is non-negotiable for most charity programmes.

No cross-programme view of individuals. When a participant accesses three different programmes, generic tools have no way to show their full journey. Charities need a single view of each person across all services.

No safeguarding or data compliance features. Charity programme management involves sensitive personal data. With 56% of charities reporting difficulty filling vacancies, the last thing stretched teams need is bolting on GDPR compliance to a tool that was never designed for it.

The result: charities using generic tools end up maintaining parallel spreadsheets for participant data, outcome tracking, and funder reports — exactly the duplication that software should eliminate.

Key Features to Look For

When evaluating programme management software for your charity, these are the features that matter most:

Multi-Programme Tracking

Your platform should let you define and manage multiple programmes with distinct structures, each with their own activities, participant groups, and timelines. You should be able to see programme-level dashboards and drill down into individual programme performance without switching systems.

Participant Management

Every programme serves people. Your software needs to record who those people are, which programmes they are enrolled in, what sessions they attend, and what progress they make. A single participant record should link across all programmes — so when someone accesses your advice service and your employability programme, you can see their full journey.

Outcome Measurement Per Programme

Different programmes have different outcome frameworks. Your employability programme might track job starts and sustained employment. Your wellbeing programme might use validated scales like WEMWBS or the Outcomes Star. Your software should support configurable outcome measures per programme and aggregate results for reporting.

Budget Tracking

With grant applications surging by 30-50% across the sector, funders are scrutinising spending more closely than ever. Your platform should track expenditure against each programme's budget, flagging variances and supporting financial reporting to funders.

Cross-Programme Reporting

The real power of a programme management platform is seeing across all your programmes at once. How many people did you reach this quarter? Which programmes are on track and which need attention? Where are participants accessing multiple services? Cross-programme reporting turns siloed data into strategic insight.

Funder Reporting

Around 42.6% of charities had expenditure that exceeded income in recent years. Demonstrating impact to funders is not optional — it is essential for sustainability. Your software should generate funder-ready reports that pull data directly from programme records, eliminating manual report writing.

Programme Management Software Compared

Here is how the main options stack up for UK charities in 2026:

Plinth: The All-in-One Platform

Plinth brings together the six core capabilities that charities need for effective programme management in a single, integrated platform.

AI Case Management

Case Management in Plinth lets you create multi-programme pathways for each participant. A young person might be enrolled in your mentoring programme, attending weekly drop-in sessions, and receiving benefits advice — all tracked in a single case record. AI-powered case analysis surfaces trends and flags concerns, helping case workers prioritise their caseloads across programmes.

Monitoring & Reporting

Monitoring & Reporting provides live KPIs per programme, so you always know how each programme is performing against its targets. Dashboards update in real time as staff record activities and outcomes, eliminating the end-of-quarter scramble to pull together numbers. With the number of donors declining from 58% to 50% of the population since 2019, being able to demonstrate impact quickly and clearly has never been more important.

AI Grant Management

AI Grant Management tracks the funding behind each programme. Map grants to programmes, monitor spend against budgets, and keep on top of reporting deadlines. When four in five charities are dealing with board vacancies and over a third report a lack of financial expertise on their board, having automated budget oversight provides a critical safety net.

Impact Reporting with Agent Pippin

Impact Reporting uses Plinth's AI agent, Pippin, to generate cross-programme impact reports automatically. Instead of spending days pulling data from different sources and writing narrative reports, Pippin analyses your programme data and drafts funder-ready reports that you can review and send. For charities where 80% are exploring cost-cutting measures, automating reporting frees up staff time for frontline delivery.

Bookings

Bookings handles programme activity scheduling — workshops, group sessions, one-to-one appointments, and events. Participants can book onto programme activities, attendance is tracked automatically, and the data feeds directly into your outcome reporting. No more separate booking systems that do not talk to your programme records.

Surveys

Surveys let you collect feedback and outcome data directly from participants. Build pre- and post-programme questionnaires, distribute them digitally, and have the results flow automatically into your programme dashboards. This closes the loop between delivery and measurement without adding administrative burden.

Other Options Worth Considering

Lamplight

Lamplight is a well-established UK charity CRM that has been supporting the sector since 2004. It offers strong case management and activity tracking features, with a particular focus on day-to-day operational recording. Lamplight is a trusted Development Partner of the Lloyds Bank Foundation and holds ISO 27001 accreditation. It works well for charities focused on tracking casework and activities, though it offers more limited functionality for grant management, bookings, and AI-powered reporting compared to newer platforms.

Upshot

Upshot began as a performance management tool developed by the Football Foundation in 2009 and became an independent social enterprise in 2021. It now supports over 1,400 organisations and places outcomes at the heart of its measurement processes. Upshot is particularly strong for funders and deliverers who need to track progress against outcome frameworks. It offers monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) services alongside its software platform. However, it lacks integrated case management and booking features.

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

Salesforce is the world's leading CRM, and its Nonprofit Success Pack adapts the platform for the charity sector. It is highly configurable and can theoretically do almost anything — but that configurability comes at a cost. Most charities need a Salesforce partner or consultant to set it up, and ongoing costs can be significant. It is best suited to larger charities with dedicated IT resource and budget. For smaller organisations, it often represents more complexity than value.

Generic Tools (Asana, Monday.com, Trello)

These tools offer free or discounted nonprofit plans, which makes them tempting. They are genuinely good at what they do — managing tasks, deadlines, and team collaboration. If your charity only needs internal project coordination (planning a fundraising event, managing a website redesign), they work well. But for programme management — tracking participants, measuring outcomes, reporting to funders — they are the wrong tool for the job. You will end up building workarounds that consume more time than they save.

How to Choose the Right Platform

Selecting programme management software is a significant decision. Here is a practical framework:

Start with your reporting requirements. What do your funders need to see? Work backwards from your reporting obligations to identify the data you need to capture. Any platform you choose must make that reporting straightforward, not painful.

Count your programmes and participants. A charity running two small programmes with 50 participants has different needs from one running ten programmes serving 2,000 people. Make sure the platform scales with your ambitions.

Consider your team's digital confidence. With digital strategy remaining underdeveloped across the charity sector, ease of use matters as much as feature depth. The best software in the world is useless if your team cannot or will not use it.

Check integration options. Does the platform connect with your existing tools — your email system, your accounting software, your website? Integration reduces duplicate data entry, which is where most time gets wasted.

Ask about onboarding and support. The transition period is when most implementations fail. Ensure your chosen provider offers hands-on onboarding, training, and ongoing support that understands the charity context.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between programme management and project management for charities?

Project management is about delivering a defined piece of work with a start and end date — building a website, organising an event, or setting up a new office. Programme management is about overseeing ongoing, funded services that support people over time. A youth employment programme does not have a simple end date; it has rolling cohorts, continuous intake, outcome tracking, and funder reporting cycles. Programme management software needs to handle this ongoing complexity, which is why tools designed for one-off projects are a poor fit.

Can we use free tools like Trello or the free tier of Asana instead?

You can use them for internal team coordination — managing to-do lists, planning campaigns, or tracking a building renovation. But for programme management, the answer is no. Free tiers of generic tools lack participant records, outcome measurement, and funder reporting. The hidden cost of free tools is the staff time spent maintaining parallel spreadsheets and manually compiling reports. For a sector where recruitment is 10 percentage points harder than the national average, that staff time is your scarcest resource.

How long does it take to set up programme management software?

This varies significantly by platform. Highly configurable systems like Salesforce can take three to six months to implement with consultant support. Purpose-built charity platforms like Plinth, Lamplight, or Upshot typically take two to six weeks, depending on the number of programmes and complexity of your outcome frameworks. The key factor is data migration — if you are moving from spreadsheets, the setup process is usually faster than migrating from an existing system.

Do we need different software for each programme?

No — this is precisely the problem that programme management software solves. The whole point is having one platform where all your programmes live, so you can see cross-programme data, avoid duplicate participant records, and generate organisation-wide reports. If you find yourself needing different software for different programmes, your current system is not fit for purpose.

What about data security and GDPR compliance?

Any platform handling participant data must comply with UK GDPR. Look for providers with ISO 27001 certification or equivalent security accreditations. Purpose-built charity platforms typically handle consent management, data retention policies, and subject access requests as standard features. Generic project management tools rarely offer these capabilities, leaving your charity exposed to compliance risk.

Recommended Next Pages

• How to Track Programme Attendance — Practical methods for tracking attendance across multiple programmes
• Outcome Measurement for Youth Services — Frameworks and tools for measuring outcomes in youth programmes
• Charity KPI Examples — What to measure across programme delivery, fundraising, and operations
• Case Management — Learn how AI-powered case management supports multi-programme participant tracking
• Monitoring & Reporting — See how live dashboards keep every programme on track
• AI Grant Management — Discover how to link funding to programme delivery and automate budget oversight
• Impact Reporting — Find out how Agent Pippin generates cross-programme impact reports

Last updated: February 2026

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