Both individual and organisational membership of Institute of Fundraising has grown over the last year, leading to a 5 per cent increase in its income, according to its latest set of accounts.

In the year to the 31 March 2016, the Institute of Fundraising’s individual membership grew 3 per cent to 5,700 while it’s organisational membership grew 17 per cent to 475 members.

As a result, the IoF’s total income increased by over 5 per cent to £4.7m, while its expenditure increased by just over 1 per cent to £4.3m. This left the organisation with an operational surplus of £332,161, almost double the surplus it had at the end of the last financial year.

Richard Taylor, chair of the IoF, who was presenting the figures to the organisation’s AGM yesterday, said that the increased membership figures were incredibly heartening considering the event of the past 12 months.

“This was a year that I think few of us would like to repeat. It was the hardest year for us – and I don’t mean just as trustees or as fundraisers – but as a fundraising community trying to make sense of what has happened."

He said that the IoF was conscious that “many of its members wanted us to speak and to defend fundraising practices in the UK” this time last year but that “sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible”.   

He said that the IoF instead decided to position itself as being “influential behind the scenes. Being involved in the discussions and to be trusted to be involved in those discussion so that we could make sure that the right discussions were being had”.

He said that the IoF did this to protect the self-regulatory system of fundraising. Taylor said: “It wasn’t an idle threat that the government wanted to impose statutory regulation on the sector. We came within a hare’s whisker of that happening”.

During the AGM, the IoF also appointed four new fellows and two new trustees to its board.