Major donors will play an important role in helping the Prince's Trust vastly increase its charitable scope in the UK and internationally, the charity's head of philanthropy said yesterday.

Claudia Knights, speaking at Fundraising First Thing yesterday, said that the organisation planned to “reach 1 million young people in the next ten years,” as many as have already been helped by the trust in its 40-year history.

In order to achieve these charitable aims, Knights said the trust needs to completely overhaul the way it works with its major donors as things stand now.

Despite reaching over 50,000 disadvantaged young people a year, the scale of the problem remaining in the UK means that those sorts of figures are “nowhere near good enough”, she said.

“While youth unemployment has started to go down, there’s still a core, 30 per cent demographic we find in our youth surveys for whom that hasn’t changed,” said Knights. “We know that we’re not going to grow as an organisation and help more young people if we keep doing the same things that we are doing today.”

Many of the trust’s major donors, according to Knights, are engaged in "transactional giving" which, despite keeping the organisation at a “plateau” of £5m a year, was “not the sorts of ‘transformational giving’ conversations we could be having,” considering the size and scope of the charity.

Knights said that outlining the trust’s plans to expand its charitable aims has led to “seven-figure conversations, where before they were maybe five-figure conversations” with many of the organisation’s major donors.

Knights said that the charity was gearing up to do more international work, but gave little detail.

• Fundraising First Thing is a bi-monthly peer learning event for fundraisers run by Fundraising magazine. The next event will be discussing the untapped potential of Crowdfunding, and will take place on 14th May. More information and booking details are available here