National newspapers announce their Christmas 2025 charity partners
Howard Lake | 9 December 2025 | News
UK newspapers have launched their Christmas fundraising campaigns for selected charities, with most of them choosing several charity beneficiaries.
The Telegraph
The Telegraph’s 2025 Christmas Charity Appeal is supporting four charities that focus respectively on neurodegenerative disease, cancer research, assistance dogs and veterans’ wellbeing:
- Motor Neurone Disease Association
- Prostate Cancer Research
- Canine Partners
- The Not Forgotten
The appeal runs in print and online from its launch on 1 November through to January 2026, and included a reader phone‑in day yesterday where journalists and public figures staffed the lines. The phone-in has been part of the newspaper’s Christmas charity campaign since 1996.
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The newspaper is promoting case‑study features across the charities and the charities are featuring the partnership on their websites.
One of the charities has a direct relevance to one of the newspaper’s staff. Chris Lancaster, The Telegraph’s puzzles editor, has been supported by the MND Association since he was diagnosed with the illness two years ago
Online donations are handled by Charities Trust “Your donations will be processed by Charities Trust (registered charity number 327489) “who will deduct 4% of all funds raised (including on gift aid) to cover handling and transaction costs”.
While no overall 2025 financial target has been disclosed publicly, recent appeals, including that in 2024, have raised mid‑six‑figure sums, and the core aim is unrestricted income and profile for the four partners.
The Telegraph Christmas Charity Campaign has run annually for over 100 years.
The Times & The Sunday Times
The Times and The Sunday Times Christmas Appeal 2025 is backing three charities:
- Switchback (support for prison leavers)
- Kissing it Better (tackling loneliness through intergenerational activity)
- World Bicycle Relief (bikes for education and livelihoods in low‑income countries).
The partnership is positioned as a UK‑and‑global campaign around rehabilitation, loneliness and mobility, with an implicit ambition to match or exceed the £1.5mn raised in 2024.
The appeal launched in November and runs across the “festive period”, typically into early January, using long‑form features, reader donation pages and matched‑funding offers from philanthropic backers rather than a single telethon‑style event.
Like The Telegraph, online donations are handled by Charities Trust.
The Guardian and The Observer
The Guardian and Observer’s 2025 Christmas charity appeal is themed around “Hope” and supports a number of grassroots organisations including Citizens UK, with a focus on community organising, local cohesion and building a “power‑building fund” for neighbourhood‑level change.
Announcing the Christmas appeal The Guardian’s editor Katharine Viner said:
“This year’s theme, unapologetically, is hope. We are supporting grassroots charities, which, through their vital work at the heart of local neighbourhoods, nurture community pride and positive change, and provide a powerful antidote to polarisation, distrust and hate”.
Citizens UK’s announcement says the appeal runs from Friday 5 December to Sunday 11 January, with Guardian journalism highlighting local stories of organising around issues such as safety, welcome for migrants and the living wage.
No public income target has yet been published for 2025, but recent appeals have raised more than £1.7mn.
Citizens UK says that support from The Guardian’s appeal will enable it to launch a Power-Building Fund “to grow the skills, confidence, and collective power of communities across the UK”.
Online donations are handled by Charities Trust.
The other charities that will benefit from the appeal are:
- The Linking Network
- Locality
- Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust
- Who is Your Neighbour?
Daily Mirror (Reach plc)
The Daily Mirror’s 2025 Christmas appeal is supporting children’s technology charity Lifelites, raising funds to provide specialist digital and sensory equipment for children with life‑limiting conditions in hospices across the UK.
The Mirror presents the campaign, which launched on 30 November, around “unwrapping the magic of Christmas”, with a series of human‑interest features on families using Lifelites kit and a standing donation ask rather than a single headline financial target.
Coverage will appeal through December in print and online. The campaign is designed to extend access to Lifelites technology beyond the roughly 15,000 children currently reached.
Donations are handled via Lifelites’ website.
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is this year supporting Alzheimer’s Society in a joint campaign ‘Defeating Dementia’.
The campaign highlights the fact that dementia “is the UK’s biggest killer, yet it still sits far behind other conditions such as cancer, HIV and heart disease in terms of awareness, funding and public understanding”.
The first three days of the campaign, which launched on 6 December, have seen:
• Two front pages dedicated to dementia
• A 6,000% increase in people completing our online symptoms checklist
• A surge in people calling the charity’s Helpline “for the very first time” after seeing its support line number across the coverage
Charlotte Matier, Associate Director of High Value and Strategic Partnerships at the charity, said on LinkedIn:
“This is what amplification looks like when it works; when the right partners come together with a shared purpose…
“This partnership is just the beginning – a powerful demonstration of what’s possible when ambition, scale and purpose align. We’re excited for what comes next, and for the growing movement of partners who want to stand with us to defeat dementia together”.
- Newspaper and radio Christmas appeals in 2019 (11 December 2019)
- Newspaper Christmas appeals 2024: who is supporting whom in 2024 (10 December 2024)
- Newspaper Christmas appeals 1999 (29 November 1999)
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.