Published: 22 May 2025

By Nicola Perrin, CEO, AMRC

Medical and health charities are now the top cause to donate to in the UK, receiving 43% of all public donations in 2024. Our member charities use this money to fund vital research that improves lives and offers hope to countless people. We’re proud to support them to be as effective as possible as they find new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.

Over the past five years, we’ve made significant progress in achieving the goals of our previous strategy: from securing £115 million in government funding for charity-funded early career researchers to updating guidance on a range of responsible research funding topics. You can find out more about our impact in this report.

To help inform the development of our new strategy, we gathered feedback from over 100 member charities. Their overriding message was ‘more of the same’: 91% considered AMRC membership good value for money, 93% think of it as a badge of quality, and 90% say we influence policy and support them well or very well. They want us to continue to offer training and networking opportunities as well as focus on a sustainable research funding environment.

In addition to collecting our members’ insights, we conducted an external stakeholder perceptions survey. We were pleased to discover they are very familiar with AMRC, overwhelmingly positive about their relationships with us, and recognise the importance of our ability to represent the diversity of our membership. Moving forward, they are keen to see us being more future-focused.

Taking all of this into account, we are clear on our purpose: to champion, support and connect UK medical research charities, helping them fund the best research and improve health for everyone. Our new strategy builds on the success of our previous work, but with two important changes to help members stay on the front foot and navigate challenging and uncertain times.

Firstly, we recognise that our members are increasing efforts to accelerate patient access to innovations. While providing ongoing support for discovery science, we’ll strengthen our focus on charity activity along the whole research pipeline, including translation, clinical research, and uptake and implementation.

Secondly, our members tell us that the biggest challenge they face is demonstrating impact. Recognising that this as an area where we need to do more, we’ll share guidance, tools and best practice to help our members showcase their impact.

Now we’ve caught you up on how we developed the strategy we’re excited to share our goals for 2025-2030:

• to ensure our charities are not only expert and responsible funders but are valued as such,
• that they can fund into a thriving research environment,
• and that they can deliver and demonstrate health impact.

Underpinning this, we will continue to provide an excellent membership service, taking pride in our work to champion, support and connect our charities.

On that note, we know how crucial our website is for accessing our resources whether its research funding guidance, sector impact reports or training events. From today, you can explore our refreshed website, with a hopefully much-improved navigation and design.

It’s incredible to think how far we’ve come in the 38 years since a small group of charities formed the AMRC. As we embark on the next five years, we will continue to fulfil our purpose and goals with an unwavering commitment and determination.