Charities are pulling back from side ventures — here's why a lottery partnership is different

Fewer charities are running social enterprises than four years ago. Meaningfully fewer.

In Grant Thornton's 2026 sector survey, the share of New Zealand charities running a social enterprise fell from 35% in 2022 to 15% in 2026. That's not a small shift. The report reads it as growing caution, organisations pulling back from new revenue ventures that ask them to carry extra operational and governance risk on top of what they're already managing.

If you're a charity considering any new funding model right now, including a lottery partnership, that data point deserves a straight answer, not a dodge. So here it is.

The honest question: isn't a lottery partnership just another risky new venture?

A social enterprise usually means the charity itself becomes the operator. New systems, new staff or volunteers, new compliance obligations, a new set of things that can go wrong, all sitting inside the charity's own walls. When it doesn't work, the charity absorbs that directly: the financial loss, the staff time already spent, sometimes the reputational cost of a venture that fizzled.

A lottery partnership, structured properly, isn't that. It's genuinely a different shape of arrangement: a joint undertaking where the operational and compliance weight, the DIA licensing pathway, the prize sourcing, the marketing execution, the day-to-day running of the campaign, sits with the partner running it, not the charity alone. The charity brings its mission, story and community. It isn't the one building or carrying the new infrastructure.

Why that distinction actually matters, not just as marketing language.

The report's own explanation for the social enterprise decline is specific: it's about the skills, governance and operational burden of running something new. That's precisely the burden a well-structured lottery partnership is designed to not put on the charity. It's the difference between "we're launching a new venture" and "we're lending our name and mission to a campaign someone else is built to run."

That's not a reason to skip due diligence. Any charity attaching its name to a public campaign should ask hard questions before it does: who's actually accountable if it underperforms, what happens to committed funds if a draw doesn't sell out, how compliance and reporting actually work in practice. Those are fair questions regardless of which model is on the table.

But the caution the data shows makes sense for the ventures it's describing. It doesn't automatically transfer to every new funding idea a charity is offered, and it's worth being able to tell the difference before assuming they're the same risk.