Sir Alec Reed, who has died aged 91, built a hugely successful employment agency, one of the UK’s largest private businesses. But he will also be remembered as the man who changed the face of British philanthropy. His Big Give organisation – an imaginative way of involving rich donors in supporting charities – now raises more money at Christmas time than the BBC’s Children in Need or Comic Relief. His own foundation draws its funds from its holding of 18% of the Reed group. He used to joke that Reed employees worked one day a week for charity.

When he was knighted in 2011 for services to business and charity he said: “Without business there would be no charity – but without charity, what’s the point of business?”

His big idea was to make it easier for wealthy people, unsure about how to become significant charity donors, to find a suitable cause. He upended the traditional pattern of charities searching for donors and established the Big Give website to help potential donors find suitable charities. Its Christmas Challenge in 2024 raised a record £44.7m through match-funding, where donors pledged to match public donations. Its target is to reach £1bn by 2030.

The endlessly enthusiastic Reed wanted to be remembered as “someone who laughed a lot and attempted to improve the lives of others. I don’t just mean the poor … I also mean those rich people suffering from financial obesity.”

Reed was born in Hounslow, west London, the younger son of Nancy (nee Underwood) and Leonard Reed. His father, a lithographer, supervised the production of such wartime propaganda posters as Keep Calm and Carry On for the Ministry of Information. Alec was a resourceful boy. At age 10 he and his brother launched a business selling toy soldiers moulded from the lead they collected on bomb sites. But he did not shine at school. He failed his 11-plus and his first school report at Drayton Manor grammar described the boy who would later fund a local academy as “lazy, inattentive and exerts himself to prevent his neighbours from working”.

He fancied becoming a farmer but failed the agricultural college exam, and left school at 16 to work as an office boy in a vehicle exporter until he was called up for national service in the Royal Engineers. Again rejection followed. He was refused a commission on the grounds of his “muddled thinking”, but he still managed to broker a profitable new contract for the bus services that served the base.

His mother insisted he should study for a company secretary qualification. He passed at the third attempt, enough to secure a trainee accountant job at the nearby Gillette factory. His breakthrough came when dealing with the payments to recruitment agencies. He was struck by how much they could charge, in spite of their apparently low overheads. So in 1960 he set up his own recruitment agency in Hounslow, taking £75 from his Gillette pension savings. A year later he married Adrianne Eyre, with whom he would have two sons, James and Richard, and a daughter, Alexandra.

Cashing in on the expansion of businesses round Heathrow, he opened 10 branches within three years and Reed Employment, now simply Reed, soon became a familiar name on high streets. By 1969 he had 75 branches and in 1971 floated on the stock market, although he retained a third of the shares.

A year later he was taking his first steps into the charity world. In his 20s Reed had become a practising Christian (though later he turned agnostic) and volunteered in a project to assist drug addicts. This led him to establish Addicts Rehabilitation Charity (ARC) to help former addicts into work, the first of his charitable enterprises. These included Reed Restart for the rehabilitation of female prisoners, Womankind Worldwide and Women at Risk, to support women suffering physical and mental abuse, and Ethiopiaid, set up in 1989 with his donation of £1m after a visit to Ethiopia, and which has donated £28m for empowering women and girls and increasing access to healthcare and education.

He established his own Reed Charity in 1972, reconstituting it in 1985 with a £5m profit from the sale of a chain of 50 pharmacies he had built up. It took an 18% stake in the Reed Group and was renamed the Reed Foundation. In 2023 it had assets and investments of more than £25m.

His employment business remained buoyant in spite of the impact on the jobs market of frequent recession and in 1995 Reed became the first to spot the potential of the internet, launching the first UK recruitment website, and at one point charged its competitors to advertise. The idea had come through a scheme in which Reed, who liked to describe himself as an “ideas” man, rewarded staff for suggestions. In this case the trainee responsible received £100,000.

He handed over to his son James as chief executive in 1997 but continued as an active and sometimes critical executive chairman until becoming non-executive in 2000. In 2004 he took the title “founder at large”.

In 2005 he took great satisfaction when the company was taken private again. He said: “We were just an unpaid greyhound on the [London] Stock Exchange. They would bet on us and didn’t add anything.”

His outside interests spread wide, with a strong focus on education. He was one of the first to take advantage of the 2000 Learning and Skills Act which facilitated the creation of academy schools, and helped establish the West London academy. Controversially he argued that it did not need an extensive library in the age of the internet, nor to teach foreign languages. It was later renamed the Alec Reed academy.

He was a member of the council of Royal Holloway, University of London and taught entrepreneurship at its school of management. In 1972 he set up his own Reed College of Accountancy, now the Reed Business School, in the Cotswolds.

He credited his wife for encouraging an interest in the arts. He was a major donor to the Royal Ballet and supporter of the choreographer Matthew Bourne, and an enthusiastic amateur portrait painter.

Reed is survived by his wife and children, as well as 11 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

• Alec Edward Reed, businessman, born 16 February 1934; died 2 December 2025