Jenny Ramage chats to Adrian Sargeant about how he’s facilitating fresh thinking in the sector, why he thinks the US isn’t necessarily better at fundraising, and why his house is full of radios.
You’ve just set up a think tank at Plymouth University to bring new ideas and thinking into fundraising from other disciplines. Why now?
For the first time in my career, there are enough academics around the world who are doing work relevant to fundraising that we can borrow ideas from behavioural economics or social psychology to inform what we do. There are a lot more ideas out there now that could make a difference to professional practice - if only people knew about them. I think now is a very good time to bridge the gap between the research that academics are doing and the issues practitioners are working on.
What will the think tank do?
We set up the think tank so we can review what we know about each of the areas we’re going to focus on, and then expose the senior industry experts to these ideas to find out what they think their significance might be for professional practice. The think tank will focus on two ideas per year, and we’ll soon be putting together an advisory panel to help us pick our first project.
Which area of fundraising do you think would benefit most from a fresh approach?
It’s likely that one of our projects will be around the whole notion of donor stewardship, and redefining what we know about it in the light of new thinking and new data sets. Different organisations have different takes on how you can best retain donors and develop the value of those relationships, but sometimes decisions aren’t necessarily taken on the basis of solid evidence. We therefore want to explore the evidence base for the different kinds of approach and think about ways that, as a sector, we might get better at stewardship.
What’s been the most useful piece of insight to come out of the research you’ve led over the last couple of years?
One of the most interesting things came out of the Outstanding Fundraising Project we did last year for Clayton Burnett. When we started that project, I thought that what would differentiate ‘outstanding’ fundraisers from ‘good’ fundraisers would be the things they do on a daily basis - for example, the way they structure themselves, or manage their team, or focus on developing organisational culture. But the research showed that actually, it wasn’t so much about what people do, so much as how they think. That led us, when we were designing the Institute’s new advanced diploma in fundraising, to put a real emphasis on equipping people with systems of thinking so they can solve the kind of problems they will have to tackle if they want to make fundraising really successful.
You also hold a post as professor of fundraising at the University of Indiana. How does philanthropy in the UK compare with the US?
If you look at the headline statistics, you would think the Americans are so much more generous than the Brits - and on one level, that’s true: they do give a greater percentage of their income to good causes. However, one of the reasons behind this is that there’s a lot more faith-based giving in the US. When you remove religious giving from the equation, giving to secular causes is pretty similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
Does the US come up with better fundraising innovations?
The Americans are good at things that we’re not, and vice versa. Classically, they’re very good at major gift fundraising and campaign-based fundraising; they understand that when you’re part of a community, you should be putting something back into that community. But I think that generally, the level of their direct response fundraising isn’t as good as ours. If you’re looking for new and exciting stuff in digital fundraising, for example, I’d be looking at some of the good stuff that’s coming out of the agencies in this country, rather than looking to the US for the lead.
If you could change one thing about the UK fundraiser mindset, what would it be?
As a profession, we’ve become very good at forging the link between the donor and the impact they are delivering on the beneficiary. I think that’s great, but what’s missing is thinking about what we’re doing to the donor when we communicate with them. We should spend a bit more time thinking about how we make people feel when we talk to them.
Do you volunteer at any charities in your spare time?
Aside from being a trustee at the IoF, most of my spare time is spent on fundraising research. It’s in the family; my other half is also a fundraising researcher. We really live and breathe it. It’s a great profession and I’m really proud to be part of it.
What else do you do in your spare time?
I started out in my career as an engineer, and during this time I developed an interest in radio. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years restoring radio sets from the 1920s and 30s, and I now have one of the largest antique radio collections in the UK! Originally the plan was to sell them and make a little bit of money on them, but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t quite bring myself to part with them. So we now have about 120 of these things floating around the house!
Adrian Sargeant (PhD) is a leading fundraising consultant, academic and speaker. He holds posts as professor of fundraising at the University of Plymouth Business School and at Indiana University. He is also an honorary fellow of the Institute of Fundraising.
