Jenny Ramage talks to Robin Pritchard about the modern challenges facing Dimbleby Cancer Care

The charity was set up in the 1960s with public donations that were made when Richard Dimbleby died and from gifts in wills left by his admirers. How are times changing for the organisation?

We’ve moved on from the generation of people who grew up watching and listening to Richard Dimbleby on the BBC, so if we’re to be successful going forward we need to engage with the younger generation as well as our current generation of supporters. The original donations and the legacies we received were invested, so for the last 45 or so years the charity has run mostly off that investment. Having made previous endowments, we recently made a £2m capital gift to Guys & St Thomas towards the construction of the new KHP Cancer Centre due to open in 2016, so we now need to replace that capital by proactively fundraising for the first time ever. It’s a sea change for us in terms of our focus.

You said the charity needs to engage more with the younger generation. What steps is it taking to do this?

Primarily we’re doing it through social media. It is a great free way of engaging with people. Even though we don’t have the resources to hire someone specifically to handle all our social media, and essentially it’s just me running it alongside all my other priorities, we can still easily share stories and information via our Facebook page, and we’re quite active on Twitter too. It means that as we start to do more fundraising, we’ve got a bigger audience to talk to.

So how will you go about growing your fundraising?

A lot of our smaller donors are people who have themselves benefitted from the service at Guys and St Thomas, so we’re starting to build more upon those relationships. We’re looking at how we can help our individual supporters fundraise for us – for example, by helping them to organise events. We’re also setting up a Friends of Dimbleby Cancer Care Scheme, and we’re planning a range of private events to engage these supporters throughout the year.

How will you use the new cancer centre to showcase your work?

The new cancer centre is a huge opportunity for us. The Dimbleby Cancer Care facilities will be at the heart of the building located in the Welcome Village on the ground floor, so this effectively will become our ‘shop window’. It will make us and the service much more visible to people. The new building is going to be a state-of-the-art facility for cancer care, which will hopefully be held up as a gold standard, so it’s a great thing for us to be associated with.

What do you think will be the key challenges for the charity as it tries to grow its fundraising?

One particular challenge we face is quite simply that we are not the only organisation fundraising out there. This is especially the case around the hospital: the NHS at Guys have their own fundraising targets, so we need to work closely with them to ensure we’re not cannibalising the money we’re both trying to get in. So it’s about having a clear strategy about who we’re talking to, what we’re fundraising for, whether there are any joint projects we can do, and indeed where we should keep things separate.

How is the charity’s internal structure changing to accommodate the new strategy?

I’ve moved from being head of communications into a directorship role, which essentially gives me additional responsibilities and enables me to work more directly with the board as we grow the charity in the months ahead. Chairman Jonathan Dimbleby has brought on a number of new trustees with particular skills and expertise. Bringing in new, non-family members as trustees is quite a big shift for us, but the board recognise that we need people who can bring fresh ideas and dynamism.

Richard Dimbleby’s sons, David and Jonathan, are the charity’s figureheads. Will they themselves be doing more publicity now?

David and Jonathan are both very hands-on and have steered the work of the charity for four decades, but the trustees are keen to raise our public profile further to increase our funding. For example Jonathan has been asked to host the Macmillan parliamentary debate on 11 September. Collaborating with such a large, high-profile charity as Macmillan provides us with a big opportunity to increase awareness of our own work.

You’ve said you want to reach out to individual supporters more, but what about securing other sources of funding?

We’ve now hired a part-time fundraiser, Jo Parsons, who has worked in fundraising for over ten years - she’s done a lot of work with Help 4 Heroes and the Sue Ryder Foundation, for example. She’s going to be focusing on major gifts, and on developing our relationships with large corporations and trusts and foundations. We have already secured financial commitments from a number of individuals.

To date, the charity has had a very clear focus on two things: providing cancer care and funding research. Now that you’re overhauling the way you raise money, do you plan to expand your work at all?

The £2m grant we made to Guy’s will ensure that the service in its cancer care centre continues, but we also want to grow that service and possibly expand it out into the wider area, possibly via outreach projects and clinics, which will make it easier for people to access the service. We will also continue to support the Dimbleby Cancer Research Fund, and quite simply, the more money we raise, the more research projects we can fund.

Robin Pritchard is director of Dimbleby Cancer Care

This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 33, September 2013