What can fundraisers learn from the activities, attitudes and approaches of other sectors?
Giles Pegram, independent fundraising consultant
A company has one goal: to maximise value for shareholders. The simplicity with which the commercial sector can invest – purely to maximise value for shareholders – would be of great benefit to the charity sector. If a company can invest £100 and get £101 back it will do it.
The charity sector has too many variables. In theory, we aim to ‘maximise benefit to the beneficiaries’, but would we make such an investment? No. Because we have donors, the media, the public and the staff all clamouring for a voice.
Decisions on acceptable return on investment are not just made differently from one charity to another, but differ within a charity, and even from one income stream to another, with no consistency. The result is that we fail to maximise net income for our beneficiaries.
I’m not suggesting a charity would invest £100 to get £101. I am suggesting that individual charities, depending on their appeal, their size etc., make conscious decisions on what is an acceptable cost ratio for them at this time, and ask their appeals director how much, over time, they could maximise income at that ratio. It would make an appeals director’s life much more focused.
Howard Lake, digital fundraising trainer and editor of UK Fundraising
A background in journalism should be a valuable grounding for any fundraiser because it will have honed a number of fundamental skills that fundraisers use every day.
Journalists learn how to communicate a clear and concise message to a specific audience and are adept storytellers. They learn how to research content, check it, and be able to back it up with evidence. By contacting many different people each day they build up the confidence to ask for help for free, in the form of information and insight.
They get used to working a lot on their own and to be self-sufficient, yet they are part of a bigger team of editors, picture editors, and business managers, all of whom contribute to the finished product.
A journalist's skills and experience should be familiar to all kinds of fundraisers, whether they be direct marketers, prospect researchers, event managers or face-to-face fundraisers. Provided these skills are combined with integrity, they should serve large and small charities well.
Lucy Gower, independent fundraising consultant and trainer
As a sector we are good at copying each other. There is nothing wrong with copying an idea and making it work in the context of your own organisation. However, it does mean that the fundraising marketplace becomes saturated with similar products (like coffee mornings and active events) that don’t stand out.
You are not just competing with other charity events, you are also competing with every other way that people may choose to spend their time and money, for example, shopping, surfing the internet, going to the gym, watching television, etc.
To grab someone’s attention you have to be different and appeal to their needs. Successful companies invest considerable resources into market and consumer trends and then develop products and services to meet the current and emerging needs of their audiences.
So rather than copy the most successful coffee morning, why not copy the corporate sector and invest more in really understanding your audiences and develop outstanding fundraising products designed for them?
Ian MacQuillin, head of communications, PFRA
I think the charity sector can learn a lot from the social sciences. Over the past ten years, evolutionary psychology – the idea that human psychology evolved through Darwinian natural selection – has changed the way we think about human behaviour.
Many commercial marketers have adopted Darwinian ideas because they understand this will result in more sales. And yet the insights offered by evolutionary psychology have been largely overlooked by fundraisers, perhaps even actively ignored.
Evolutionary thinking provides a new way of understanding people’s motives to be generous, altruistic and philanthropic – for example, research has fairly reliably established that men are more likely to make charitable donations when they are in the presence of someone they find sexually attractive.
I’m not saying that taking a Darwinian perspective will overnight equip fundraisers with a wealth of ideas that will transform the way they ask for support. But they should at least take a look, like some commercial marketers have. They might be surprised what they find.
Alan Gosschalk, director of fundraising, Scope
In challenging economic times charities need to work harder and need to explore more innovative ways of fundraising.
Focusing on the sustainability of our fundraising methods is vital, and we rely heavily on inspiration and advice from other sectors, including business and retail.
We set out to apply this thinking in our current retail initiative, which allows supporters to invest in our charity shops, rather than making a one-off donation.
The business model allows generous donors to loan or donate £50,000 to open a new Scope shop, which will go on to generate as much as £30,000 a year in profit for our important work with disabled people and their families.
Our work on this business-based initiative has been helped along by the advice of our new patron, Richard Bradbury, the former chief executive of River Island. His wealth of retail-based knowledge and business expertise has been invaluable in taking our fundraising forward.
This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 22, October 2012
