Leadership Spotlight On… Linda McBain, Chief Digital Officer of Save the Children UK

15th November by Jo Hastie

On Wednesday 7th December, AAW will be hosting a special event in London focused around the cultural and organisational changes NGOs need to make to embrace the full potential of digital.

One of our key speakers at this event will be Linda McBain, Save the Children’s Chief Digital Officer. We caught up with Linda to get a sneak preview of some of the things she will be helping us explore when we get together in December…

Tell us about your journey in digital.

Before moving to the charity sector in 2007, I worked agency side and became their de-facto technology person because no one else could understand computers. I then got my first ‘digital’ roles in the charity sector at CAFOD and British Red Cross before moving to Save the Children in 2011.

What does a Chief Digital Officer do?

I sit at the intersection between the wider business as a whole and technology, thinking about the role of digital and data and how we really utilise it to deliver more impact for children whether that’s improving our finance systems, fundraising and marketing or our wider relationship with the global movement. It’s less about the ‘tech bit’ and more about people, our culture and ways of working.

What advice would you give your 25-year-old self?

I have always held on to the thinking behind the saying ‘comparison is the thief of joy’. It is really important for you to create your own path and think about what is going to make you happy and what you want from life. I am happiest and do my best work when I am able to be my authentic self.

How would you respond to Deniz’s blog on the failure of the third sector’s approach to digital?

I am quite optimistic compared to Deniz’s pessimism, so between us we are a good balance!

I don’t think this is simply a charity sector issue. I see many similar issues across sectors from old companies who have a lot of legacy ways of working and technologies. If you weren’t set up as digital by default, then shifting your business model can be tough.

Deniz is right in saying that change isn’t happening fast enough but the reasons behind that are not purely digital ones.

Charity governance is often overly concerned with risk and risk management which holds people back in this area. We see this most obviously in the way organisations plan and budget -  most charities just roll targets over year on year which doesn’t allow for significant changes. We need to be thinking about longer term growth, testing new channels and developing new necessary skills.

I believe there is a risk that the sector is being left open to the potential of more disruption from players who might come in with a digital-first model.

Where do you think Save the Children has made progress?

I don’t think we have everything right yet at Save the Children, but we are thinking across the whole organisation about how we coach staff to prioritise data as that first step to adopting an insight approach to drive growth.  Data is very powerful, but as a sector I wonder if we are utilising it as much as we could to make smart decisions.

We have also adopted more agile principles in the way we work  - focusing on putting the user first, and working collaboratively towards common goals, bringing the right skills together to deliver.

We have invested in our technology, built-up teams and developed skills – but digital is always evolving and changing so it can be difficult to stay up to date.. It’s about carving time and budgets out for a continuous learning and development approach.

What do non-digital leaders need to do now to help their organisations become more digitally enabled across fundraising, service delivery, engagement and social change.

Recognise that they don’t have all the answers, but they don’t need to either. Engage with experts and staff across the organisation who are doing the work every day. Leaders need to become the agents for empowerment and focus on removing barriers for staff to provide the right environment so they can do their best work.

Linda McBain, Simon Waldman and Deniz Hassan will both be speaking at AAW’s free event on 6th December in Moorgate, London focusing on the cultural shift that organisations should be considering to enable digital transformation.

We are now close to capacity so if you would like to join us or know more about the event, contact jane@aawpartnership.com.

Digital - the whole truth

14th September 2021 by Deniz Hassan

It’s time us fundraisers were honest with ourselves – we’ve really dropped the ball on digital.

And what’s worse is that we don’t even know how bad it is.

Here’s a fun little example just to illustrate. TPX Impact recently conducted a survey about digital transformation where a whopping 53% of organisations reckoned they’d class themselves as ‘digitally mature’; only 11% thought they were ‘immature’. At the same time nearly 60% ‘feel they feel they do not have the tools, resources and capacity to achieve their goals’. So we’ve basically got nearly 90% of organisations (that took the survey, I know) who essentially think they’re doing a half decent job but at the same time don’t feel they have the right tools to do a decent job.

When I say ‘behind’ I don’t mean that the actual state of digital in the sector is worse than it has been. Far from it. Organisations are doing more than ever. We’re doing ok tactically for sure (masked a lot by exceptional 2020 results which were obviously much higher across the board). But what I’m saying is that that we’ve moved far too slow and while digital has advanced massively on the whole, charities haven’t. They’re still doing the bare minimum. And the time is getting close to where we’ll stop being able to get away with it.

The holes are everywhere. From our understanding of technologies to how we plan and measure; from skills gaps at both leadership to a lack of talent coming through at operational level; from creating organisational structures that enable digital growth to embracing organisational cultures that allow it to thrive. A bit like the UK under the Tories… everything seems to be in decay.

Let’s start with technology… it’s getting dangerously away from us. While other, more forward thinking sectors are developing technology that brings value across the customer lifecycle, we’re still talking about CRM. We’re still stuck using archaic, monolithic platforms. And our version of a technological silver bullet is to just put a more modern version in. We’re thinking in outdated paradigms and we’re relying on the people selling us products to do the thinking for us. As a result we’re left with siloed data which we can’t accurately report on or segment (to name just two things).

Now let’s come to team structures and cultures, which goes hand in hand with the well-publicised digital skills shortage in the sector. First of all, yes there is a skills shortage. But why? We always assume it’s because ‘all the digital experts out there want to work for the big tech companies for more money’. Well that might be one reason but the elephant in the room is that, as a sector, we simply are not offering the correct cultures and structures that would entice people with these skills into our organisations. Let me ask you, as a budding data scientist, would you rather work in an organisation where you’re surrounded and supported by peers and more experienced leaders all working to achieve the same goals vs being ‘the data guy’ in a charity where nobody really knows what you do, nobody is there to advance your knowledge and you never really get to see the impact of your work?

Which takes me onto leadership. The people that make it all happen. Frankly a group of people who need much more support than is on offer. Support to understand a completely new set of rules; support to understand how to make the right decisions; support to know it’s ok not to know; support to know that it’s ok to try something and fail miserably in the knowledge that you at least did something. Because without this support our tendency is to avoid risk; we trust the wrong people and we make decisions that are short-term.

And because of this, there’s a big old vacuum to fill which is often done by agencies. We see it time and time again… we send out that RFP which we think is going to solve all of our problems. The RFP that says ‘Digital Agency Wanted! Must be able to do absolutely everything with next to no support from us’. And the agencies come knocking. They come armed with creative and spreadsheets alongside big old costs. And they say, ‘we can build you a digital strategy!’ and ‘it’s ok, we’ll do all the measurement for you!’. And then say ‘it’s not working because your content isn’t good enough’ and ‘your website experience isn’t good enough’ and ‘but our figures show it’s all going great’ and (my fave) ‘IT’S IOS 14’S FAULT!!!!’.

And then, after 2 years and £megabucks we say the relationship wasn’t working and we publish the same brief again without even considering what the underlying issues were (see above).

And all of this is why the answer to our digital woes is often to bang in a new CRM, recruit a mid-level manager and sling money at an agency. And why we will continue to fail until we can fail no more.

Is this the future of child sponsorship?

5th September 2022 by Tobin Aldrich

I’ve spent a lot of my career working on individual giving programmes and in particular focusing on regular giving. The late 1990s and early 2000s was the heyday of regular giving in the UK and the model of mass recruitment of monthly donors primarily through face to face has spread across the fundraising world. But the world has got a lot more complicated since then.

When I started in fundraising, the gold standard for a regular giving product was Child Sponsorship. The charities with child sponsorship programmes had the highest value supporters with the best retention of any of the INGOs and were the source of widespread envy from the rest of us. It was easy to see why - child sponsorship, when done well, creates a real connection between the donor and the communities being supported. Sponsorship is a truly one donor to one child relationship and this direct link makes it unique as a modern charity donation product.

The sponsorship concept was successfully applied to a number of other cause areas. WWF have developed a highly successful regular giving product around the concept of animal adoptions and other animal sponsorships also work well. Centrepoint have built a regular giving programme around the concept of sponsorship of a room in hostel. But these are typically not real one to one relationships. WWF’s tiger, for example has a lot of foster parents.

Child Sponsorship always had its critics and those who know how the sponsorship charities operate understand just how complex the administrative process behind it can be. But for a long time it was extremely successful.

For the past decade, however, child sponsorship has been in steady decline in almost all markets. It has become gradually more difficult and expensive to recruit new donors and the result has been slow but remorseless decline. This is now putting more and more pressure for the charities to rethink a model that fundamentally dates back to the 1970s and before.

But perhaps the ship has sailed. For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by the US charity, GiveDirectly. We now have loads of research that tells us that the best way to bring people out of poverty is to give them money. It turns out those who are best able to decide what poor people need are the poor people themselves. Who knew? GiveDirectly were set up in 2008 based on the idea of setting up programmes to identify poor communities and give families regular monthly payments with no strings. The charity was set up by tech people and has been built on data which allows rigorous tracking of payments and measurement of impact.

GiveDirectly has grown massively and is now an over $200m charity but it had been mostly funded by foundations and major donors. I have been waiting for them to develop an individual giving programme for years. The charity has the technology to link an individual donor to a single beneficiary and to track the outcomes which means it could create an extremely powerful donor offer.

And now they have done so. I got an email from them with their new monthly giving product. You can choose a poor family in Africa to give money to and they will get all of that money to raise them out of poverty. And you will be told what that has achieved.

The email I got from them to ask for support was perfectly tailored for this, admittedly probably niche audience. As well as an exceptionally detailed Q&A on how the programme works, they included the results of their A/B testing to launch it! The Q&A is worth checking out, the level of transparency is incredible.

It will be very interesting to see how this product does. GiveDirectly raise so much money from other sources that they might not promote it that hard. How much do donors really care that their money reaches a specific family? (GiveDirectly’s email told me that their test shows that this product produces 28% more recurring gifts than their standard donor offer)

I think this is important. There is a demand from donors, particularly the sort of high information, affluent individuals who give to international causes, for more authenticity and they are getting better and better at seeing though marketing spiel. There’s a market for people looking to make a real impact.

However successful this particular product turns out to be, I think the trend towards authenticity and real one to one connection is clear. This is very challenging for the existing international development charities burdened as they are with decades of organisational infrastructure and approaches that get in the way. If they can’t re-invent their entire model, I wonder how long they can retain their mass individual supporter bases.

Regular giving will continue to be a critical income area for charities. I think we are now seeing what its future might look like.

It’s Better By Coach

30th May by Richard Bowyer

One of the benefits of applying for a role through the AAW Group is our offer of a full interview coaching service including face to face or remote mock interviews and developing strategies tailored to our candidates, their unique needs and the posts being applied for. We have had very positive feedback from candidates on this service delivered by our personal coach and associate Anton Packheiser. Below, Richard Bowyer, the Chief Executive of the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals charity, outlines the impact it made on him as he celebrates a year in the role.

On the 10th May I celebrated my first anniversary in a job I love, and without the work I did with Anton Packheiser I’m not sure I would be able to say that.

I joined Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals Charity in May 2021 after almost seven years at Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity and six months as a fundraising strategy consultant. I was ready for a new challenge – and ready, I felt, to step into my first CEO role – although after a long period with GOSH I was out of practice at the application process.

The earlier days of my search had a few missteps – including two occasions where I was the second choice candidate. This was both positive in the sense it showed I was a credible candidate as an organisational leader, but also frustrating in my inability to get over line and secure an offer. Being qualified is not enough if you’re struggling to tell your story in way that does you justice in an interview.

What impact did Anton’s coaching have on me? Well, I would point to three different areas.

First, he was full of practical advice. For example, in interview run-throughs, he felt I was selling myself short. He would constantly push me to tell ‘complete’ stories, explaining the full and ongoing impact of decisions I took and projects I led.

Second, he gave me perspective. Job applications can feel like a beauty parade and as an applicant you are particularly vulnerable. Anton’s advice was essentially, if it’s not working it’s probably not the right match for you; when you meet the right charity it will feel the easiest thing in the world.

Third, and much less tangibly, he was there for me through the process. Prepping every interview and debriefing afterward. A job search can feel such a lonely experience, but with Anton’s coaching I knew I was never on my own.

It’s been a brilliant and challenging first 12 months with RBH Charity. We’ve launched new appeals, appointed a fantastic new Chair, written our first grants strategy, moved to hybrid working, completed our biggest ever property project and exceeded our fundraising targets.

Career coaching doesn’t make you into a different person. Your strengths are still your strengths, your achievements are still your achievements. But it can help you find the right approach and confidence to tell your story in the most effective way – and that can make a world of difference.

For more information on our coaching services (and our Executive Coaching Programme for non AAW candidates) visit Career Development | Astarita, Aldrich & Ward (aawpartnership.com)

Firm Foundations - Helping Strengthen AAW’s Philanthropy Offer

28th June 2021 by Jo Hastie

Earlier this month, Jennie Gillions joined the AAW Group as an Associate Senior Consultant.

Jennie is a highly experienced philanthropic funding and partnerships expert with 14 years’ private and institutional fundraising, strategy development and relationship management experience within international and UK non-profit organisations. Jennie was Global Philanthropy Lead for ActionAid International and has had senior trusts and institutional fundraising roles with Médecins du Monde, British Heart Foundation and British Red Cross amongst other charities. She has secured major grants from a wide range of trust and institutional funders including the National Lottery, EU, NORAD, Elton John Aids Foundation, Zochonis and a variety of family/ corporate trusts, and we are delighted she is joining the AAW family to share her expertise with our clients. Below she tells us more about her background and some of the key issues that are relevant to charities’ philanthropic fundraising right now.

Can you tell us about a few of your achievements in funding.

I accidentally fell into the voluntary sector after getting my degree in history, working in my first Trusts and Foundations fundraising job at the Refugee Council, after five years as a volunteer manager, mainly because I love writing! I achieved my first grant of £5,000 for interpreting services for women fleeing Sri Lanka and the DRC.

My most significant bids have been in a sector I love – international development. I spent two years at the Red Cross and secured grants totalling £1.4 million from the Big Lottery Fund for refugee services in England and Scotland and an additional £600,000 from the EU for anti-trafficking projects in Europe, as well as funding for post Ebola work in Sierra Leone.

One of the most challenging bids I worked on was for the French-headquartered charity Médecins du Monde to the Elton John Aids Foundation for funding for counselling and HIV services for sex workers in Moscow. It was particularly difficult given President Putin made changes to the law twice during the grant application period, making it even harder for people to access healthcare and meaning we had to change our approach to avoid frontline delivery staff breaching new legislation. Satisfyingly, the bid was successful though, raising £650,000 over a two year period for the project.

I also spent 2.5 years at ActionAid International as the Philanthropy and corporate partnerships lead, which was like an internal consultant role in the Global Secretariat, supporting colleagues in Africa, Asia and Brazil to understand how to access grant funding from corporate sources, individual major givers, and trust and foundations. I carried out training, helping them to create strategies, reviewed their cases for support and provided guidance on what donors are looking for. I enjoyed exploring and understanding how to put their stories across to philanthropists, so that they would want to invest.

Tell us about your new involvement with AAW

I was contacted by AAW after being made redundant from ActionAid, along with many other staff members, partly as a result of the pandemic. Being an associate and freelancing appealed to me to give me more variety and freedom to solve problems – something I particularly like to do, but which can be more difficult in an organisation with heavy bureaucracy and layers of permissions to get anything done.

I want to help people solve their problems and overcome barriers to fundraising, working out the reasons why you are not raising money, which aren’t always obvious – perhaps your fundraising policies are wrong, your back-end support isn’t right or your board isn’t supportive of fundraising.

I also love helping others with grant writing. The trafficking grant I worked on was drafted by a colleague using English as a second language. I loved editing that down, making the story-telling stronger and making the project more appealing to the donor. I could write bids for the rest of my life!

Story-telling and language come across as key interests in your background, tell us why.

What I love about grant writing is getting the perfect word and language to communicate clearly. My parents were both journalists and I am very keen on the use of inclusive language in international development; so many UK, EU and US funders write in very formal English and there is no attempt to translate for other audiences. For countries where British or American English is not their first language, they are already at a disadvantage. If people are serious about decolonising funding, they need to make their language more accessible.

I recently completed a certificate in Philanthropic Psychology from the Institution of Sustainable Philanthropy founded by Professor Jen Shang and Professor Adrian Sargeant. The course explored the psychology of how people respond to being spoken to in different ways and getting into the mindset of donors in the way you talk – what language you use and how people respond to that language and specific words, bringing them with you on the fundraising journey.

What do you think the key issues are currently around trusts and foundations and institutional fundraising?

One huge issue right now is the decolonisation of Aid, which is key within the international development sector. Some trusts and foundations may be quite conservative and this is not an issue for them (though it should be), but many younger and/or more progressive donors who are interested in Black Lives Matter, Pride and #CharitySoWhite, for example, will increasingly be looking at donating to causes where they can see charities actually doing something on these issues, not just talking about them. And charities need to do their part to influence an institutional shift; if you are serious about having African nationals running African NGOs you need to be having conversations with your funders about transferring funding directly to those organisations.

In the UK context, ‘decolonisation’ feeds into how organisations manage diversity and inclusion.

Another interesting issue in the UK is grant-makers’ investments. In May, two of the Sainsbury family trusts won a case against the Charity Commission that means funders in England and Wales can exclude companies not adhering to the Paris Agreement from their investment portfolios, if investing in those companies would run contrary to funders’ charitable objectives. They haven’t been allowed to do that before, because English and Welsh law emphasised high financial return; the ruling means funders can invest ethically, even if that means they’ll have less money to give away.

Finally, we still don’t know what the impact will be post-pandemic for trusts and foundations (including corporate foundations and trusts that are vehicles for individual philanthropy) after the last couple of years – I think it will take a while to see the impact on levels of funding to the sector.

Jennie is available to offer strategic and hands-on support with all your trusts & foundations requirements. If you’d like to find out more contact her at jennie@aawpartnership.com.

The CRM Dilemma

20th June 2021 by Tobin Aldrich

Yes folks we are deep into the age of the big CRM switch. Here our Principal Partner (and database guru) Tobin Aldrich offers a few words of advice (and warning) if you have the task of leading a big switcheroo in 2022.

One of the real joys of being a strategic consultant is the variety of clients you work with. In the past year or so, we've worked with organisations from across the UK and Ireland and countries as varied as the US, Bangladesh, Egypt and Uruguay. We've worked with non-profits of pretty much every description and cause area from local and regional charities to massive UN organisations. The projects we've done have been incredibly varied, including market entry studies, auditing and reviewing fundraising and marketing functions, developing major appeals and campaigns, creating change strategies and supporting restructures as well as lots of recruiting.

Despite this diversity, there are some common themes in all of our projects and clients. Fundraising only works when it is fully embedded in everything that a non-profit does. Everything in the end comes back to strategy and people, and one can't work without the other.

Another common thread is that everyone understands they need to make their organisations digitally enabled and data driven but hardly anyone has the systems they need to make this happen.

At the moment it feels like every one of our clients either is in the middle of or about to embark upon replacing their CRM database. These are very significant projects involving major investment and which take up very large amounts of organisational time and attention.

As may have been mentioned, I've been around for a bit. But I did have a life before fundraising and a big chunk of that was spent in the IT sector. I've been involved in major business systems projects since the days when the computer was a big box the size of a room with less memory than today's pocket calculators. I've spent quite a lot of time specifying and implementing CRM systems and while the technology has moved on, the basics of successful systems implementation are exactly the same now as they were thirty years ago.

It's extremely frustrating to see CRM projects go wrong today for the same reasons as they have for decades.

There are I think, five key ways your new systems implementation doesn't give you the answer you wanted:

Unrealistic expectations. The tech industry has been over-hyping what it can deliver since the first Colossus was turned on at Bletchley Park and is still merrily selling blue sky solutions to this day. We are constantly told that the latest whizzy thing (marketing automation anyone?) will magically solve all previous problems. You know what? If you put the same crappy data into a system with the old structure that the intern came up with a decade ago, you get the same rubbish results in a shinier box.

Mission creep. Out of unrealistic expectations comes an overly ambitious project. It's a great idea to put all of your data into one database, right? So combine all information about everyone the organisation deals with into one place. Makes sense. The problem is that you have committed yourselves to replacing not only the fundraising system but the services database and potentially other business systems across the organisation. All with own processes and needs. Oh and systems able to handle all of these functions together are much more expensive. When actually you could have got the integration that is actually essential by taking feeds from all of these systems and putting them into a data warehouse. Someone needs to make a properly informed decision about what information is actually needed when, where and by whom before you buy a Rolls Royce when a Nissan Micra would have done.

Too much focus on the brand, not enough on the people. There's lots of focus on which system a charity should adopt. Salesforce, Dynamics, Raiser's Edge? Usually it doesn't matter all that much which particular system is selected as most popular CRMs do basically the same things in pretty similar ways. It is all about how the solution is specified and implemented. And crucially who by and how good they are.

Knowledge gaps. A fundamental problem is the gap between the people who know how the system works and those who understand the business processes. This is definitely an issue in fundraising where there is a combination of some quite quirky processes and activities, and a workforce that isn't particularly digitally literate. The lack of digital understanding often seems to increase in proportion to the seniority of the individual. There are not many people who both thoroughly understand how fundraising works at a granular level and who can transfer that into a proper specification and architecture for a business system. If someone like that is not at the heart of a new implementation (on the client side), you are in trouble.

Ownership. Senior ownership of the project is crucial. This is not just oversight of a project board, it is active engagement in making sure not only that the project has priority for time and resources but that it keeps to its scope and vision. Unless the new system is bringing significant improvements in business processes, the investment is being wasted. All the way through the project, there will be pushback against change and unless this is challenged, existing inefficiencies will be replicated in the new environment.

Planning and timescales

Just as the IT industry over-promises on the technology, it consistently underestimates how long it takes to implement systems properly. Or vendors promise to hit unrealistic deadlines to win contracts.

The reality is that everything will take longer than you think. And cost more. But the more time you spend upfront on the preparation, the more time and money overall you will save. Getting the specification right is both absolutely essential and really hard. There will always be the temptation to rush to the solution, but if key issues aren't identified and dealt with up front they will come back and bite. These are often nothing to do with the technology itself. How can you know what reports you want out of the system if the charity hasn't completely clarified what its key fundraising KPIs are, how they are defined and how they should be measured? And if your overall fundraising objectives aren't clearly set, how can you come up with these KPIs?

The key point is that technology doesn't solve organisational problems. Non-profits need to answer the important questions about why they need information, who needs it, in what form and when before they embark on major technology projects. Then the right skills and experience need to be brought together to come up with the most practical answer and that project has to be given real organisational support and priority.

Embarking on a new CRM project isn't something to be attempted lightly. But the pitfalls can be avoided with a combination of strategy, planning and resources. Oh and time, lots of time.

If any of the above sounds familiar or resonates, drop Tobin a line. We won’t be able to solve all your problems, but we can help you with the structure around planning, process and measurements. Tobin can be reached at tobin@aawpartnership.com.