What We Can Learn About Philanthropy From The Higher Education Sector

By Tobin Aldrich

9th September

One of the reasons that I enjoy being a consultant is the variety of organisations and sectors we work with. We learn from every client and every project we work with.

In the last couple of years we have increasingly been working in the higher education sector, including a series of major Advancement projects in Australia with the University of Sydney. It’s been a fascinating experience and we have learned loads from it.

As part of building our expertise in the specifics of university philanthropy we’ve got more involved with the extremely impressive industry body that is CASE, the higher education organisation that promotes Advancement (philanthropy and alumni relations) across the sector.

Last week I was at the CASE Europe annual conference in Manchester. It was a great event that showcased how well higher education does some aspects of philanthropy.

One of the joys of working with HE for someone like me is this is a sector that really, really loves data. US universities have been developing very sophisticated philanthropy programmes for well over 150 years at this point and CASE itself dates back to 1960. That’s a massive amount of experience in the art and science of (mostly) major giving. And they have been collecting data for a long time.

The result is that HE fundraisers have access to data on relative fundraising and alumni engagement performance that their counterparts in the charity sector can only dream of. While the most data (and the most giving) is in the US, there is now considerable data available for giving to higher education in the UK.

This allows us to get a clear picture of a sector that, while it has some common characteristics, is quite distinctive from the wider charity sector.

Giving to HE in the UK has grown strongly in the last 20 years rising from £0.4bn in 2004 to £1.4bn last year.  This compares to the £1bn that the international development sector raised from voluntary sources, for example.  

Unlike other sectors (outside arts and heritage), giving to higher education is all about major giving, six, seven, eight and increasingly nine figure gifts. Over 85% of the funds raised by UK universities are typically from major gifts, from individuals and foundations mainly. HE is well ahead of the wider charity sector in philanthropy and it is an interesting question why this is the case.

An explanation that is often offered is that this is because of alumni connection. About half of the biggest gifts come from alumni so this is definitely part of it. My view, however, is that the scale of ambition that universities can offer is also a key factor. This is a sector that can genuinely come up with big ideas and visions, with a truly long-term view - this is something that many fundraising charities really struggle with.

This doesn’t mean that HE fundraising is universally better than practices in the charity sector. Smaller scale giving, often called “community giving” is rather under-developed by UK fundraising standards, with investment limited and relatively unsophisticated programmes. This is a bit surprising as alumni engagement is otherwise taken very seriously by universities.  Legacy giving is also lower in the HE sector than you might expect.

Universities, like the charity sector, often have a gap in their fundraising strategies around mid-tier donors and we increasingly hear concerns about this “missing middle”.

Higher education and the charity sector are all looking to achieve step-changes in their use of digital channels and technologies, and are facing similar challenges in making this a reality - the issues of limited technology, lack of expertise and significant cultural barriers are familiar to both.  Charity best practice can definitely add value to many universities in terms of digital fundraising.  There is huge interest in the potential of AI but a common lack of integrated strategies to understand and exploit it.

While we will continue to work across a wide range of sectors and look for cross-fertilisation across them, we will be building our HE engagement and expertise over the next year and look forward to sharing some of those findings.

Fundraising Benchmarking: The Findings

By Tobin Aldrich

30th July 2024

I am very excited to announce the results of our 2024 Fundraising Benchmarks report, in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.

I have been looking for years for a robust external benchmark to use to compare how well a charity’s fundraising  is performing against peers. We do this as part of our fundraising reviews (of which we’ve done more than a hundred at this point) and each time I’m frustrated by the lack of decent external data to use.   I covered the issues in my previous blog.

Our hypothesis was that it was possible to create a meaningful benchmark based on a survey if we could be really, really specific in the questions.

In the end 56 organisations ranging from the very small to the biggest charities in the UK completed the survey. We got representation from most sectors and the charities who took part accounted for no less than £1.5bn of fundraised income, around 6% of the total voluntary income of the UK charity sector.

The survey was definitely not perfect. We only got a few respondents from small charities with under £1m of voluntary income and those that did take part fed back that the survey was too complicated for them with many of the questions not relevant. We need to give respondents more guidance in how to fill out the survey and be realistic about the amount of pre-work they need to do. This really wasn’t a 30 minute exercise.

But we got lots of really good data and much of it was pretty robust. We have enough charities who operated in all of the areas at sufficient scale to give us decent samples for things like income and expenditure levels (and hence ROIs) and team sizes and income raised per fundraiser.

Many of the findings were confirmation (but with hard data, so still useful) of things we already knew - the importance of legacy income and regular giving, how events income is concentrated in particular sectors such as health, how little charities spend on promoting legacies considering the importance of this income source. But there were also things that we suspected but didn’t know for sure, that there a real economies of scale in fundraising, that all else being equal the amount raised per member of fundraising staff is higher the bigger the charity is (in voluntary income terms).  I think this is less a case of larger charities being more efficient per se (trust me many of them really aren’t) as of there being a high cost of entry for many fundraising areas such as individual giving. You need specialist staff, for example, whether your income is £1m or £10m. It was also interesting to see that for all the emphasis on digital in fundraising, the vast majority of new charity supporters are still being produced from non-digital channels, particularly face-to-face.

The report is being sent to all participants who also get an individual analysis of their numbers against the survey means. For everyone else, you can download it by providing your email address below.

We are planning to make this an annual exercise and are aiming to keep it free to enter. We’ve been approached by charities looking to replicate this for particular sectors and we might develop some sub-sets if there is enough demand (probably not for free though). If you are interested in exploring this, drop me a line.

We are also exploring a simpler version for smaller charities and may be looking for volunteers to test this on. We’ll announce that when we have something ready.

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How Does Our Fundraising Compare?

Tobin Aldrich

21st May 2024

For as long as I’ve worked in the sector, the issue of how to benchmark the fundraising performance of charities against each other has really bugged me. We have collectively never managed to come up with a way of comparing fundraising activities that manages to be both robust and easy for charities to participate in. As a result we don’t even have a single comprehensive list of the top fundraising charities, let alone good benchmarks for fundraising efficiency across the different areas.

There have been many valiant attempts to address this issue. Remember Fund Ratios anyone? And there are good quality studies that do exist - Open Creates run a very good annual benchmark, mostly focused on individual giving. But it costs a reasonable amount of money to take part in and charities have to provide their data for it, so participation is limited to only a relatively small number of the largest charities.

Is it possible to create an annual benchmark for fundraising that would be accessible to all charities, relatively easy to take part in, free to enter and still able to produce decent usable data? I don’t know, so we at AAW in collaboration with CIOF decided to give it a try.

We are launching the CIOF 2024 Fundraising Benchmarking study this week. This will be based on a self-survey questionnaire sent to Directors/Heads of Fundraising. The aim is to have something fairly simple that answers what we believe are the most common questions about fundraising performance, for example how does our ratio of income to expenditure across each fundraising area compare to other charities or how does our cost to acquire new donors by channel differ from others?

This won’t be an in-depth process and this isn’t intended to compete with or replace existing studies such as the Open Benchmarks (which we still encourage charities to take part in if they can). But we really want to get the biggest possible sample size and the most representative of all parts of the sector, so we can have something that is as robust as we can make it.

The survey is intended to take about 30 minutes to complete (although information will need to be collected beforehand).

We are planning to share the results at the CIOF National Convention at the beginning of July so we will need to have all the entries in by the 20th June 2024.  We would love to hear people’s feedback after taking part in the survey - this is very much a first attempt and something we would hope to refine over time.

You may already have received an email from us or from CIOF that has been sent out to all their  organisational members letting you know the survey is ready, but if you haven’t you can find the link here. Everybody is welcome to take part, there are no fees to pay and everybody who takes part will get a report of the results (and of course, we will anonymise individual charities in the report).

I do hope your charity can take part. In the meantime, please contact me with any questions or feedback.

To Mark, With All Our Love

Imogen Ward

29th April 2024

Mark has been a close friend, colleague and mentor to me for over 20 years. From our time when we first met as part of the DEC to when 7 years ago, he left his beloved Red Cross to join Tobin Aldrich and myself in the newly formed consultancy practice Astarita Aldrich Ward.  

Tobin always laughed that only Mark and I could actually ignore the rule of the alphabet and put his name first. Technically of course Aldrich should come before Astarita. Mark and I just thought Astarita Aldrich Ward sounded better. And it did. We were right. We often were. 

The search side of our business had been Mark’s idea all along. Fundraising leaders finding other fundraising leaders had been something that came naturally to Mark. For many, many years every charity recruitment agency in the UK bent his ear for recommendations on roles and his instinct for talent meant that he was generally pretty astute to landing the right people for the right role. So he kind of knew this would fly. 

I am not saying that the actual translating of this idea to a proper company was easy. It wasn’t. We had to learn loads and we were lucky to get some of the best search people in the business to help us. But the core of it - the authenticity of what we knew was right - was our North Star. And it worked. AAW’s Search and Interim service will continue to be one of Mark’s many, many brilliant contributions to our sector. 

Professionally, Mark was inspired and energised by three things. Firstly, the Red Cross movement and all that entailed. Whether that’s a humanitarian response thousands of miles away or a crisis closer to home. 

When I worked with him as part of the DEC someone said to me (when Mark was being particularly truculent) “when Mark bleeds it ain’t red. It’s Red Cross”. And it was true. Mark was always fixated on doing what was best for humanity and delivering aid as his axle, and he was always convinced that the role of the Red Cross in an emergency was key. So of course they deserved all the money!  He loved the Red Cross Movement  - he lived and breathed its values and history, and was entranced by all its many incarnations. Even when he left, he was still part of it. The blood running through him was Red Cross. 

The loss of Mark's late wife, Gill, hit him hard and when some years later he found love and laughter again with Angie everyone was so happy for him. When Gill was coming to the end of her life she was treated by the St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney. It triggered for Mark a deep connection to the cause, serving on the board of St Joseph’s and then later St Clare’s in Harlow. He did so much for the movement and I know it’s stronger thanks to his love and determination. 

Finally Fundraising. Or rather Fundraisers. When Mark moved from being a Trade Unionist to the Charity Sector he really did bring something very different. Mark was a working class young man who had left school at 15 with very few qualifications. Smart, cocky and determined to have his voice heard in a sector which, like the rest of British society, really wanted the Marks of the world to conform and be quiet. But Mark couldn't be quiet. And as he got more confident he got louder. And it was Fundraisers that became his cause. Fundraisers who he loved and roared for and would always, always champion. Fundraisers were Mark’s life’s work. 

Mark raised loads and loads of money for the causes he worked for in his career - billions of dollars in fact. He won countless awards, was the Chair of many, many committees and institutions and even received an OBE in recognition of his work. But I think the thing he was proudest of was the teams of Fundraisers he led and inspired to not only deliver the greatest for the charity they were working for, but to achieve greatness for themselves. 

It’s impossible to quantify how many lives Mark touched in this way. How many individuals he inspired, encouraged and propelled  - many are now CEOs of some of the biggest charities in the world. All of the people he touched will be remembering him now. Mark was one of those unique people who changed your life from simply being in his presence. 

Mark - all of us at AAW loved you very much and will miss you deeply.  We are having to deal with the unimaginable and navigating the next few days and weeks will be hard. But we were all blessed to be close to you personally and have you as part of our small company trying in your words “to do good stuff for good people fighting the good fight”.

And do you know what? Even if your surname had started with a Z -  your name would have always been first. 

How Has Fundraising Changed Since 2016?

Tobin Aldrich

4th April 2024

Anybody who has ever tried to benchmark the fundraising performance of charities against each other will tell you it is a thankless and frustrating task. Charities are absolutely excellent at reporting their income and expenditure in confusing and inconsistent ways and the task of comparing apples to apples is, well, an interesting one.

So obviously we spend quite a lot of time and energy on benchmarking. It’s pure masochism really.

Amongst all the pain and suffering we do occasionally manage to collect interesting data so I’d thought I’d share some of this.

Since 2017 we have been tracking the overall fundraising performance of the top 100 UK charities by voluntary income. This is using public data only (although we have worked with a majority of these organisations in some capacity, we obviously can’t share their information) which means using the audited accounts each charity files with the Charity Commission.

Given that every charity uses the same accounting framework (SORP), you’d have thought this means that this would be a simple task. You would be wrong, there is wide room for interpretation in these principles and boy do charities take advantage of it. How and why is a whole different subject but for now let’s just say we have to do quite a bit of work on these figures to make them reasonably comparable. 

That all being said, in 2015/16  (year ending before April 2016) the organisations below were, according to our figures, the top charities in the UK by fundraised income (that is to say donations and legacies from individuals, charitable trusts and companies).

*These are our definitions based on what section of the fundraising “market” we think the charity occupies, not how the charity would represent themselves (sorry Guide Dogs).

Of the top 20 charities, five were in the health sector, including the two big cancer charities CRUK and Macmillan which were first and second in the top 20. There were six internationally focused charities (if we classify Red Cross and Comic Relief as international), four animal charities, two conservation/heritage and a smattering of others.

Going forward to the year ending before April 2023, there has been quite a lot of change. CRUK retains the top spot but there’s plenty of movement below this. This was the year of the Ukraine appeal, so we have internationally focused charities - BRC, Islamic Relief and UNICEF – performing strongly and moving up the chart, but all of these had been growing even before this. Sightsavers, which is not an emergency charity, has entered the top 20, up 11 places since 2015/16.

Not all international charities have grown, Oxfam has fallen from 4th to 8th place while Save the Children has gone down from 7th to 14th place.

Health charities remain strongly represented, but there are winners and losers. Macmillan is down to 4th from 2nd place.  Marie Curie is down three spots. BHF is up one place and Alzheimers has entered the top 20, up nine spots from 2016.

Animal charities are still strongly represented but there has been a bit of movement between them. Conservation charities are showing growth, WWF are up four places for example.

What does all this tell us?

Well let’s start with the macro picture. The voluntary income of the top 20 charities in 2015/16 was £2.56bn and this had grown to £3bn by 2022/23. That’s a 19% increase in seven years.  That sounds good except that, according to the Bank of England, the Consumer Price Index has increased by 30% in that period. The situation is worse if we exclude legacies. Donation income of the top 20 increased by just 12% in seven years.

There’s some movement between causes. In a year when there was a once-in-a-generation emergency appeal for Ukraine, we saw some strong results for some international charities but this overlays a pattern of steady decline by some long established international development charities. Children’s charities are steadily losing market share - the highest ranked children’s charity is now outside the top 10 charities. Conservation is growing, animals and health are broadly stable.

Oh and the fifth biggest charity by voluntary income in the UK is Islamic Relief. Now that’s a societal shift right there.

This is very much just the edited highlights of our data, which cover the top 100 charities. If anyone wants more of the underlying detail, just drop me a line.

The Art of Asking for What You Want.

Mark Astarita

26th March 2024

Last week I received an email out of the blue that made me smile. I have permission to share it with you and I wanted to do so, to as it’s a great reminder to all fundraisers especially, as well as candidates looking for new roles, to be brave – and that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And if you ask beautifully, you are unlikely to be ignored and will stand out from the crowd.

The email started with a reminder of our shared past and this person’s expertise as a highly successful fundraiser…

I hope you are well, and don’t mind me reaching out in this manner. I’m taking a wild stab in the dark here, in the hope that you might remember me. A few years ago, we spent an afternoon together whilst you observed my work as a door-to-door fundraiser, representing the British Red Cross. At the time, I was one of the highest performing fundraisers in the country, on the verge of setting up my own direct marketing company. My business proved a roaring success, sustaining an unparalleled retention rate, generating millions in revenue for numerous charitable organisations… most favourably the British Red Cross of course!

That afternoon we spent pacing the streets of East London left a huge impression on me. It was just over 10 years ago now, but I distinctly recall bonding over our love of motorbikes and the phenomenal work the Red Cross do. I left our encounter feeling deeply inspired by your story and have since been committed to working in sectors that make a positive and powerful difference. 

…before going to on to ask directly for what she wants now:

My reason for reaching out now, (and I must stress that I sincerely hope it is not too cheeky to do so), is that I am looking for a new career opportunity and the chance to use my skills to make an incredible difference in the charity sector again. Recently, I've become a member of a fundraising board, on a volunteer basis, further securing my desire to apply myself fully in this field again; which explains why you are reading this email right now.

It would mean such a lot to me if I were able to steal a little bit of your time to pick your brains on what might be my best way to move forward. Perhaps you may know of an organisation that needs an ambitious, tenacious, self-starter like me? Or alternatively, I'd value any words of wisdom that could help me identify possible gaps I may need to fill, in order to get to where I want to be. 

And then closing with a very personal thank you:

I appreciate how busy you must be however, so if nothing else, please consider this a long overdue thank you for the invite I received to the BRC garden party at Buckingham Palace. I believe you were responsible for that invite and let me just say, the whole day was wonderful...the cucumber sandwiches were sublime!

It was an email that made me recall getting a similarly lovely letter along with a CV in my first few weeks as Director of Fundraising at the British Red Cross, asking for opportunities. It was from the one and only Tanya Steele – within a few days she was volunteering at the charity and today she is the CEO of WWF. She asked, I noticed, and the rest is history.

It’s a direct approach that has proved successful in my career before. Some years before I met Tanya, our wonderful Patron where I was working as Director of Fundraising and Communications at the National Deaf Children’s Society signed six very speculative letters to potential major donors for a capital build. Five out of the six responded and donated – the largest had never had a previous connection with the charity and won naming rights because of the size of the gift.

The key lesson here is that approaches were very personal, appealing and direct – above all you need to ask specifically for what you want; heck what have you got to lose by not trying and then trying again?

Oh and yes the email sender is having coffee with me next week.  I look forward to hearing all her news 10 years on.

What Can We Learn From Universities About Philanthropy?

Tobin Aldrich

12th March

As I’ve said before, one of the great pleasures of consultancy is the variety of the projects we get to do.

In the last year we have been working more with Higher Education organisations than in previous years.  It’s a fascinating world and there are definitely learnings for the wider charity sector.

HE philanthropy is very different from charity fundraising. In some ways they can be seen as mirror images of each other.

What HE really excels at is major giving. We have been working with a University in Australia that raises 97% of its over $100m annual philanthropic income from gifts of over $100,000 and nearly 75% from gifts of over $1m. HE institutions are the places where really big giving is happening - the largest gift to an Australian University so far has been $250m.  By contrast, the biggest UK fundraising charities typically raise around 5% of their income from major gifts. And that proportion hasn’t really changed for many years.

Why do universities do so well with larger gifts? They have an advantage with their alumni communities, people who have a lifelong relationship with the institution and to at least some degree, a stake in its success. But only around half of the biggest gifts to universities come from alumni. So what else is going on?

One of the things that has really struck us about working with universities is the sense of possibility and optimism in these places. We’ve always said that to raise a very significant amount of money you need an idea that is big enough. Universities are full of people who can generate very big ideas. That isn’t to say that turning these ideas into deliverable programmes isn’t often very challenging, but this is an environment which enables big picture thinking while the institutions are large enough to be able to pull them off.    

The universities which routinely secure these very big gifts have learned how to build philanthropy into the fabric of the institution. US universities have been doing this for over a century but we are increasingly seeing this in the rest of the anglosphere as well as in other parts of the world such as Asia. Institutional leadership are committed to and prioritise philanthropy, and academics engage more and more with philanthropists.  Major projects are co-created with potential funders and other partners. Donor stewardship is proactive and professionally managed.

This isn’t to say that everything in the HE garden is rosy. The sector has as many challenges as the wider charity world and there is much variation in philanthropic performance across institutions.

Compared to the charity sector, HE is generally much less good at delivering effective programmes to engage large numbers of smaller donors. Philanthropy programmes built around a one-to-one approach can really struggle even to take smaller gifts. Trying to give a small gift to a major university can be a ridiculously difficult process.

Although in theory universities understand how to deliver one-to-many engagement through alumni programmes, these often struggle to convert into effective fundraising, at least outside the US.  There is much the HE sector can take from the best of supporter engagement practice in the more progressive charities.

What universities and charities do have in common is a struggle to effectively deliver engagement progress for supporters who fall between the major giving and mass donor programmes, what is often called “the missing middle”. People who have the capacity to give mid-tier gifts have very significant potential value but too often fall between organisational siloes and do not receive the attention they deserve.

As we hopefully do more work in the HE sector, we will continue to share learnings across sectors. There is much potential for collaboration here in order to engage donors more effectively around ways giving can achieve transformative outcomes.

Universities don’t have the secret to great fundraising any more than the charity sector does but each side has much to learn from each other.

The Practicalities of AI

Deniz Hassan

11th December

Over the summer I embarked on a mini European speaking tour on how frontline fundraisers can use AI right now to make their jobs more effective. I'm lucky enough to look across the full fundraising ecosystem - from strategy to tech to tactics - and I've found uses across the lot. To put it into context, I’m a digital fundraising expert who uses AI frequently and having spent a lot of time thinking and testing, here are a bunch of things I've learned using it:

• It's a baby. A very clever baby but at the start of its useful life nonetheless. It gets stuff right but also gets a lot of other stuff wrong. So we can't just expect perfect outcomes.

• It tends to get stuff very wrong because we haven't fed it correctly. In much the same way as people, you get out what you put in. If we're poor with how we communicate with it, the margin for error is pretty big. We make basic assumptions with a lot of the stuff we do - and with AI, this can lead to the weird and the wonderful (/bloody awful).

• Both us and the AI need to learn together so we're not always starting from scratch. If, while you're working on something you make a mistake and clock that there's a better way to work, note it down for next time. Don't expect it to remember what you did and nail the same task in the same way each time. On a number of occasions, I worked with Chat GPT to undertake repetitive tasks and I found I could get the same outcome 9 out of 10 times and then the 10th would be massively different. So now I'm microscopically specific each time and repeat myself.

• I’ve used it extensively for heavy data analysis and found that I need to work in a lot of quality assurance. One of the tactics I've developed is asking it for granular steps so I can compare against my own workings. Only once I've done enough spot checks do I trust it to do an entire job. People asked 'what's the point if you still have to work hard?' to which I respond that, even if in the first instance it only saves me 5% of time, then I know that next time it will be more because I've learned how to drive it better. And of course, 5% is still 5%.

• It's an excellent troubleshooter. I use a number of enterprise level platforms to build anything from data visualisations, CRM configurations and automations. Often, it won't take the job off my hands but it will be able to look at my work and help me get round obstacles I might otherwise get stuck on.

• It's not a fundraiser but it can be taught fundraising (scarily better than many fundraisers I've met!). It doesn't get big strategic things like how you could create a diverse, balanced portfolio 'out of the box'. But I found that, given the right level of love, it will help with strategic planning and modelling.

These are just a few thoughts and I’d love to hear what you think. And of course, if anyone wants to discuss how we can help you leverage AI in your fundraising programmes, give me a shout. You can contact me at deniz@aawpartnership.com.

Seeing Things A New

Imogen Ward

4th December 2023

I’ve recently returned from Australia, where AAW have been working with the University of Sydney (USYD).

USYD have some big plans and ideas for overall income generation, and they’ve sought our support with planning for their new comprehensive campaign following on from their hugely successful first campaign called INSPIRED which raised a stunning AU$1billion.

We were out in Australia primarily to help with the engagement phase. Engaging not just USYD’s internal key stakeholders such as the Vice Chancellor, Provost, Deans, Faculty Leads and other leadership, but also to bring the donor into the conversation at this crucial stage.

Australian philanthropy is pretty well advanced, particularly in the Higher Education space where it is raising a lot more than all UK counterparts other than Oxbridge. And it's catching up with those two lovable rascals fast. Very fast.

Okay… so we are talking big figures here and very, very significant gifts. Gulp! It was an enormous privilege for us to have that unique access to thoughts and insights first-hand from such major philanthropists.

Even now – nearly 30 years after I started my career in Fundraising – I find that I am constantly learning stuff.  And that’s what keeps me fascinated and excited by philanthropy, particularly when you get insight from different countries and cultures.

So, what did I learn? Loads! But these five (maybe six) things keep swimming around my mind at the moment. Examples below or learnings aren’t related to just USYD or higher education institutions by the way. The below is what I have taken from the highly unique opportunity that I have had to speak with philanthropists within the setting of planning and wider internal engagement.     

1. It really is about big impact for donors at this level and for them it’s about finding the best partners to do this with. Track record, scale, financial leverage are important but ultimately its whether they feel they can truly work with you productively.   Charities and NFPs need to be confident that they can truly make this impact and have a clear idea about the road map. Clear, but not inflexible.  Most donors want the opportunity to co-create. Most do not want to control or micromanage, but they do want to feel like this is a partnership.

2. With that in mind, donors are acutely aware that NFPs can have a problem with joined up working or formal or informal partnerships with other comparative organisations working the same space. Mostly they find this odd. We really need to do something about this. Higher education institutions are far more advanced in this journey than say international aid and development for example.

3. Organisations need to be joined up internally which, surely, is a much, much easier thing to achieve then let’s say brokering external partnerships? Surely? But no. When problems happen down the line – and of course they will when you are trying to do stuff at scale – it’s often because internally things have become disjointed. And this is something that we see time and time again. Making sure that everyone is on the same page is not just a nice to have once implantation is in full force, it’s as crucial as securing the gift itself.

4. Sustainability. If the project has a long tail or significant ongoing costs for the foreseeable, how will this be sustained in 10, 20 or even 30 years’ time? This brings in of course the question of diversity of funding sources and financial stability… it’s something that some donors can be anxious about. ‘What happens when I stop funding it….” There needs to be a plan, even if it’s got a long lens.

5. The next generation. Particularly when dealing with family funds and offices, having an eye to the future is important. Don’t assume that the next generation will dig you or your cause and if I am honest, I think everyone needs to cool about this. Can you mitigate it? Probably not. But just be nice. Make sure that you engage as much as possible across all ages so that you can keep visibility and crucially relevance. And who knows? Maybe….

And a bonus number 6.

Sometimes, organisations are nervous about having donors involved in planning or opening up access to lots of different people and views. I get it. Us fundraisers want to steward relationships perfectly, but it can sometimes be this obsession with perfection, with stage managing things to a ridiculous degree that stunts the journey. Donors are just people, right?  They have often run huge businesses themselves. They had to deal with disputes and catastrophic issues. They know that life is complicated.

Of course, they want to be dealt with professionally and elegantly (and to point 2 – don’t be at war internally!)  but CRUCIALLY they want the relationship to be authentic. And sometimes Dear Fundraiser that can mean easing off on the control freakery and just letting them in more.  And taking that risk. The team at USYD taught me just that. 

It says a lot about my own levels of self-awareness that it took a trip to the other side of the world to really learn this.  But I get it now. I really do.

Helping Drive Growth in Asian Markets Case Study

WWF created the Asia Pacific Growth Strategy (APGS) in 2008 to support the growth of fundraising income in the Asia Pacific region.

A small team acts as the secretariat of the APGS, and supports the investment in growth opportunities, enables collaborative opportunities at a regional level, and provides capacity building opportunities for fundraisers across the WWF offices in 25 markets in Asia Pacific.

In 2020, APGS asked AAW to undertake a review of the growth potential in the region, particularly looking at key market potential, peer INGO performance analysis, and to provide in-depth assessment of some priority markets. The aim of this review was to evaluate where the INGO could raise more income through strategic investment.

Following a review of external market data, internal topline performance data and through the conducting a series of interviews with WWF Asia Pacific Marketing Directors and CEOs, AAW were able to make a series of recommendations and business cases to drive performance in the region and to present these to the CEOs at their strategic planning meeting. 

“When we decided to conduct a review of key Asian Pacific markets, I immediately thought of Tobin Aldrich at AAW. He is renowned both within the WWF network and more widely as being the go-to expert on creating plans to ensure significant strategic fundraising growth in an international context. It was great to work with Tobin again and the AAW Team. We were very pleased with the outcome of the study and report and would highly recommend Tobin and his global team to anyone seeking a similar review.”

Laura Weeks, Director, Asia Pacific Growth Strategy, WWF

To find out more about how we can support any plans you have for feasibility studies/market entry reviews, please contact imogen@aawpartnership.com.

New and Shiny Fundraising

2nd October by Tobin Aldrich

For as long as I've been in fundraising, charities have been looking for the next big thing that will transform their income generation fortunes. If anything, this seems to have got more and more attention over the years. Today, no self-respecting fundraising strategy is missing a major section on innovation and the majority of the bigger and many medium sized charities have innovation teams or departments all industriously searching for new products, services or approaches that will transform their performance.

One of the dangers of having done anything for a long time is that you get increasingly jaded and think you have seen everything before. Astonishingly, fundraising has changed quite a bit since I wrote my first appeal letter and there have been significant changes in approaches and technologies that have driven this change. Where would we be without face-to-face fundraising or digital acquisition for example?

But (and this is a big but), there have been a long list of things that have been tried and really haven't worked. Of course just because a particular cause unsuccessfully tried some approach in a specific channel many years ago doesn't mean that it will never work for anyone else but we do need at least to know what happened before and learn from it. What is an issue of execution or channel maturity perhaps and what is a more fundamental problem in the psychology of the approach.

The heavy investment by charities in innovation approaches in recent years does not seem to have actually produced all that much in terms of really new approaches that are making a significant different in the market. The approaches that have done are not really new at all. Face-to-face and digital have been around for over two decades now.  It’s hard to think of many really new approaches in the last two decades that have had been really significant in income terms.  There’s certainly technologies that have attracted lots of attention such as blockchain/crypto, NFTs, not to mention AI but little evidence any of this is revolutionising fundraising just now.

Of the initiatives that have come out of the big charity innovation teams that have gone into the market these seem to be mostly either pretty tactical, deployments of existing approaches in different channels or with creative spins, or seem to be things that are actually more in the field of social enterprise (stuff you can sell) than fundraising. There are enormous opportunities here of course but there’s a strong argument that charities are the wrong vehicle to deliver for profit activities. Unless there’s a particular reason why a charity has a competitive edge selling products (for example a charity shop which gets its stock donated), why wouldn’t a social entrepreneur use the flexibility of the market to raise capital for an idea and then if it works, donate the money they make? I can’t think of any big charity trustee board I have experienced that would be the right governance structure for a risky, entrepreneurial social business.

This isn’t an argument that charities should neglect innovation but it needs to be put in to context. The fundamentals of fundraising haven’t changed during my career and these had existed a long time before that.  The core of having a really strong and compelling case for support that is relevant for your audiences and being able to demonstrate the impact you are making remains unaltered. There’s no shortcut that allows you to avoid having that and no shiny new product will compensate for its absence. If you want to improve your fundraising, always, always sort out your core offer first.

The bar for a really new fundraising approach that no one has tried anywhere is a really high one. It is much more likely that successful innovation for your charity can be achieved by taking an approach that has worked somewhere else that is new for your audience.

Our top tips for innovating successfully in your fundraising programme are:

• Get the basics right first. Make sure you have really landed your case for support and core donor offer.

• Develop an innovation framework. The bulk of your investment should usually be in optimisation of your core programme. Only once you have maximised this should you be looking at introducing activities that are entirely new.

• Look at what others are doing. In particular look at outside your immediate sector at related areas. There’s much that mainstream charities can learn from Higher Education for instance and vice versa. Look for successful ideas that are readily transferable.

• Test cost-effectively. Take an MVP approach that allows you to take an idea to market as quickly and cheaply as you can.

• But test rigorously.  Ensure that tests are developed that are meaningful, results are measured consistently and learnings are captured.

Benchmarking Smenchmarking

29th August by Deniz Hassan

Lately I've been awash with data from organisations big and small - all of whom want to know how they're doing. Inevitably the conversation of benchmarking comes up, especially around the time when we see the results of one of the larger digital studies released. 

As a sector we've got loads to compare ourselves to - from the IFL's Indigo study which focuses on 'Global Individual Giving', to the M+R Digital Benchmarks and the grandiosely entitled Wood for Tree 'State of the Sector' (not to be confused with the very similarly named Blackbaud 'Status of UK Fundraising') ...and we mustn't forget the countless internal benchmarks which organisations pay lots of money to conduct. 

But it's a conversation (and often a budget line) that I really try to steer people gently away from relying upon - whether it's digital benchmarking or fundraising benchmarking in general - and I'll explain why. 

How useful are they?

They're a bit useful but not massively so. In none of the benchmark studies we've got is there any sort of context attached. It's just numbers with subjective meaning…and in my slightly humble opinion, subjective meaning means no meaning. If you see what I mean.

Let me give you an example of one of the more simple things people like to benchmark against - email click through rate. Many a conversation about email strategy starts with "what's a good click through rate?" and "the benchmarks shows that xx% is good".

This is not a great start to the conversation as it immediately assumes that all organisations are the same. For instance in one large study, within the international aid section, you have the British Red Cross participating alongside Women for Women International UK. Is there really a useful comparison to be made between your data and a merged dataset of including such diverse organisations?

And perhaps my organisation is really focussed on creating a large pool of low value donors (with a high conversion rate) vs another which is concentrated on higher value? If I don't know the separate strategies of all the participants then something like 'average cash gift' is not helpful to compare against.

The wrong metrics

Studies often use quite baffling metrics that we would never use when creating our own strategies. For example, how many strategies have a KPI for "Investment in digital advertising divided by total online revenue" (ignoring the subjectivity of 'total online revenue')?

My favourite red herring is the 'cost per donation'. It's meaningless and only exists because (as I'll go into later) many participants can't actually measure their activity well enough to understand the differences between the investment and returns across acquisition and retention. Again, is there anything meaningful in comparing my cost per donation as, say, a small membership organisation in a moment of growth vs a mature organisation with a much higher base of existing donors? CPD is not the same as CPA.

Similarly the return on ad spend (ROAS) is to be taken with large fistfuls of salt. Having seen multiple submissions, I can tell you that the word 'return' can mean a plethora of things. Is it the immediate return at point of acquisition? Is it a long term modelled return? How have participants attributed spend and income across the channels? What assumptions does it take vs the amount of real data in there? So many variables across so many organisations means it's not going to be reliable to compare against.

Data quality

One of the biggest issues facing our sector is data quality and measurement - this affects organisations big and small. I've had the privilege of working with a number of top 20 charities this year and they all have measurement issues. For example, one internal benchmarking study had a number of different definitions for how income was measured. That really should be a simple one so you get my point.

Similarly phrases such as 'Not all participants were able to provide data for every metric' does not fill me with confidence or joy. It might be roughly translated as 'we asked a bunch of organisations some questions and we might have got some answers which may or may not be useful or accurate. But here's some graphs'.

The best benchmarking study - WHICH I LOVED (yes, I can be upbeat you see) - that I've seen, collected data consistently across all markets and all channels with no variance and stored it in one data warehouse running a consistent data model. ROAS is the same for every market and channel. As is CPA. As is the attribution. Super.

In many studies, participants are invited to submit their own data which is a huge problem. Take the example of attribution - one organisation may use last click attribution to fill out the form and another might use campaign level income allocation as determined by their custom CRM rules. It's the old apples and pears adage. Take paid search - this will always show a better return on last click attribution than Meta.

Using tools such as Google Analytics can also pose problems. In GA4, for example, you can set your own custom attribution settings. And that's before you even consider that GA will always favour (by Google's own admission) Google channels. So income from one organisation might be attributed to email for one organisation and paid channels for another.

The other big assumption these studies make is that people are skilled in extracting, transforming and cleaning their data. It's a big old job and different people will put different levels of rigour into it…it's just another variable. Self submission without any consistent rules or auditing isn’t a reliable way of collecting data. And even if there were consistent rules, it would be impossible for most participants to follow them.

So what's the future?

I do think benchmarking can work though. But I think the sector needs to mature significantly around data. Data literacy is still much lower than it should be considering the amounts of money some organisations are investing in paid media channels. We're still getting our heads around what attribution really means and we still see huge differences in things like our fundraising systems vs management accounts. This is what we need to work on.

But for the time being I think a lot of it is simply navel gazing. My CTR's biggest than your CTR and all that…

The Power of Integration – Raising Profile and Income through Face-to-Face Fundraising

27th June by Tobin Aldrich

We were very fortunate to be at the very first international Face-to-Face Fundraising conference in Vienna last month. I mean Vienna in June with added fundraising, what's not to like?

I have been a strong proponent of Face-to-Face since running my first campaigns in the early bronze age around 1997. Face-to-Face was the primary reason that regular giving in the UK doubled in the period to 2010 and it has recruited tens of millions of supporters for non-profits in nearly 100 countries around to world to date.

But the approach has always been controversial, most of all within the non-profit sector itself. We still find many detractors today, particularly amongst trustees and senior leaders in non-profits we work with. I have lost count of organisations I have spoken to who have said “face to face isn’t for us”, whilst usually simultaneously looking to increase their predictable unrestricted income.

Let’s be clear, there are issues with Face-to-Face. In pretty much every market where it operates, the approach is facing increasing costs to sign up new donors while retention of face-to-face recruited supporters has long been an issue.  There’s plenty of incidences of this form of fundraising being done badly, leading to poor quality and supporter dissatisfaction. And lots of people don’t love the approach but then who really likes being asked to give money to charity?

But Face-to-Face remains the most important channel for new regular donor acquisition in most of the world’s fundraising markets and, done well, continues to be profitable and effective for large numbers of non-profits of all cause types.

One of the most common objections to this fundraising approach is the negative effects it might have on a charity’s brand. This is a view firmly held by some individuals, but I have never seen any data to support this contention.

So, I was very interested in a presentation by the Norwegian Air Ambulance at the F2F Conference. When they set up a Face-to-Face programme a few years ago they wanted to know how it would affect their brand reputation. Interestingly, the fundraising programme was led by someone with a brand marketing background, so he did what brand people do and tracked awareness and satisfaction levels before and after the programme was introduced.

The result? The Face-to-Face programme, which was developed as an integrated campaign with the charity’s other marketing and communications activities was extremely successful and drove very healthy income growth. But it also resulted in a significant increase on both awareness of the charity in Norway and trust in its brand. The more fundraising they did and the more conversations they had, the higher brand trust was.

Not only this, when surveyed the supporters recruited through Face-to-Face had a much better understanding of the work the charity did than those recruited from other channels and a more positive impression of it.

I suspect that not every Face-to-Face programme would have the same effect on a charity’s brand. This was a particularly well-designed campaign that thought about income generation and brand value in a holistic way.  The charity started with high levels of recognition and support. But it does I think demonstrate how the power of the personal conversation is undervalued by many charities.

Even those charities who use Face-to-Face often do not particularly value the people carrying out this activity for them, whether they are agency or in house staff. It is often managed in a very transactional way with very little support from senior staff, let alone trustees. But these individuals are critical ambassadors for a non-profit’s brand, having thousands of conversations with potential supporters every week.

Fundraising and brand are far too often treated as separate functions by non-profits. In reality, of course they are intertwined. Most major non-profit public brands were built originally by fundraising, whilst every fundraising activity is hugely impacted by people’s awareness and trusts levels in the non-profit.

Face-to-Face remains a really important communications channel for many non-profits and how the activity is used to strengthen and reinforce organisational messaging is a critical question for marketing.  As important is the challenge of how other channels can support Face-to-Face.

Successful non-profit marketing is increasingly about the effective integration of organisational messaging across multiple channels. The power of the Face-to-Face channel shouldn’t be underestimated in that context.  

Don’t Look Now

27th June by Imogen Ward

My time working in the charity sector is slowly inching towards its third decade. There’s a quote by writer Angela Carter that cites nostalgia as being “the vice of the aged”. And as we get “aged”, it’s oh so very easy to shake our heads and mutter that everything was rosier and happier back in the day.

There has been loads that has changed for the better.  The biggest of these is arguably around digital which has probably brought the most positive disruption not just in our working practices but how we effectively reach and communicate with supporters and other key stakeholders such as the media and policy decision makers.

It is still a very conservative sector (trust me, I have sat in enough Board meetings recently) but it’s a lot less restrictive and hierarchal than when I joined in in the mid-nineties. The localisation agenda in international aid and development is ultimately going to shift power from the North to the South and will hopefully move the dial on how the world addresses big and complex problems more effectively and sustainably. Lived experience in charity leadership teams and boards was almost unheard of 10 years ago as was diversity and inclusion. 

But indulge me a little in this vice.

Raising funds to support our work has never been tougher. Sorry.

Our ability to effectively use channels such as Face-to-Face, direct mail and the telephone to reach new supporters has become a lot harder and a lot more expensive and exclusive. Building a file of supporters was an achievable goal for even relatively modest organisations if you could find a bit of investment and the right channels. Now, like buying your own property, it seems to be the preserve of the rich.

One of my first business plans I put together for both Board of Trustee approval and to support funding in the form of a bank loan was focused on Face-to-Face fundraising. This was around 1998 whilst I was working for a small conservation charity. It took a lot of work to get the organisation (and the bank) over the line. But I did. My one regret? Not being bolder and asking for more money and being more ambitious with targets.

The majority of small to medium sized organisations that we are called into review on the income generation side are struggling with their individual giving programmes. This is not because they have bad programmes or because there’s a lack of talent in the team. It’s just really, really hard. And if funding in acquisition was turned off during the heat of the Olive Cooke tragedy, then the implications of this are very serious now. 

For all the talk of Philanthropy and Corporate Partnerships and even social enterprise, nothing has really emerged that satisfactorily solves the problem of how charities fund core costs and use those core costs to propel impact. Outside of full cost recovery (again getting harder) and the magical legacies, it really does feel like we are chasing our tails.

There are bits of the UK charity sector doing well which I think still have a chance to achieve substantial growth in Individual Giving.  Those with causes that are local – Air Ambulances, Hospices, Animal Shelters – these are bucking the trend and done correctly should do well.  In addition those causes that are linked to major news stories – Food Bank/Security charities and (up to a point) humanitarian charities will find recruiting donors easier. But it will take a lot more money and energy than I had or needed back in the 90s.

So. If I was my 20-something reading this missive from the future how would I stop the younger me from jacking it all in and running for the hills?  

Well, as with most things in life, it’s less about what you know and more who you know. And I think this applies here.

Focus on those closest to the organisation and the cause. Spend time getting to know them. Explore how you can develop the relationship. Stop looking at your donor file as pure entries on a database that need to be segmented and technically aligned, look at them as individuals. And treat them like people not numbers.

Yes, back in the day we could build a programme quickly but unless we nurtured our supporters they would still fall off at an alarming rate.

Perhaps 30 years on we’ve at last learnt the power of relationships and taking time to care. Now that is good news.

Changing the World Through Business

25th April 2022 by Jo Hastie

Patrick Nash has set up and led twelve successful social enterprises, charities and values-driven businesses since his early 20s and has just published his first book – Creating Social Enterprise. We interview Patrick about the book and his career in businesses that aim to have a positive impact on the lives of people and the environment. He lives in Wales and is a non-executive director of AAW.

What in essence is a social enterprise? What makes it different to other businesses?

The simplest explanation is businesses that are changing the world for the better. There are three main kinds of business that tend to make up social enterprises: co-operatives and employee owned businesses, community interest companies B Corp companies. For me, social enterprises are one of the best ways of tackling the problems we face around inequality and the environment.

How did you start out in this area and why?

After university I travelled around Africa and after discovering more about wholefood cooperatives  I set up one in Bristol. Within two years this workers co-operative had an annual income of £3 million – it had been a baptism of fire, but I was hooked!  

It wasn’t until my 30s that I came across the term social enterprise but by that point I had already made a career in it. For the first 18 years my work was focused on the environment and food, including building an eco-village in Scotland.  I then moved into mental health.

Why did you write the book?

My kids loved the stories I told them about working in social enterprises. I am not interested in telling people what to do, but I wanted to share things that might be helpful for people who want to set up their own business, steps to success, mistakes and, most of all, how enterprises can change the world and the lives of others. I do occasional guest lecturing at the School for Social Enterprises and really enjoy talking to people about my experiences. The book is a longer version of that.

What is your proudest achievements since you started out?

I’m proud of all my businesses, but perhaps most particularly of Connect Assist in the South Wales Valleys, delivering helplines supporting people in challenging life circumstances. The company was established in an area of high unemployment and one of the poorest areas in the whole of Europe; in 2002, Save the Children reported that in Rhondda Cynon Taf, where we were located, 17% of children lived in extreme poverty. I knew if we were successful, we could create a lot of jobs and today 450 people work for the company – it’s probably the largest non-government employer in the county. People there do an incredible job answering the phone and talking to people facing challenges with mental health and poverty, debt and other problems. They also do a lot of work with asylum seekers. I feel like we did something really special there.

I am proud that all of these enterprises are still going – Essential Trading in Bristol remains one of the largest vegetarian food wholesale co-operatives in the UK.

What next?

No more start-ups! I am working with a number of local festivals and have managed to secure two full paid posts for these. I’m on the board of a couple of charities and, of course, AAW.

To order a copy of Creating Social Enterprise, visit www.amazon.co.uk.

Time For Engagement - St George’s Pioneering Partnerships This Ramadan

21st April by Jo Hastie

On 28th March this year, St George’s Hospital Charity held its first Tooting Interfaith Iftar, welcoming guests from of all faiths across the borough. As the month of Ramadan comes to an end, we talk to Chloe Roberts – Community and Events Fundraising Manager at the charity and Molly Simpson – Senior Public Fundraising Manager – about the event and how it came about.

Over the last couple of years the AAW Group has had the pleasure of working with Chloe, Molly and the team at St George’s Hospital Charity to launch a capital appeal to raise funds for children’s services at the hospital.

The Tooting Interfaith Iftar was part of the Time For Change Appeal which aims to raise £5 million by 2024 to transform children’s services and facilities at the hospital.

One of the key aims of the Time for Change Appeal was to engage with all constituencies and faith groups who are part of the broader community that surrounds St George’s Hospital.

Tooting is a very diverse area and, as Molly states, “we knew we needed to engage the community with the appeal through something that was relevant and would speak to local people”. With a large population of Muslim’s within Tooting the team began to explore ideas around Ramadan - Islam’s holy month, a time of fasting, reflection and prayer – and also for giving.

“We knew we needed to engage the community with the appeal through something that was relevant and would speak to local people”.

After a spot of volunteering at the humanitarian charity Islamic Relief, the team decided they wanted to do something around sharing stories and gratitude with food being identified as a powerful way to bring communities together. And so the idea of the Tooting Interfaith Iftar was born!  Iftar is the fast-breaking evening meal served during Ramadan, as the sun is setting.

Realising they needed local partners who could help, St George’s approached the Tooting-based Naz Legacy Foundation which supports young people from minority communities and disadvantaged backgrounds in education. After an approach from St George’s, they were delighted to join in plans to hold a Tooting lIftar, something they had never done locally before.

“Looking back” Molly states “I don’t know how we could have done without the support of Naz Legacy, We are both white and British, and although we could learn as much as possible,  there are so many different elements that we wouldn’t have known about. Naz Legacy Foundation’s expertise, understanding and input was invaluable.”

With this particular event, there were various elements the team had to take into consideration that differed to normal dinners they have organised. Timings had to be thought about very carefully; there was no flexibility if anything overran, with sunset at 7.31 setting a strict deadline to work around. The venue had to be very specific, offering prayer spaces, no alcohol to be served and ensuring all vegetarian food. It was also important the team had a range of speakers from different faiths and backgrounds, as well as an Imam to lead the call to prayer. Tickets were offered on a complimentary basis as the team wanted the event to be accessible to everyone, but there were opportunities to donate at various points.

The speeches throughout the evening told a story of both community and faith. Some of the speakers also had a personal connection to St Georges, highlighting the impact the hospital has on its local community. The evening also included a speech from a local Imam from Balham and Tooting Mosque who reflected on what charity and Ramadan means to people of Muslim faith, before carrying out the call to prayer.

Ensuring the event was sponsored was key and the team were delighted when Islamic Relief UK offered their support. For Chloe, “One of the main things that we were proud of is that three very different charities came together to put on the Tooting Interfaith Iftar. To have Islamic Relief’s stamp on the event was a massive win and the collaboration between the three organisations was definitely the highlight for me.”

“One of the main things that we were proud of is that three very different charities came together to put on the Tooting Interfaith Iftar.”

Chloe goes on “What we had learned from our volunteering is that it is important to the Muslim community to give donations over Ramadan but it’s as equally important that those donations go towards something that directly impacts other Muslims. Knowing this, we really wanted to show that St George’s Hospital is really helping your community – we open our doors to everyone, your children will be born here and if they are ill, they are going to be treated here. And I think our speakers did a really good job of getting that across”.

The event was relatively informal with the team wanting guests to feel like they were in a home setting, having a casual chat with their neighbour. Each table was hosted by a St George’s staff facilitator and guests enjoyed discussions with prompts around topics such as what Tooting, community and religion meant to people, what faith means if you aren’t religious, and whether people had a connection to St George’s Hospital. Molly notes that “It was lovely to look around the room and see different people engaging. On one table you saw a Christian Priest, Staff from St George’s Hospital and a local Muslim family all having a discussion together. For us, that was exactly what we had set out to achieve.”

The event culminated with a performance from a spoken word artist - Kaira Brown. “We wanted the idea of sharing stories throughout the evening, to come together at the end with one final story” states Chloe “Kaira took snippets of conversation and weaved them into a prepared piece about Tooting and our story, bringing those conversations to life and it was just amazing to listen to. You could literally hear a pin drop in the room. It was a great way to round off the evening.”

“Our spoken-word artist took snippets of conversation from the night and weaved them into a prepared piece about Tooting and our story, bringing those conversations to life and it was just amazing to listen to. You could literally hear a pin drop in the room.”

Feedback from those who attended the event has been very positive and the team have been delighted with the level of engagement. As Molly adds, “We had quickly worked out that this wasn’t going to be a massive fundraiser for us, but we had other objectives in mind. For people who didn’t know about St George’s Hospital Charity, we wanted them to leave knowing who we are.” The event raised £5,000 including sponsorship but introduced St George’s to a whole new audience. As Molly goes on “I would say at least 80% of the room didn’t know us before the event. Bringing the Iftar to the community and having our name associated with it was a huge deal for us as an organisation.” An additional bonus was Muslim staff at the hospital thanking the team for engaging in this way.

Molly, Chloe and the team are very much hopeful that this event will happen again. As a final reflection they add, “Hopefully the Tooting Interfaith Iftar becomes an annual event that people look forward to in their calendar.”

AAW would like to wish a joyous eid to all those celebrating.

ChatGPT and Fundraising – What do You Need to Know? (Part One)

13th March 2023 by SOFII

With so much talk about ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), it can be hard to understand what this new technology could mean for us – as individuals and as fundraisers. We are delighted here to share a great new interview by the fantastic SOFII (Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration) featuring three experienced fundraisers – Emily Casson (Digital Marketing and Fundraising Manager at The Salvation Army), Matt Smith (Director of Transformation & Innovation at THINK Consulting Solutions) and our very own Digital Director Deniz Hassan. Below, SOFII asks them five questions about ChatGPT and how it could impact fundraising now and in the future.

Q1: Have you experimented with ChatGPT? If so, can you please tell us what you learned?

Emily Casson (EC): I’ve been experimenting lately (both in a personal and professional capacity) asking ChatGPT everything from how to brighten up my balcony garden in winter, to asking it to draft a fundraising strategy. I liken it to having an eager intern, great for research tasks, answering questions faster than Google and basic copywriting but it needs a steer in the right direction. 

ChatGPT sometimes presents opinion as fact without citing sources, so you do need to fact check – but it is possible to debate it and it even apologises when you question it. For example, I had a lively discussion with ChatGPT on what constitutes a ‘small’ charity.  

Deniz Hassan (DH): I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT since launch, across a number of areas including creative and campaign analysis. I think, like anything, it’s a case of you get out what you put in. The richer the information you feed in, the higher the quality. 

Matt Smith (MS): I’ve used it for both with writing supporter-facing communications for charity clients and to help with new product development. I’ve learned that the more time you spend on writing the brief (as with working with human writers!) the better the output. 

It’s incredibly impressive and I’ve found it particularly helpful with the start of a project or getting going on a first draft of a piece of work – it can help remove the anxiety of having a blank page and give you a great skeleton to then add your own thinking and creative flourish.

Q2: What do you think are the most exciting applications of ChatGPT for fundraisers and the charity sector?

MS: It will mean we can get much more done in any given day. By using AI (artificial intelligence) tools wisely, we’ll be able to be much more efficient, perhaps even get double the amount of work done, but whilst providing us the chance to spend more time on the truly human and creative parts of our roles. And by writing great initial briefs, we’ll then be able to use ChatGPT to create first drafts that give us back more time and creative energy to use on perfecting multiple pieces of work – all in the same time it would usually take to write one. 

It will also help with idea generation and can be used a great starting point for ideation sessions.

DH: It will certainly help rapid prototyping. In this digitally driven age, volume of creative executions is key. ChatGPT can really be an extra resource in creating variations that can be tested, combining top performing ads and identifying trends. 

EC: I actually asked ChatGPT this exact question and within seconds it gave a few useful examples – such as writing web copy, developing fundraising strategies, template emails and event plans.  

I think it has the potential to be a substantial change for society, similar to how search engines changed the way we find out information. For the charity sector it could mean we can get a starter for ten on a range of strategies, plans, campaigns, research and copy, that a human can then edit, saving us precious time. 

It is great for idea generation and research, as well as copywriting, so I see it as being beneficial to small charities who don’t have a lot of resources.

Q3: Can you see any risks/potential negative applications/ethical issues surrounding ChatGPT that fundraisers should have on their radars?

DH: Ubiquity has long since been an issue in fundraising and the danger is Chat GPT makes this worse. It exists by learning from what’s inputted so naturally if we keep putting the same stuff in and asking similar questions, it will output similar stuff. 

Ethically the issues are the same as without it. Stories need to be authentic and maintain dignity. We can’t use it to churn out disingenuous creative just as we can't write stuff like that ourselves. 

MS: One issue is ensuring that unconscious bias and unethical content is recognised, and that work is done to remove these. As with any technology that is based on a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT can and will generate offensive or biased content because it pulls from things like Wikipedia articles and web pages that themselves contain these biases. 

Another issue is that we become over-reliant on it in situations that require a human touch, or that we sleepwalk into replacing roles and tasks without fully understanding the consequences. It’s an incredible powerful and exciting tool, but this power comes with real risk.

EC: I think that there are a few risks associated and it is key to have human oversight. It presents thoughts as fact but is only as good as how it has been programmed, so I have concerns around amplifying bias. 

It also doesn’t currently cite sources, so it is hard to know where it has gained information from – and as we all know, what is on the internet isn’t always truth.  

ChatGPT can learn tone of voice, but I would hate us to lose what makes specific charities unique by a copy and paste approach, so I would use it as a starting point not the end product.

We also need to be aware of the fact our donors might use it. I asked it ‘what are the most effective charities to donate to?’ and it gave me a few options. So there is the question of how ChatGPT decides what charities to give prominence too, as donors may also use it to research charities.

I think one of the key ethical issues is around what AI can’t do. As much as we can programme them, it will never be able to replace human empathy and we have to be careful about how we use it and not lose the human touch where it is important.

Q4: Do you know anyone who is making good use of ChatGPT already?

MS: At THINK we’ve used ChatGPT to help us develop new products for our clients. It’s been incredibly helpful at that first development stage to provide structure and to save time during a particularly busy part of the year. Some of our charity clients are already using the tool to produce first drafts of press releases, copy for adverts and as an idea generation tool. 

So far, the examples I’ve seen have been appropriate time savers, rather than replacing whole tasks or functions (so far!). I liken it to using Google to answer a question, rather than thumbing through a hardcopy encyclopaedia for the answer. ChatGPT will help us be more efficient and get more done, but it won’t replace the need for human originality, scrutiny and nuance.

EC: An American mental health non-profit Koko has been doing some testing with ChatGPT and tried using a co-pilot approach with AI suggesting prompts to peer supporters. It will be interesting to see if other charities try this ‘co-pilot’ approach.  Someone also shared with me this list of prompts for marketing/comms that could be useful for charities to try. 

Q5: Any final thoughts for our community of fundraisers, who might be hearing a lot about ChatGPT right now?

EC: While ChatGPT is relatively new, it is a very fast-growing area (and often over-subscribed so potentially paid versions may be coming). Google will be launching its own version ‘Bard’ soon, so this technology will be a fundamental shift in our ways of working. It is important that as this technology grows, we as a sector debate the ethics and use cases. We should take advantage of the opportunities it offers, while keeping to our values.

DH: Like any shiny new tool, have fun with it learn what it can do. But whatever you do, just ensure you’re doing it with strategy in mind. Do things for reasons that help you achieve your goals. Use it if it fits, don’t worry if it doesn’t! 

Thanks to SOFII for allowing us to republish this article. Please note, the answers above have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

We Need to Talk About Face-to-Face Fundraising

8th March 2023 by Daniel McDonnell

At the end of May, the first International F2F Fundraising Congress will take place in Vienna, providing a global platform for learning, skill sharing and innovation around direct dialogue fundraising. AAW’s Tobin Aldrich and Imogen Ward are looking forward to attending and talking about how big data can help us all keep face-to-face donors for longer. As a taster before the event, speaker Daniel McDonnell, Global Fundraising Specialist at UNICEF shares his thoughts below on using data to create successful F2F fundraising teams.

The charity fundraising sector is facing a significant staffing shortage and it’s difficult to recruit and retain the right talent. This is especially true for face-to-face (F2F) fundraising, a role which we all know can be demanding, despite how exciting and rewarding it is.

It’s been that way as long as I can remember, and there are no easy solutions to it.

But I think that there are two words which can alleviate some of the woes we face here. They are words fundraisers are already very familiar, albeit in slightly different guises; retention and journey. And F2F fundraising has a big opportunity to innovate around both.

Thinking about retention; F2F has traditionally used somewhat crude KPIs such as volume of new donor sign-ups and average donations. What we’ve begun doing at UNICEF is further examine our data to better understand the lifetime value of each new donor.

We seek to understand donor behaviour based on things such as:

• The donor’s age;

• The amount they signed up for;

• The donor’s location;

• The sub-channel recruitment method, e.g. door, street, private site;

• Their payment method;

• Any extra one off cash payments, payment delinquencies; and

• Any donation amount upgrades or downgrades.

This deeper analysis allows us to predict with some accuracy when each donor will break even and their value in the longer term.

And vitally, this is meaningful information we can share with our F2F fundraisers. This means that rather than telling fundraisers to engage those who are most likely to sign up, or  just to take a guess at who looks generous, they can put their energies into those candidates most likely to create the greatest lifetime value. This enables prioritisation and data-driven decisions, something which the charity sector does not typically do as well as the commercial world. It means F2F professionals know when it’s worth engaging in a more challenging conversation, or when to just back away.

This in turn means we can give our fundraisers a tangible, predictive value for the donors they recruit and let them know the impact this has. We can tell them, ‘You’ve created this impact today…’, or ‘You’ve built part of this building, provided for this family,’ and so on because we know what the donors they have recruited are likely to give over the long-term. This means so much more than the abstract ‘You’ve recruited four donors today’. This can have a massive impact on a F2F fundraiser’s morale and job satisfaction and can therefore increase the likelihood they will be more productive and stay in the job longer-term.

We also need to start thinking about the F2F fundraiser journey. We’re used to plotting out donor journeys and thinking about their experiences, but we can neglect our fundraisers. One fundraiser can be worth hundreds if not thousands of donors so we must not take them for granted.

This means creating a calendar like you would with the donor journey. On this you can plot times of the year when you’ll be running internal campaigns to motivate, empower and inspire your teams. From welcoming to thanking and celebrating, you can even pre-empt pain points in the fundraisers’ journey where there are lows in motivation or peaks in resignations. The way we see it, the more engaged, valued, motivated and better informed your F2F fundraisers are, the more likely they are to do a good job and want to stay with the organisation.

I’m looking forward to speaking about these and other topics relating to the use of data to create successful F2F fundraising teams at the inaugural International F2F Fundraising Congress, taking place in Vienna this 30th of May to the 1st of June. This event is an incredible opportunity to bring together the global community of F2F fundraisers for the first time for peer-to-peer learning and valuable networking.

I strongly believe that the more we share as a profession, and as a sector, the more we all benefit. We know that F2F has not necessarily had the best reputation historically, but if one of my F2F fundraisers gives a donor a great experience, it reflects well on the charity sector as a whole and makes them more open to other fundraising communications.

As charities continue to face challenging times, it’s really important we do what we can to deliver the best possible experience and as much as possible take clear data driven decisions to improve our ways of working. Collaboration as a profession will be key if we are to make this happen.

Join Daniel – and the AAW Team - in person at the first @International F2F Fundraising Congress (#F2FCongress23) in Vienna, Austria this 30th May to 1st June. Visit https://www.f2f-fundraising.com/ for details and to register.  

Concern Worldwide AAW Group Digital Review Case Study

AAW helped Concern Worldwide - Ireland's largest INGO - assess its current abilities and future opportunities to maximise digital.

Over the course of the review, our consultants looked across all aspects of digital - from a strategic view to how activities are coordinated, technically underpinned and measured. It identified where Concern wanted to go with their digital compared to where they were at the start of the process. It identified where organisational structures, skills, resources and culture was either hindering or accelerating digital growth.

By taking a deep dive into the digital platforms and data architecture, AAW Group were able to find that measurement and attribution issues were leading to an inability to robustly optimise the paid digital media spend. By reviewing the architecture, AAW Group were able to make recommendations on ways to accurately measure the ROI of each channel.

The digital fundraising review process and outputs were the key foundations in Concern developing a 5 year digital strategy (also facilitated by AAW Group) which, in turn, formed a key part of the overall organisational strategy.

 “AAW were brought in to help us drive our digital fundraising transformation by creating a holistic digital strategy that brought together our Fundraising, Communications and IT teams.  The AAW team helped us create a coherent vision for digital fundraising and marketing and a clear plan to deliver it. The combination of Tobin Aldrich and Deniz Hassan is truly unique, providing a huge breadth of experience and unique perspective across strategic, structural, cultural and operational considerations. We're excited about our digital journey – thank you AAW!”

Gabrielle Murphy Director of Development and Fundraising, Concern Worldwide.

To find out more about how we can support your digital plans, please contact deniz@aawpartnership.com.

Stepping into Coaching

9th February 2023 by Jo Hastie

Three years ago, after a 25 year career mainly in the third sector, Jo Stone made the leap to setting up her own leadership coaching business and is relishing the change. We interview her about the move, the key issues and challenges that her clients need help with and advice for those who are thinking of setting up their own business.

What made you decide to make the move from working in fundraising leadership roles charity side to setting up your own business and coaching?

My background is in working for a range of charities including Friends of the Earth, British Red Cross and Battersea. In 2018, I experienced coaching that involved Insights Discovery; a psychometric tool that helps people understand themselves and their relationships with others through colour energies. I discovered I lead with a Fiery Red energy which means I can be quite impulsive, make a decision and just do it. I loved the coaching and, on the spot, decided to qualify as a coach.

So I quit my job at Battersea to focus my energy into building my business and help transform people’s lives and careers.

Did you make the move gradually? 

At the start I just managed to fit it all in and some of the training took place on weekends. As someone who leads with Fiery Red, I’m capable of taking a lot on at any one time!. After I’d left full-time, Battersea kept me on for one to two days a week to finish off some key projects which helped with the gradual change over.

I continue to do around two days a week fundraising consultancy and three coaching. 

Often, I’ll work with AAW on fundraising consultancy projects and was really happy to be placed by AAW’s Interim team at St George’s Hospital Charity in South West London to help implement the Time for A Change appeal to raise funds to transform children’s services at the hospital.

After my AAW Assignment had finished, St George’s asked me to work with their leadership team and do their insight profiles. In any of my fundraising roles, through osmosis I will talk in the language of Insights Discovery, energies and naturally try and coach people. This bridge in my work with clients moving from consultancy to coaching is common.

Tell us about your Stepping Stones coaching business – what inspired you to be a coach?

Once I had started coaching others, I absolutely fell in love with it; I can start a session with a client exhausted but always finish it energised. 

Most of my clients are in the sector but I also have commercial and non-charity clients. I work with individuals and, increasingly, with leaders and their entire teams.

In my own experience, organisations in the not for profit sector are reluctant to invest in this area, unless a senior decision maker has experienced coaching personally and then of course they get it. If you are a leader, having access to a coach can be transformational. It also makes economic sense as the organisation is then able to actually maximise you as a leader you're more likely to be creative and innovative rather than stuck in the weeds.

But I believe everyone should have a coach, I don't think it should be saved for the most senior leaders in an organisation.

What sorts of challenges the leaders face today that come up in your coaching?

I recently did some market research with around 30 leaders from across different sectors and the really common issues identified were:

·       How to have a challenging conversation when you are managing people and stakeholders.

·       Dealing with emotions in the workplace. Thank goodness that today we are much more conscious of, and sensitive about, mental health and wellbeing – this is quite a generational shift with younger people very comfortable and vocal about how they feel and perhaps older generations needing some guidance on how to handle this.  

·       Challenges around hybrid working: this really ties in with Insights Discovery and Myers Briggs and how people work best in different environments whether you are on the introvert or extravert spectrum.

·       Not having the time of space to be a leader or director; people want to be visionaries and doing amazing things, but they are having to step in to iron out conversations that have gone wrong, barriers that are coming up, etc. Teams need to be empowered and confident. A lot of what my Mastering Leadership Programme is about how you create that environment.

·       The biggest challenge of all is recruitment. One of the fundamental problems is fair pay, but a key issue is flexibility of working. We need to understand that people are all different and you will get so much more from people if you have a menu of working options, rather than a nine to five office base; people can choose what is best for them. That also feeds into diversity and accessibility as well.

What advice would you give for anyone looking to set up their own business?

• Don’t quit your job unless you a have a few months’ savings to rely on.

• Network – you may hate it, but it gets easier. Also network with your peers in the same field.

• Keep connected with your existing network – the first few green shoots for your new business will likely come from them.

• Be brave – it will become second nature to you.

• Understand that we each have our own strategies to deal with things – I am happy to stand in front of an audience and make a speech, but I won’t go to a networking event and mingle. Find what works for you.

• Invest in your own development. I have just spent the last year putting focus into developing my business and marketing strategy to get a better balance between my coaching and consultancy work and my work/home in 2023.

To find out more about Jo’s consultancy and coaching services visit https://www.stepping-stones-coaching.com/.