F Word

A few years ago we were talking about the need for charities to come on board with video as a medium for fundraising. Hardly any charities were using it, many did not even have decent still photo library resources, let alone video.

You can’t just decide to do things in fundraising without a good understanding of what you are doing and being able to measure it to see if it works or not. Otherwise you are working in the dark – potentially losing more and more money, like our charity with 20% retention in Year 2.

One of the main trends we are seeing in UK fundraising right now is an alarming lack of donor value sitting on charity donorbases.

Most of the time an organisation doesn’t realise the underlying causes of an ongoing decline in income. Until the causes are pinpointed, it is impossible to make any adjustments.

Autistica wanted to develop a new donor acquisition programme and online was considered the best channel to begin with. Investment was lower than either direct mail or DRTV and testing could be carried out fairly easily.

I heard recently that the Board of a development charity has insisted on all donor acquisition having to break-even within 2 years.

I was recently giving a presentation to a group of fundraisers and – without thinking about it – said that it was usual for us to laser prompt each donor’s response device individually.