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 … Continue reading What can we learn from Universities about Philanthropy?

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 … Continue reading Can Face-Face Fundraising Build Your Brand?

In 2022 we experienced the first (nearly) year of post-pandemic fundraising. If anyone was hoping for a return to ‘normal’ they must have been sorely disappointed. We went straight from the Black Death to a major war in Europe, which was swiftly accompanied by rampant inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. Oh, and the planet's on … Continue reading A Change in Mindset

I’ve spent a lot of my career working on individual giving programmes and in particular focusing on regular giving.  The late 1990s and early 2000s was the heyday of regular giving in the UK and the model of mass recruitment of monthly donors primarily through face to face has spread across the fundraising world.  But … Continue reading Is this the future of Child Sponsorship?

  One of the real joys of being a strategic consultant is the variety of clients you work with. In the past year or so, we've worked with organisations from across the UK and Ireland and countries as varied as the US, Bangladesh, Egypt and Uruguay. We've worked with non-profits of pretty much every description and cause … Continue reading The CRM Dilemma

We’ve been having lots of calls with people since the start of the war in Ukraine as our humanitarian friends and clients formulate their responses to the crisis. With no end in sight to the conflict, there’s no doubt we are looking at a vast humanitarian emergency for a considerable time to come.  Our jobs … Continue reading Fundraising Responses to Ukraine

I don’t know about you but 2021 for me was just a long slog. After the constant crisis that was 2020, this year has been less of an emergency but has consisted of a seemingly endless series of challenges as organisations adjust to a Covid world. And 2022 looks like starting the same way. This … Continue reading Leadership after the Crisis

One of the changes in fundraising we’ve noticed since the pandemic is that there is increased focus from many charities on developing their individual giving programmes. Whether it’s existing programmes that have been struggling in recent years (often since 2015 and Olive Cook) or charities seeking to develop individual giving from scratch , there is … Continue reading Where will we find our new donors?

It has been 5 years since Imogen Ward and I created the company now known (after Mark Astarita joined in 2017) as AAW. It has been quite a ride. September 2016 feels like a different world now. Our idea, when we set up AAW, was that there was a space for an agency that combined … Continue reading Now We Are 5

Over a year into the Covid crisis the future that all of us face is still very uncertain. What do we know about the long term implications of the pandemic on the non-profit sector and for fundraising specifically? There is much we don’t know - how long the crisis will last and what condition our … Continue reading The New World of Fundraising