That fundraising has changed and continues to change, fundamentally isn’t news any more. Many people, including me, have been saying this for years now.

The above chart (date from CAF’s UK giving surveys) shows what’s been happening to giving by individuals in the UK since 2014. At best, the picture is flat. Across the sector, charities report increasing difficult in acquiring new supporters and in keeping and developing new ones. Efforts to develop new income streams and new funding models have resulted in only modest progress for most. As always with charities, there are exceptions (hospices and air ambulances take a bow) and outliers but for the average “general” fundraising charity, things are very, very hard.

There’s an emerging consensus about what non profits should do to move forward. I summarise it as follows:

• We need a new approach to fundraising
• We need a new fundraising practice
• We need people with the right skills, expertise and attitude

At AAW we think our role is to help charities and social purpose organisations make the transition from the old to the new worlds of fundraising.  In our Insight, Inspire, Ignite & Implement model, we have designed a simple way to support nonprofits make the change with the knowledge, expertise and resources we can provide.

We are already working with many organisations to make the change, from the largest INGOs in the world to small  and medium sized domestic charities.  We are working across the range of areas that need to be covered starting from reviewing where our clients currently are, through to inspiring and developing change strategies and finally, if appropriate, helping with the implementation solution whether that is on the practical fundraising front or providing permanent or interim talent through our search and recruitment services.

Of course one company cannot hope to provide all of the support charities need to transform their fundraising and operational delivery.

So we will continue to partner with other agencies with specific complementary skill sets while building up our own capabilities and capacity.

We have teamed up with digital specialists Big Mallet to create a new offering around digital transformation. This partnership is a fusion of our strategic and fundraising expertise and Big Mallet’s ability to rapidly develop and deploy digital technical solutions. The aim is to help charities get started on the road to fully digitised fundraising and marketing through interactive workshops using our Inspire and Ignite model.

We will be running our first digital transformation workshops in the new year.

Changing the (fundraising) world won’t be easy or quick. It will need very many people and organisations to play their part.  We hope that we can make a useful contribution. And it will be fun to try.