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

Who would want to be an international development charity just now? Giving from individuals in the UK (and Ireland) to international development causes has been declining for years. By some estimates, the proportion of UK individuals donating to international charities has halved in the last two decades. Total voluntary income of the top 20 UK … Continue reading What Now for the Aid Agencies?

photo Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash I know we'll all be happily shot of 2020 at this point but before we do let's take stock of where the fundraising world stands at the end of this tumultuous year. Since March we have I think gone through a number of stages in terms of how the charity … Continue reading A Year Like No Other

Photo credit: Ross Findon, Unsplash My AAW partner Imogen calls the point we have reached in this crisis, “the Midway”. Whether we are actually half way through this time will tell, I suspect it might be more a case of the “end of the beginning” to quote our Prime Minister’s principal hero (whom apart from … Continue reading The Next Stage: The Change