Brand people and fundraising people have fought in charities ever since I've been involved with the sector. Too often the two areas have had conflicting mandates and compete for attention and resources.  At its most extreme one brand manager in a charity I worked for explained to me that she saw her role as counter-acting … Continue reading How brand can really support fundraising

I've written before about my slightly weird preoccupation with charity benchmarking. Edited version, I'm a data geek and there's nothing someone like me loves more than comparative charity fundraising stats. But more pertinently, I think it's very hard to judge how well any charity's fundraising programme is doing without looking at its direct competitors.  How … Continue reading Why aren’t you benchmarking?

I’ve always had a bias toward towards the individual side of fundraising programmes. Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong believer in balanced income generation portfolios. Areas of major funding will provide more money for less investment of money and effort than mass programmes.  But I am strongly of the view that the bedrock … Continue reading Rebooting individual giving

Charities had, it’s fair to say, a fairly torrid 2018 and fundraisers might be forgiven for facing the new year with something less than happy anticipation. If there’s one thing that we can sure about in 2019 it’s uncertainty. The world feels like a pretty chaotic place at the moment and trying to make any … Continue reading Trends for 2019

We all know I think that fundraising as we have known it has changed profoundly. That fundamental changes in the market, in technology, in supporter expectations have radically altered and are continuing to alter the environment in which nonprofits seek to raise funds. You can gather any group of industry stalwarts at any of our … Continue reading The new fundraising organisation

Recruiting new donors for a charity has never been harder, or costlier. We’re seeing charities we work with paying hundreds of pounds per new regular donor and not expecting to get their money back for many years, as many as ten. Many nonprofits simply can’t find enough new donors to replace attrition and are seeing … Continue reading Seven ways to find new donors

  At AAW we seem to be doing ever more international fundraising consulting, as part of our work with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and with other clients. For a long time I've been interested in how fundraising differs across the world. What is the same and what is different from market … Continue reading Where are the best fundraising markets?

It is now over 20 years since face to face fundraising in its modern form was introduced to the UK market. Paid fundraisers had actually been used for many years previously to recruit charity supporters door to door onto some form of regular giving but it was in 1997 that a fundraising agency working for … Continue reading Does Face to Face have a future?

I've been consulting now for just over three years, on my own and now with Astarita Aldrich & Ward,  and I've just finished my fiftieth project. It's been quite a journey, I've worked with non-profits with incomes from £200,000 to £2bn across a dozen or more countries and covering a huge range of issues and … Continue reading A half century

With the recent Oxfam "scandal" (don't get me started - I think the scandal is the media onslaught on one of our best charities) concentrating attention of the UK aid and development sector, it seems like a good time to review how the fundraising of the international development NGOs has been doing recently. As anyone … Continue reading Tough times for the Aid Agencies