Simon Scriver is the co-founder of Fundraising Everywhere, a recovering fundraiser, coach/mentor, trainer, keynote speaker, podcast delighter and lovable imp. Fundraising Magazine named him one of Top 20 Most Influential Fundraisers. He has also won Fundraising Ireland’s ‘Small Budget, Big Impact’ and ‘Supplier Of The Year’ Awards, Eircom’s Start-up Award, and was a 2019 finalist of Charities Institute Ireland’s Communications Agency of the Year. He’s a TEDx speaker and has previously won the Toastmasters UK & Ireland International Speech Contest. He holds a Diploma in Fundraising and a Certificate in Fundraising, and is working towards a degree in Theology.
Fundraising challenges come at you from all directions.
Sometimes the most disheartening and difficult challenge is the resistance you might receive from your co-workers. At some stage you’ve probably witnessed the other staff in your charity complain about fundraising or felt their lack of support and interest. You might even have felt alone in your organisation. Look around the staff meeting…are you the only fundraiser?
It doesn’t have to be us and them.
With a bit of ‘internal marketing’ you can get your co-workers on your side… and even get them happily fundraising for you. Here are five tips:
1. Send Updates To Staff
Consider sending monthly or even weekly updates to everyone in your organisation. It doesn’t need to be a comprehensive newsletter, but a quick email talking about something that’s happened or something you’re planning.
Follow similar rules to when you communicate with your donors: centre your news on your staff. Why does it matter to them? Why should they feel great? What can they do to help? What are their goals and what are they trying to achieve?
It seems crazy, but sometimes being inside the organisation can make it really difficult for non-profit workers to see what they’re achieving. Show them in the same way you show your donors. I introduced this in one organisation and within a year nearly half of the staff had signed up to be monthly donors…inspired by their own work and now donating towards their own salaries!
2. Feedback Successes
In particular let your co-workers know about fundraising successes…and make it about them. That large donation didn’t come in because you’re a great fundraiser…it came in because the donor recognised how important the work is and what a great job the staff are doing. Thank them for that.
You might be surprised what works. I remember staff being unimpressed with a four-figure donation from a company they’d never heard of, but a few free Facebook ads were incredible to them. It felt like Facebook had noticed us and the work we were doing!
3. Work With Them… Not Against
You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do…and why would you want to? Don’t expect staff to fundraise for you or shake buckets for you or go to your stupid Harry Potter quiz at the end of a hard week working with vulnerable people.
Instead try to get them involved in a way that suits them. This can take time but is going to be much more productive for you. Can they introduce you to a corporate connection? Have they been meaning to take part in a 5km run? Do they want to bake cakes and decorate the room for your Thank-You Day?
Help them be successful with what interests them and you’ll see them step up to help in other ways. And those that don’t…Hey, fundraising isn’t for everyone. Leave them to it and wait for them to come round themselves when they see others involved.
4. Humanise Your Donors
Fundraisers are a bridge…linking your staff and beneficiaries with the general public. You know that part of your role is to show the good work you do to your supporters. But it’s also your job to inform your staff on what your supporters are saying and doing.
If you’re not already doing it, asking your donors and the general public for their own stories, their messages of support and their thoughts is a great way to increase supporter engagement. But then sharing those inspiring words and stories with your co-workers is a great way to motivate them and get them on your side.
Non-profit staff can find it difficult to look outside. But you can easily bring the sunshine to them.
5. Meet Your Staff and Board One-on-One
Maybe you’re given opportunities to address the staff or speak at Board meetings. That’s great. But by only addressing the group as a whole you’re missing out on opportunities.
Make time to sit down with staff members one-on-one and understand what their goals are. Build a relationship and build trust. Likewise, invite each member of the Board out for coffee. You’ll learn more about them in 30 minutes then you will in 10 years of Board meetings.
Through these one-on-one meetings you’ll begin to understand your staff and Board better, and understand how you can best help each other.
As if you didn’t have enough to do already!
But by putting the time in to motivating the non-fundraisers in your organisation you’ll see better relationships and better results. And banging your head against the wall will be a thing of the past.
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Our platform is open to anyone and everyone in the sector that has an opinion, idea, or resource they would like to share to help make our sector better. If you would like write and share something, pop an email over to nori@fundraisingeverywhere.com and we will support you every step of the way to share your voice.
We know it’s a tough fundraising landscape out there with continued economic uncertainty among everything else.
But, as ever, we’re here to help you navigate these choppy waters with confidence and optimism.
Individual Giving Conference 2024 is back in October!
Before we get onto the specifics, we wanted to share something important with you first.
Below, are the top 5 problems you’re experiencing right now.
And, more importantly, the solutions to help you overcome them.
1. 📉 Economic Uncertainty and the Cost of Living Crisis
Problem: The UK is experiencing significant economic challenges, including inflation and a cost of living crisis. This reduces disposable income for many individuals, leading to a decline in charitable donations and new donor acquisition.
Solution: Understanding the core needs of your key audiences and diversifying your fundraising strategies will help you be seen by the right donor, in the right place, at the right time.
IG Conf 2024 session to help you:
➡️ How to Recruit More Individual Giving Donors
💡Open, the team who have analysed over £1bn of income from 15 of the UK’s most-loved charities, will be sharing the top opportunities for IG recruitment.
2. 😩 Donor Fatigue
Problem: Charities have never been more needed. Though, with numerous charities vying for attention, donors can become overwhelmed and fatigued, leading to decreased engagement and support.
Solution: Personalise your communications and implement effective stewardship programmes to re-engage donors, mitigate fatigue and enhance loyalty.
IG Conf 2024 session to help you:
➡️ Enhancing Donor Relationships through Strategic Engagement
💡Learn how to deepen your donor relationships and boost giving through strategic supporter journeys & engagement actions, with More Onion.
3. 🤖 Digital Skills Gap
Problem: The shift towards digital fundraising was accelerated by the pandemic, but many charities are experiencing a digital skills gap.
Solution: Invest in digital fundraising training and leverage user-friendly platforms to enhance your digital campaigns.
IG Conf 2024 session to help you:
➡️ 10 Tactics for Jump Starting a Stalled Digital Fundraising Program
💡 Get practical strategies to implement and scale your digital fundraising efforts across email, paid and organic social, search ads (including Google Ad Grants), and website optimisation, with Broccoli.
4.🌐 Regulatory Changes and Compliance
Problem: Changes in data protection laws, such as GDPR, and other regulatory requirements can complicate the collection and use of donor information, potentially reducing the effectiveness of fundraising efforts.
Solution: Stay updated with regulatory changes and implement robust data management systems to ensure compliance as well as strong fundraising performance.
IG Conf 2024 session to help you:
➡️ Unlock the Full Potential of Your CRM: Strategies for Success
💡Explore actionable strategies tailored to the unique challenges faced by IG fundraisers, including data management, donor retention, personalised communication and regulatory changes.
5. 🥊 Competition
Problem: Competition among charities has never been greater, making it harder to stand out.
Solution: Differentiate your charity by highlighting your unique ‘you’ and your impact. (Plus, you’ll have to look in the right places, too).
IG Conf 2024 session to help you:
➡️ Competition or Collaboration: Finding Relevance To Stand out From the Crowd
💡 Today, standing out requires more than just a compelling message. Discover how to carve a unique identity while leveraging new strategies to amplify your impact. We’ll cover core challenges from donor fatigue to digital disruption.
At Individual Giving Conference 2024, we’re bringing you an afternoon packed with fresh insights, innovative strategies, and practical solutions designed to tackle your biggest challenges.
For the sessions mentioned above and much more, join us to supercharge your IG fundraising strategies!
Voice Your Thoughts 🗣️
Our platform is open to anyone and everyone in the sector that has an opinion, idea, or resource they would like to share to help make our sector better. If you would like write and share something, pop an email over to nori@fundraisingeverywhere.com and we will support you every step of the way to share your voice.
Claire is a digital mobiliser, fundraiser, and campaigner. Having worked in engagement and mobilisation teams at Greenpeace, ActionAid, Cancer Research UK and Amnesty International, she joined More Onion over eight years ago.
Since then she has delivered dozens of engagement and supporter journeys projects with organisations of all sizes and has trained hundreds of charity professionals in the same. She is now a Mobilisation Expert and Director at MoreOnion
It’s easy to get caught up in our organisation’s needs when talking to supporters. Please give us money, please support our campaign. But to develop a strong, deep and long lasting relationship, we need to consider supporters’ needs too.
Yes, that absolutely means you should be sending loyalty emails to show how their support is making a difference. For example, how you spent their money or how they contributed to a campaign win. But you shouldn’t stop there. So what’s one simple, yet really effective, thing that could take your supporter experiences and relationships to the next level? Engagement actions.
What is an engagement action?
An engagement action is a piece of content that invites your supporters to actively engage with you, and is primarily about one of their needs, not yours.
The ‘active’ bit here is really important. A quick way to assess whether your communication is active is to ask ‘can the supporter experience this fully with their hands in their lap (and without assistive technology like voice dictation)?’ If they can – it’s passive and therefore a loyalty communication, not an engagement action. It’s a fine line and one that’s often pretty easy to get over with a little creative thinking, but by using ‘active’ as the goal you can take something quite simple and create a much richer supporter experience.
For example, can someone watch a video with their hands in their lap? Yes, so it’s loyalty. But what if you made the video slightly interactive, asking the user to make decisions at the end of each section to guide their storytelling? Now, it’s engagement. It’s a fine line that makes a big difference. Now instead of talking at your supporters, you’re engaging with them.
Why bother with them?
At this point you might be thinking – I’m already so busy! Why should I make time for engagement actions?
The incredible thing about engagement actions is that they don’t need to take a huge amount of time or budget to create, but they can uplift the performance of all of your other work. And what’s more, you’ll be surprised at how much fun you have creating them!
Engagement actions can contribute to a large range of supporter objectives, including:
- Educate supporters about a topic
- Build supporter passion and/or empathy
- Help you to learn more about supporters (so you can enrich their experience)
- Help supporters to learn more about you
- Foster a sense of community
- Plus many more…
The right engagement action for the right audience can make people more likely to give and to remain donors for longer. One project in which we created a welcome email journey found that people who took a campaigning and/or engagement action were 4-5 x more likely to make a donation than those who didn’t.
Here’s some examples to get you started
1. A message exchange action to build empathy and connection
An engagement action can help you to connect your supporters to other key groups of people, like your charity’s clients or campaigners.
At Christmas, homelessness charity St Mungo’s invited supporters to write a Christmas message of hope to someone experiencing homelessness. These messages were printed and displayed on Christmas trees in St Mungo’s shelters across the country.
2. Gather expertise and build your community
Charity supporters have a wealth of knowledge and experience that could strengthen their work. So ask them for their input!
Environmental organisation Friends of the Earth Scotland asked their supporters to share their tips for reducing plastic usage and then shared those tips back with the community. This helped encourage supporters to think about the topic in their day to day lives, to produce a valuable resource, and help people feel connected to a broader community of like-minded people.
3. A resource finding tool
Help demonstrate your value by connecting people with useful resources.
Sustainable transport organisation Sustrans have a wealth of free resources on their website, but these could be hard to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
In this simple form they gathered key information on the supporter’s location and specific needs. At the end of the short form they were presented with a personalised range of resources relevant to their answers including local maps, cycle safety guides for children, and much more.
4. Make learning appealing
Do you work on a complex or difficult topic? Engagement actions can help make challenging subject matter appealing and accessible.
Freedom from Torture provide support to survivors of torture as they rebuild their lives in the UK. They wanted to build the knowledge of their newer supporters of the problem of torture and the stories behind it. They made this appealing by using the recipes that they had collected during their cooking classes – one of the many types of therapy that Freeedom from Torture provide. Supporters were asked to guess which country each dish was from and were then told the story of the survivor who cooked it. On the final step they were offered all of the recipes to download and try at home.
Engagement actions not only enrich supporter experience but they also enhance the overall impact of your work, proving that a small investment in creativity can yield substantial returns for supporter donations and lifetime value.
If you’d like to read more about engagement actions, you can download a free report at: https://act.more-onion.com/engagement_actions
If you want to hear more from MoreOnion, Claire will be speaking at Individual Giving Conference 2024 on Enhancing Donor Relationships through Strategic Engagement
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Voice Your Thoughts 🗣️
Our platform is open to anyone and everyone in the sector that has an opinion, idea, or resource they would like to share to help make our sector better. If you would like write and share something, pop an email over to nori@fundraisingeverywhere.com and we will support you every step of the way to share your voice.
We wanted to take a minute to say, fundraising leaders, we see you.
In the ever-changing landscape of charity work and fundraising, you know better than most that leadership isn’t just about steering the ship; it’s about guiding the crew through storms with courage and compassion.
It’s not about having all the answers, but fostering collaboration, empowering others, and harnessing the unique strengths of everyone.
Leadership comes from all levels. Whether you’re a seasoned CEO or a frontline fundraiser, your voice and actions matter more than you realise. Each of us has a role to play, no matter our position or title.
Times may be tough, but tough times call for resilient leaders, like you. Your ability to inspire, motivate, and support those around you is the key.
In times like these, it’s easy to lose sight of the impact you’re making.
But trust us, your work matters more than you know. Your dedication, passion, and sheer determination to make a difference are what inspires us all here at Fundraising Everywhere every day.
So, as we navigate these uncertain waters, continue to lean on each other for support, share insights, and champion one another’s efforts. Together, we can face any challenge head-on and emerge stronger on the other side.
But while you’re busy steering the ship, don’t forget to take care of yourself. You can’t pour from an empty cup, right? Remember to carve out time for self-care, lean on your support network, and celebrate the wins, no matter how small.
And whenever you need us, we’re here. 💙
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Voice Your Thoughts 🗣️
Our platform is open to anyone and everyone in the sector that has an opinion, idea, or resource they would like to share to help make our sector better. If you would like write and share something, pop an email over to nori@fundraisingeverywhere.com and we will support you every step of the way to share your voice.
Guest blog post by Daniel Servante
I have always really enjoyed collaborating with others, be it the many bands I started as a teenager, group research projects at university, co-op gaming online in the evenings or building a career in face to face fundraising – give me people, and I am happy. Having the confidence to try something new isn’t always easy, but the best punt I ever took was knocking on a stranger’s door, aged 21, and saying “Hello, have you got a moment to talk?”
I immediately fell in love with fundraising; the incredible causes I was able to represent, the inspiring impact of each conversation I had, the soft skills I was rapidly developing without even noticing. All this immeasurably built my confidence both professionally and personally. Of course, more than anything, I stuck with fundraising for the incredible people who gave me these opportunities and put their all into doing a very difficult yet vital job every day.
Collaboration and Confidence
Fast forward 5 years, I’m at a major fundraising agency managing sites and I saw a few key problems that needed urgent attention. One was sustainability of access, as we often saw the plug pulled on charity bookings after a single piece of negative feedback from a customer or staff member. Sometimes the complaints were fair, often they were not, but either way the site management usually saw no option but to ban all charities until further notice – they did not have any monitoring or quality control processes in place, and did not seek to implement them.
The second problem was a lack of accountability for the quality of private sites and rates being charged. When I discussed private sites with peers in the sector we often found we had all been sold the same unworkable site one after another, all being told how popular it was. We also found that rates were being inflated at the most in demand sites as we were played off against each other for bids to secure them. All in all, we were navigating quite choppy waters.
We set up Green Light Sites with two goals in mind; to build collaboration and inspire confidence. We shared anecdotal feedback on sites between our clients, and developed an in depth team auditing process (Unicef told us this led to a team achieving their highest sign up rate in 4 weeks). We gained access to new and exciting sites such as Westfield shopping centres, while pushing rates down in other key locations UK wide. Overall we offered huge value to both sides by creating much more sustainable and mutually beneficial booking agreements.
Eight thousand hours later…
When lockdown hit we had the opportunity to reflect, and the necessity to innovate. Returning to face to face was going to be a challenge and we were determined to support the sector that gave us so much on this journey. In part we were well prepped for the new ways of working as we all already worked completely flexible hours from home. This is when our auditing became what it is today. By developing brand new processes we were able to offer our unique auditing product for street, telephone and even door to door teams. We added modules on team management, individual work rate, COVID safety and environmental impact to ensure these reports inspired as much confidence for the fundraisers as it did the venues.
It’s now 4 years later and we have gathered what we believe is the most in depth set of performance and compliance data face to face has yet seen. Overall we’ve observed over 8000 hours of fundraising since then (3300 of those last year) and the incredible ambition, professionalism and determination of fundraisers in the UK is plain to see. For example, last year our clients generated a third of the number of complaints per donor compared to the industry average. We can’t wait to share and celebrate all this and more with you all at Fundraising Everywhere’s Face to Face and Telephone conference on April 17th. If you’d like a copy of our 2023 benchmarking report please get in touch too.
I’ve always known F2F fundraisers are some of the most amazing people on the planet, and now I’m delighted to say we have the stats to prove it
Green Light Sites Ltd is a promotional sites and compliance consultancy and service provider, focused on fundraising and ethical marketing campaigns. We offer our clients access to premium space, strategy and planning, ROI modelling, auditing and mystery shopping services.
Voice Your Thoughts 🗣️
Our platform is open to anyone and everyone in the sector that has an opinion, idea, or resource they would like to share. If you would like write and share something, email nori@fundraisingeverywhere.com and we will support you every step of the way to share your voice.
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