Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:01:01] Lucy Lowthian: Well, hello everyone. I am Lucy Ian, and I’m a Senior Legacy Consultant at Legacy Voice, which is part of Legacy Futures, and I’m here today to talk about how to develop an effective legacy strategy. So thank you all for joining me today. You may have already written a strategy before or been involved in implementing one, but my main name today is to ensure that you go away feeling confident that you can create a legacy strategy and that you understand what some of the core elements are.

[00:01:29] Lucy Lowthian: Gifts and wills are obviously such a vital income stream for many charities, so having an effective strategy is crucial in order to maximize legacy income. But when we start to develop our legacy strategy, Adrian Sargent and Elaine Jay’s planning framework is a really good example of the different stages involved in a strategic plan.

[00:01:50] Lucy Lowthian: Most charities take the time to plan their fundraising activities, um, including legacy activities obviously, and that. That they will undertake throughout the year. And according to Sergeant and Jay, there are three core dimensions of a fundraising or strategic plan. So the first is, where are we now? So this usually involves a complete review of the organization’s environment and the past performance of the legacy function.

[00:02:14] Lucy Lowthian: So in this case, it is obviously legacies. The charity needs a complete understanding of its current strategic position in the donor markets. It serves to be able to set effective and realistic objectives for the future. But secondly, we want to, um, look at where do we want to be. So this is when the organization will map out what the legacy department is expected to achieve over the duration of the plan, and set out those clear objectives.

[00:02:39] Lucy Lowthian: And then the third stage is how are we going to get there? So this stage of the plan contains the schedule and the tactics that the organization will adopt to achieve its targets. The tactics contain the detail of how the, um, legacy fundraising will actually be undertaken. So the audit is, um, what helps with the first dimension to establish where the organization is now.

[00:03:03] Lucy Lowthian: The audit explores the macro environment in which a charity is operating, and it analyzes peer activity, the legacy marketplace, and the internal environment of the organization. And it concludes with a SWOT analysis. So summarizing strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats. So the audit, like I say, starts with the macro environment and we work from the outside in, starting with the bigger picture and moving to the internal environment, which we then pull together into a swot.

[00:03:35] Lucy Lowthian: So if you get the audit right at the start of the strategy process, everything else should hopefully flow quite easily from this. So I’m going to focus quite a lot of this session on the actual audit. So the macro environment has an effect on what we do, but it’s something that we can’t control. And like any other organizations, charities are susceptible to external factors.

[00:03:56] Lucy Lowthian: And when it comes to legacies, understanding the external environment is incredibly important, as many, many of these external factors can impact on future legacy income. And you might have come across the pest tool before, but if not, this is a tool that we could use to examine the wider external influences that might have an impact.

[00:04:17] Lucy Lowthian: This covers four areas, which are political, economical, social, and technological. And the slide on screen shows some examples of of each of these. By conducting a pest analysis. Fundamentally, we want to understand what are the key trends and what does this mean for me, and as an example, in the legacy context, if we consider political, there has been a backlog in issuing grants of probate.

[00:04:43] Lucy Lowthian: This has therefore had an impact until the shortfall in bequest has been recovered. Therefore the challenge for legacy managers is to deal with the peaks and troughs in workload that this situation brings, and to manage the increasing caseload as the situation resolves. There are also, um, a number of contentious cases.

[00:05:02] Lucy Lowthian: These are rising every year, so this is something charities need to be aware of, especially with the changes in will writing, such as an increase in online wills. But moving to economics, so legacy income is set to reach 10 billion by 2050. This is due to a rising death rate combined with wealthier, more charitably minded donors.

[00:05:23] Lucy Lowthian: So they, this is what is going to drive this growth. So there’s huge opportunity there. And if we look at social, around 11 million people in the UK are aged over 65, and this is set to. Almost double by 2050. And the passing of this older generation will result in around 5.5 trillion pounds transferring between generations over the next 30 years in the uk.

[00:05:48] Lucy Lowthian: And as families become more complex, we’ll making will be increasingly important. And that’s again, something that charities need to consider and communicate. And if we consider technological, all generations, you know, including baby boomers, are now online for longer periods. Digital will therefore play an increasingly important role in legacy strategies moving forward, both in terms of legacy donor recruitment and retention.

[00:06:14] Lucy Lowthian: And it’s also sensible to include an online element where free will making is offered. So the next stage of the audit involves a peer review, and some sectors might consider this a competitor review, but I think in fundraising we see this more as a learning exercise. So we’re learning from our peers.

[00:06:35] Lucy Lowthian: And if we consider the first point on screen, so the who, we really do want to think about what we can learn from the individual charity when deciding upon peers to review. So for example, what are they doing well in the legacy space? Why, for example, might their legacy giving have been increasing in the last few years?

[00:06:54] Lucy Lowthian: And we might look at other similar charities working in the sector. So this could be those working in a similar cause area. Of a similar size or working in the same geographical location. Or we might choose charities that are often alongside the charity in a will, so our co beneficiaries. But it’s about deciding who would be the most relevant charities to include in the peer review, and you can then start to delve into their legacy programs.

[00:07:20] Lucy Lowthian: So. It’s not only important to look at what activity they’ve been doing, but you want to know if that activity actually receives or achieves results. Should I say? And this isn’t any point in, sorry. There isn’t any point in trying to understand best practice if campaigns aren’t generating results, for example.

[00:07:37] Lucy Lowthian: You can then start to identify some of the reasons why things have been successful and start to unpick the charity strategy and tactics and questions might include things like, you know, has their legacy income been growing? Do they invest in legacy marketing? Do they run an annual campaign? Do they undertake digital legacy fundraising activity?

[00:07:57] Lucy Lowthian: Do they have an effective stewardship and recognition program in place? So you are looking at all of these different factors to try and really build up a picture of what’s, um, working well for them. And you can then bring all of your findings together to identify common themes across the peers and understand what this means for your charity when developing your own legacy strategy, and what opportunities exist to enhance your own legacy program.

[00:08:23] Lucy Lowthian: Based on this sector, best practice. So you might find common themes with regards to marketing approaches and stewardship activities or around their levels of investment and products. And when you conduct a peer review, you can find lots of useful information from sources such as the NCVO and Charity Commission.

[00:08:42] Lucy Lowthian: There’s annual reports, the charity’s website and job descriptions even. But speaking to people who work there or communications that you might have received personally from the charity. But when conducting the review, just try to consider both their acquisition and stewardship activities. And this section of the audit considers the overarching trends in the market and their relevance to legacy giving before exploring who leaves legacies and why, and trends in legacy fundraising.

[00:09:14] Lucy Lowthian: So we can start by looking at who your market audience is. So for example, if you are a university, it might be your alumni aged 50 and over, and you can use your internal data to gain insights into what you know about your existing supporters. For example, charities might look back at their previous legacy gifts considering similar characteristics and demographics of their.

[00:09:39] Lucy Lowthian: Charities can also consider their legacy supporters relationship with the organization. So for example, um, previous ator and existing inquiries and pledge and pledges. So are they regular donors? Do they attend events? Have they used your services? So you can really start to build up a picture and see if there are any common analysis amongst legacy supporters and their relationship with you.

[00:10:01] Lucy Lowthian: And you will probably find that those who are your most loyal supporters are your best legacy prospects. Identifying the average legacy donor is a good starting point for identifying future legacy prospects and charities can then use these insights alongside what we know from external research, such as typical legacy support profiles and what we know about the different generations, including baby boomers and what motivates them to give to.

[00:10:27] Lucy Lowthian: I identify potential legacy supporters. You can then start to understand more about who they are and what interests them and why they would support you and where you can find them, and so on. And there were reports from Mintel Legacy Foresights, me and Ford. You know, they’re all useful starting points as well as online information tools such as ACON and Mosaic.

[00:10:50] Lucy Lowthian: It’s then important to identify key trends in wider consumer behavior. So for example, these might be to do with technology and consumer experience and individual identity. Looking at these trends and looking at what they mean for legacies. So for example, I. Technologies advancing all the time, and charities are increasingly embracing digital channels and offering virtual experiences, and they’re also starting to use tools such as AI to help with data analysis and copywriting.

[00:11:20] Lucy Lowthian: So it’s really about identifying opportunities that will enable growth in legacies. One of the final stages of an audit is about conducting internal analysis, so the aim here is to look at past performance and also current performance, including the structure and support systems that underpin your legacy activity.

[00:11:44] Lucy Lowthian: The main objective is to appraise what’s worked well or not so well. So in order to put the most effective systems and processes in place to support the Legacy program. Data can be gathered through a mixture of desk research and meetings and interviews with staff, but one of the most useful tools to help you do this in analysis is what we call the five Ms.

[00:12:09] Lucy Lowthian: And it’s probably most useful for me to run through some of the points that you can consider under each of the headings. So for example, if we take money, can you provide a breakdown of your legacy income, for example, of the last five or 10 years? Is it increasing or decreasing? And do you have a breakdown of legacy expenditure?

[00:12:26] Lucy Lowthian: So are you investing enough in your legacy program? How many requests do you receive each year? Are numbers, again, going up or down? And what is the split between pecuniary and Reid requests and what are their average values? And if we move on to men, so how many people work in the legacy team and what are their roles?

[00:12:47] Lucy Lowthian: Do you have the right structure and staff resource? And what, oh, sorry. Where does Legacies, and that’s both marketing and administration, sit within your organization, do your legacy programs and plans have senior and um, trustee support our wider staff and volunteers supportive of legacies. And have they received any legacy training?

[00:13:08] Lucy Lowthian: Then moving on to machines. So what databases and systems do you use to store legacy data? So that’s both supporter and financial. Are there any other databases and systems which hold additional supporter data? For example, you might have a separate one for volunteers. Are there other systems working well or have you identified any issues?

[00:13:29] Lucy Lowthian: And then minutes. So this is really around your legacy processes and procedures. You know, do you have these in place? So for example, administration, procedures, data capture, data protection, et cetera. And the final one is mission. So is there an organizational case for support? And do you have a legacy, vision and mission statement that sits underneath this?

[00:13:52] Lucy Lowthian: Do you have a compelling legacy proposition and key messaging to really inspire people to leave a gift to your charity and their will? So you’ve now gathered all the internal and external data that you need, which you can pull together into a swot, and this is a common tool available to charities, which helps to identify the charity strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats.

[00:14:19] Lucy Lowthian: Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the charity and a charity. Strengths and weaknesses can provide the charity with a real advantage or potentially hold it back from grasping. These new opportunities and the opportunities and threats relate to the external environment and include factors that can can impact on the charity’s work both now and in the future.

[00:14:42] Lucy Lowthian: So for example, if we think about strengths, you really want to think about what the charity’s doing well and think about your internal resources. So what qualities set you apart from competitors and is there high awareness of the charity, for example, and with weaknesses? Are there weaknesses such as internal support or lack of resources and, and not the right structure?

[00:15:04] Lucy Lowthian: So what barriers are there to any future development and with opportunities, you know, are there new fundraising products and techniques to test? Are there opportunities to attract new audiences? And threats. Are there any current or future economic, legislative or political changes that will impact on the charity’s work?

[00:15:24] Lucy Lowthian: So these are just some of the things that you want to consider when building your swot, and we can then use this information to conduct what we call a SWOT matching exercise. So, for example, the best place to start is by matching your opportunities and strengths. And we call this the match magic box.

[00:15:45] Lucy Lowthian: And that’s because you’re using your strengths to really take advantage of opportunities. But you can also use your strengths to try avoid threats, for example. Or can you overcome a weakness to try avoid a threat as well. So looking at the strength and opportunity example on screen, you might decide to introduce a will making scheme that you.

[00:16:04] Lucy Lowthian: Contact your committed supporters about to encourage them to consider leaving the charity a gift in their will. Or if we take the weakness of a lack of legacy supporter journeys, we might decide to focus on ensuring we provide an amazing supporter experience in order to retain more supporters in a very competitive environment.

[00:16:28] Lucy Lowthian: So once you’ve completed the audit and you understand where the organization is currently and the external environment in which you are working, you can then start to develop your overarching vision, mission, objectives, and strategic pillars. A great way to do this is by organizing a strategy workshop so you could bring together key people from within the charity so everybody can contribute to the legacy strategy.

[00:16:54] Lucy Lowthian: And this also really helps with buy-in because people feel more involved and invested in the plans. I. So for example, you might want to include your CEO or fundraising director, trustees, your marketing and comms team, and so on. So think about who will be most useful when it comes to supporting the legacy program, and you can then start by agreeing what the overarching legacy vision is.

[00:17:18] Lucy Lowthian: The vision should be an image of the future you want to create or aspire to create, and it should be an inspirational, memorable, and concise statement which describes the world as you believe it should be. The legacy mission statement says What will be accomplished in pursuit of this vision, so it should be action focused and state clearly what you’re going to do.

[00:17:41] Lucy Lowthian: The charity can then move on to setting objectives, which keeps us focused so we know what is required and what is likely to be achieved. And objectives are usually formed based on previous performance trends and market research, and they should be linked to the overall fundraising strategy. And you may have heard of the term smart objectives, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and.

[00:18:11] Lucy Lowthian: Smart objectives help charities to set realistic and meaningful goals that they can deliver on. Objectives must therefore be measurable so the fundraising team knows if they’ve been achieved and therefore successful in their legacy plans. So as an example, an objective wouldn’t simply be to increase our legacy supporter base, but it might be to recruit 50 people with an interesting legacy giving in the next year, or to have.

[00:18:38] Lucy Lowthian: 200 direct legacy conversations each year. So they really do have to be, um, very measurable in terms of the, what you set yourself, um, targets to do. And it’s useful to break down legacy supporters by segment, and we can’t can consider geographical, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors to start to really build up a picture.

[00:19:01] Lucy Lowthian: Charities might want to target new audience segments, for example, if they’re seeking to expand their audience base, or they will define their segments based on the profiling of their existing donors. And as charities, um, might find their legacy donor profiles look very different. It really is worth charities looking back at their previous legacy gifts and looking at the characteristics of their legacy, that can be really useful.

[00:19:27] Lucy Lowthian: And as mentioned earlier, charities should also consider their current legacy prospects and pledges to really identify any commonalities and to understand more about their relationship with the charity. Charities might also want to be creative and try to bring to life their donor personas with identities and visuals and having donor personas can be incredibly useful for all teams working for the charity when it comes to their legacy plans.

[00:19:54] Lucy Lowthian: Identifying the leg average legacy donor is a really good starting point, as mentioned before for identifying future legacy prospects and it will assist greatly when targeting them so you can work out the best communication and the channel. This will be communicated through to reach them. And depending on the level of segmentation you require, you might decide to use a relatively simple behavioral segmentation model that starts with your warmest audiences in the first instance, such as volunteers and trustees moving outwards to those colder audiences.

[00:20:32] Lucy Lowthian: And then we move on to strategic pillars. So the term strategic pillars describes the critical areas of focus that will help the charity achieve its objectives. So whilst there is no one size fits all approach to defining strategic pillars by clearly defining the pillars, a charity can ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals, and that every decision supports the overall strategy.

[00:20:58] Lucy Lowthian: They also help to determine which activities to focus on, but a charity does, um, need to be careful not to have too many strategic pillars because they need to be distinct and retain that focus. So the table on screen just shows some example pillars along, um, that top row and as an example, these might be related to things like marketing, activity, stewardship, and internal awareness and training.

[00:21:24] Lucy Lowthian: Once a charity is defined, its strategic pillars, the tactics, then sit below each pillar. And tactics are really the specific actions that need to be performed over the next few years to help achieve the objectives. And again, this is when a workshop can be incredibly useful to encourage people to really brainstorm what some of the different tactics might be.

[00:21:48] Lucy Lowthian: And when deciding upon tactics, um, keep returning to the objectives and the audit results to ensure the tactics are relevant and you can think about the trends and best practice that you’ve identified through the audit and peer review. And it’s important to be realistic as well when it comes to time and resource.

[00:22:08] Lucy Lowthian: Tactics can include a number of activities such as acquisition and stewardship, internal awareness, raising events and campaigns, developing processes and designing materials. And it’s also important to think about channels and how best to actually reach your target audiences.

[00:22:29] Lucy Lowthian: Scan charts are a useful tool when creating schedules to visually represent that plan over time, so you can decide when your activities will take place and who will be responsible for these. And you can also split this into, for example, years one, two, and three, and break this down further by month and quarter and so on.

[00:22:50] Lucy Lowthian: And the schedule needs to be continually mo monitored to ensure plans are being delivered on time and to amend this when necessary. And a key aspect of any fundraising strategy or plan is the budget. And the NCVO states your budget needs to be a translation of your plan into financial terms. So you should not be able to write one without the other.

[00:23:17] Lucy Lowthian: So they suggest the budgeting thought process should emulate the diagram on screen. So we need to plan what we want to do and then. Decide if we can afford to deliver it once we’ve considered things such as our resources and the costs of things. And a simple way to compile a budget is by using a spreadsheet and listing each item, including the detail and breaking down the income and expenditure of each.

[00:23:46] Lucy Lowthian: You can then work out the return on investment RA ratio, and if the income outweighs the expenditure, which hopefully it does. Budgets are an estimate because there is obviously no way of knowing for sure exactly what the numbers will be. They are based on previous evidence and almost like a best guest a guess approach.

[00:24:06] Lucy Lowthian: And despite an element of guesswork, creating a budget will help to establish the amount of investment needed in order to achieve the desired outcomes. Budgets should be continually monitored to check if income and expenditure is tracking as predicted, or if they’re up and down and plans might need to check accordingly.

[00:24:26] Lucy Lowthian: But monitoring the budget provides the team with a realistic overview of where the plan is and what they can expect the financial outcomes to be.

[00:24:38] Lucy Lowthian: Finally, um, you need to decide on the metrics and KPIs that will be used to monitor and assess the ongoing success of the legacy program and measure performance against objectives. As an example, we can start at the top of the funnel by monitoring the charity’s overall reach and the number of legacy conversations you’re having before moving down to monitor the number of considers and pledges.

[00:25:05] Lucy Lowthian: And then finally, we need to monitor the number of actual gifts being received by the charity so we can ensure the legacy program is effective. But when deciding upon metrics and KPIs. You need to decide who will measure it and how and where will it be, measure, measured, and how often. And ultimately, you want to know what went wrong and what went right and why.

[00:25:30] Lucy Lowthian: So thank you all so much for joining me today, and I hope you found this session useful, but please don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like more information following this session. 

[00:25:43] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend?

[00:25:50] Alex Aggidis: And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:01:00] Simon Scriver: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. I am Simon Reiber, one of the co-founders of Fundraising everywhere. Uh, and I have another couple of great guests on today. Um, but we’ve invited them on because you know how much we love research, you know how much we love reports and really we get a lot of questions from our members and our community.

[00:01:18] Simon Scriver: Um, you know, trying to compare themselves with other organizations. ’cause fundraising can be a very lonely job sometimes, especially in the area of trusts. Uh, sometimes you are the only person doing it and you really don’t often have something to measure yourself against. So I’m really happy today, um, that from gifted, we have Amy Stevens and Carna Beeson, who have joined us, uh, to share some of their findings from the 2025 Trust and Foundations Insight survey.

[00:01:44] Simon Scriver: Hello, Amy. Hello, Konna. How are you? 

[00:01:46] Amy Stevens: Good afternoon. Very well. Thank you. 

[00:01:49] Simon Scriver: I’m very happy to have you here. And I will say to anyone listening, great. Always love speak about research. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off there. Um, but yeah, thank you very much for coming. Um. The research that we are talking about today, you can find it@giftedphilanthropy.com.

[00:02:05] Simon Scriver: Um, it’s the 2020 5 25 Trust and Foundations insight survey, and you’ll find a link in the description of this. Um, but you guys, you guys put out quite a few of these reports and this is something that you’re trying to make an ongoing thing in terms of this trust and foundations insights. Amy, maybe you could tell me a little bit about your organization, because you, you are the chief executive, you are the, you are the person who set it up, right.

[00:02:27] Simon Scriver: Could you tell me a little bit about who you work with and what your organization actually does? 

[00:02:31] Amy Stevens: Absolutely. Yeah. So at Gifted, we are full service fundraising consultants, so we work from all different levels of support, whether that be a, a fundraising feasibility study, uh, before a major capital program to giving hands-on support in a fundraising program.

[00:02:49] Amy Stevens: We do legacy campaigns, uh, strategic reviews, um, but also support clients in particular with trust and foundation work, as well as their major gifts. So we try to, you know, do these projects. Uh, and I’ll kind of talk about it because he’s, he’s the man behind it. But we try and do these projects to just offer a bit of insight really for, um, our clients and for ourselves as well.

[00:03:12] Amy Stevens: We’re all still learning every day in this field, aren’t we? So it’s helpful for us as well as we go forward supporting our clients, but we work across the uk. Europe and indeed internationally as well. Um, across some key areas. We do a lot of work in the education space, um, a lot in health and welfare, um, education, like I say, um, increasingly animals and climate.

[00:03:38] Amy Stevens: Becoming more popular. Um, arts, culture, heritage, uh, we do the whole range. The only thing we really do not touch is politics because political fundraising gets messy and we don’t wanna be involved in that. 

[00:03:51] Simon Scriver: I mean, Amy, it sounds like you have enough stress on your plate. You’re already juggling, juggling on that.

[00:03:55] Simon Scriver: You do not wanna add politics to it. 

[00:03:57] Amy Stevens: That’s it. 

[00:03:57] Multiple Voices: Exactly. 

[00:03:58] Simon Scriver: Um, but I, I do love talking to people like you because you, you, because you work with so many different organizations, you almost kind of have this view across the sector of what’s going on. And I know. For a lot of fundraisers, it can be hard to know what’s going on around that.

[00:04:12] Simon Scriver: Connor, you are, you are the main driver behind the research. What, maybe you could talk us through who’s involved and kind of what, um, you know, who, who’s, who’s taking part in this that, that you’ve seen. 

[00:04:24] Konna Beeson: Yeah. So, uh, obviously this was geared towards anyone doing trust fundraising and I’ll we’ll break down in, in a minute sort of how that was made up and sort of who took part specifically.

[00:04:34] Konna Beeson: Um, I mean, first of all, probably worth saying that we were, we were really delighted with the, the sample size, which is quite difficult to get in with this sort of survey of 155 fundraisers took part. Um, which is, which is really, really important. Um, ’cause there’s nothing worse than sort of looking at, um, trying to get some data and extrapolating insights from it.

[00:04:52] Konna Beeson: And, you know, it’s got. You can’t really do it, um, with a small sample size. So that was really important. Um, we had quite a, a good range of different types of causes that took part as well. Uh, so the most common ones in the survey were health and wellbeing, disability education, and the arts being the most common.

[00:05:10] Konna Beeson: Um, but we did have representation from pretty much every, uh, type of charity, which is. Really, really good. Um, there are reasons for that as well ’cause of sort of our own, uh, pushing out on our own, uh, database, uh, to get people to take part, um, as well in And in terms of the, sort of the, the turnover and the size of charities, that took part as well.

[00:05:30] Konna Beeson: Um, most charities were under five mil, um, income, uh, 45% were under one mil. Um, so again, it’s, it’s a, you could argue it’s sort of quite representative of the wider sector in that regard. Um. In terms of, uh, you know, we did ask how many years that charity had had a trust and foundation program built in because it’s really, really important.

[00:05:52] Konna Beeson: ’cause someone starting out in year one is fundamentally different to year three, um, and beyond. Um, and the results were overall almost 70% of people that took part had been doing trust and foundations within that charity for five or more years. Uh, 12% for three to five years. Um, so we only had 2% that were literally starting out, which to be honest, kind of makes sense because.

[00:06:17] Konna Beeson: Probably got a lot less to talk about if you’ve only just started doing trust and foundations when you’re at least recapping on a whole 12 months. So, um, so 

[00:06:24] Simon Scriver: you, you just wanna see the results, don’t you? That’s the, you wanna see the results of the survey and, uh, yeah. Not even answer the questions yet. I think.

[00:06:35] Amy Stevens: The number that took part, we should give a shout out to all our friends and colleagues in the sector who shared it as well and shared it more wildly. So our friends over at, and they shared it with their network and we’ve then since shared their research projects. So it’s important we do that, isn’t it?

[00:06:51] Amy Stevens: Because you know, it benefits all of us in the sector. So thanks guys to everyone who helped us get people on board for the research. 

[00:06:58] Simon Scriver: A hundred percent a double shout out to Caroline at Al, um, because she’s so good to us as well. But yeah, to remind people, I mean, this is something you’re planning on repeating.

[00:07:06] Simon Scriver: So gifted philanthropy.com is the website. There’s contact details main list and, and the research itself there. So do sign up to it. Um, and sorry, Connie, you were, it’s interesting to think about the structure of these teams. ’cause you’re talking about the size of them. What, what do they look like? Is it, is it one trust person full time or is it, what kind of people were responding to you?

[00:07:26] Konna Beeson: Yeah, it’s a really good question. So we did ask that question specifically and accounted for it in the results as well. And it’s, uh, the results basically said that we’ve got a roughly equal mix of people either working one day a week or five days a week on trust and foundations. Because you may be a three days a week trust and foundations manager, in which case that’d be three days.

[00:07:46] Konna Beeson: You may be a general fundraising manager, in which case we kind of asked you to say, you know, on a rough sort of your average week. How much of your time is spent just in trust foundations, in which case you may have put two days out, the five, for example. Okay. And we accounted for that and all of the results when we talk about success rates and number of applications sent and things like that to see if there was a, you know, a clear sort of, you know, prorata difference and all those sort of things as well.

[00:08:09] Konna Beeson: So it’s quite, I 

[00:08:11] Simon Scriver: that’s, uh, I mean, do you get many where it’s, it’s multiple people responsible for trust who are doing five days a week? I mean, do you deal with a lot of organizations to that scale? 

[00:08:21] Konna Beeson: Yeah, ab Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, as with a general rule of thumb, obviously the, the, the larger you go in terms of charity size, you know, the more you’re likely to have had a very established trust and foundations program, you’ve probably got at least one full-time person as well as an, as well as, um, some, at least a fundraising assistant that will do somewhat work assisting you.

[00:08:39] Konna Beeson: But, you know, there’s certainly charities that took part in this that said that they were one of, um, three. Um, pretty much part-time or full-time trusts, um, fundraisers. So again, it’s really the whole, the whole shebang. 

[00:08:52] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Yeah. They’re all in there. It’s brilliant. So let, let’s get straight on because, because I know people, I mean, the, the main thing I went straight to was the success rate.

[00:09:00] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Um, but in, in terms of, uh, some of the stats that came out for you, what jumped out at you? Um, leaning towards things like the success rate that we ly want to know. 

[00:09:08] Konna Beeson: Yes. Great. So, uh, we’ll give sort of the top line result. First of all, and this is really important because we did this survey the year before as well and we really sort of went, uh, in a lot deeper with the questions we were asking, and that was based on feedback that people gave from that survey as well, which is great.

[00:09:25] Konna Beeson: Um, so in terms of the average success rate, so. Everything, uh, included all in once. That was just over 35% and the average number of applications sent, uh, was 52. So this is all in sort of the 12 month period and that we asked leading up to that. Now. It’s really, really, almost somewhat obvious, um, to understand that an average success rate is really not useful to benchmark yourself against.

[00:09:51] Konna Beeson: Mm-hmm. There are so many variables, especially in this sector. Um, you know, your size, how long you, your charity’s had a program, do you have warm funders? Do you know what type of charity you are? All these sort of sorts of things. So what we. Really wants to do is ask more particular questions around that as well.

[00:10:07] Konna Beeson: And those are actually the more interesting insights. So in particular, um, when we asked, um, fundraisers taking part to break down sort of their success, how much was raised and how many was sent based on if it was a cold application to, you know, a new funder or to a repeat. Um, funder as well. So obviously a much warmer, um, funder getting sort of year on year or, you know, every three years sort of funding.

[00:10:32] Konna Beeson: Um, the breakdown of those was really interesting. So, um, what we found there was that there was a, a 2.6 times greater success rate for those repeat funders than cold. Mm-hmm. Um, and actually a greater ROI, um, two of about 1.7. Times, um, sort of the ROI compared to cold, uh, as well, which is really important.

[00:10:52] Konna Beeson: And the sort of the, the nerdier stats spray in me as well, looked a little bit deeper into that in terms of like the reliability of the statistics as well. And it, uh, for, um, repeat funding applications, it was a 0.9 sort of reliability metric, which. May not sound that attractive to some people taking part.

[00:11:10] Konna Beeson: But actually for those of you that do benchmarking and forecasting, that’s a really important metric. ’cause it shows you just how reliable, um, you know, approaching and developing those relationships with your existing funders actually is compared to just constantly, you know, spending your time trying to grow and approach.

[00:11:27] Konna Beeson: New funders all the time as well. 

[00:11:29] Simon Scriver: I, I mean, it, it kind of echoes every form of fundraising, isn’t it? That it’s, it’s much easier to raise money from people who are already supporting you than it is to find those new people. I mean, I mean, you guys have a lot of years experience in this, um, hands-on experience.

[00:11:43] Simon Scriver: I’m guessing that’s not a, a surprise for you. But, um, do you see many, ’cause I I think the pushback some people might have is, is many Tru Trust, many grants are just one year. Do you know? And there is sometimes that negative feeling that it’s like, well, you know, all this work is only ever gonna be for one year.

[00:12:01] Simon Scriver: But the, the feeling I’m getting from you is actually multi-year is more common than people acknowledge. 

[00:12:06] Amy Stevens: Yeah, I think, like you say Simon, it’s about relationships, isn’t it? So we see the full range across clients that we work with. Some that kind of have had support from funders in the past and then not spoken to them for eight years until they do their next capital project.

[00:12:21] Amy Stevens: Yeah. And then think they can just pick up where they’re left off. 

[00:12:24] Multiple Voices: Yeah. 

[00:12:25] Amy Stevens: And then others. So we’re currently working with a fantastic organization. That deals with young people with learning disabilities and their team have been phenomenal at impact reporting to their funders. So they’ve had funders that have given to them year on year for their revenue costs, for their general, uh, running programmatic costs.

[00:12:45] Amy Stevens: But they’ve been so good at impact reporting when we recently went out to them for the capsule project. They were all in, all of them at, at really good levels, and it, it was that relationships. So, yeah. 

[00:12:58] Multiple Voices: Yeah, let’s 

[00:12:58] Amy Stevens: not forget that with our trust and foundations, you know, it’s the same as any major donor or any other donor really, isn’t it?

[00:13:04] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And kind of in, in the report, you talk a bit about how much the income is raised. Do you see. Like is, is it like that first year is a taster for a lot of these grants and then they, you know, they fill you out and then we’ll give you more in the following years? Or what, what kind of trends do you see in, in how the amounts they give, um, changes over time?

[00:13:24] Simon Scriver: I. 

[00:13:25] Konna Beeson: Yeah. So I mean that’s, I mean, that’s certainly for somewhat obvious reasons, sort of the case. You know, if you are, if you are the funder mm-hmm. Um, and you’ve got a brand new charity you probably never even heard of them before and you’re, you’re probably gonna be a lot more risk averse to giving them a very, very large, um, grant and the first time.

[00:13:41] Konna Beeson: But once you’ve seen the work, they’ve got that monitoring evaluation, the impact reports. Possibly then done a site visit, if it’s a capital uh, appeal, or that their work is sort of on a site, you are personally far more invested in that charity and to make it a more informed decision to know where your money is gonna go the next time.

[00:13:59] Konna Beeson: Obviously, there are exceptions to that. So if you’re doing a large capital, uh, campaign, for example, you do. Tons of these. Um, yes, you are absolutely gonna be relying on cold funders as well as, um, repeat funders. Um, and they are still highly willing, you know, depending on what it is to give seven, eight figure grants.

[00:14:16] Konna Beeson: It depends on who they are. Is, is a bit of a nuance within that, but I. Absolutely. In terms of income raised, it’s quite important and we’ve got actually in the, in the report, uh, which everyone can see, uh, we’ve broken down sort of the total income raised as well, sort of by, uh, different levels because it’s quite important to be able to benchmark yourself against, especially in sort of, you know, the current landscape, whether you may get a lot of internal pressure to grow and like raise income and things like that.

[00:14:43] Konna Beeson: And, um, you know, what we saw is that I think it was 41% of people that took part said. That they, uh, raised between 50 and 200 k, 30% was between 200 and 500 K. Um, and then it was, you know, much smaller percentages, far above and and below that. So, um, we did break that down further by cause type, but they obviously, there, there comes a certain point in doing this sort of survey where you can only, uh.

[00:15:07] Konna Beeson: You can only sort of segment your data so far before it, uh, you know, becomes a little, uh, meaningless at that point. But I think that’s really, yeah. You having 

[00:15:14] Simon Scriver: one-to-one conversations by that point. 

[00:15:17] Konna Beeson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it’s not data anymore, you know, case studies. Um, but that’s really important to be able to benchmark yourself ’cause.

[00:15:24] Konna Beeson: I mean, obviously there is always gonna be a cap to the amount that any individual can raise, no matter what field. It’s, um, so that’s really, really important to, to understand 

[00:15:34] Simon Scriver: the, it’s interesting the range because, so sometimes in, in reports or talking about trust, I. It doesn’t really acknowledge the big scope of size of organizations you have, and I, I was really pleased to see in this report that you’ve, you’ve dove a lot into that.

[00:15:47] Simon Scriver: Amy, I’m curious as, as someone who runs like an agency, as a chief exec, do you get a good mix? Like at what point do you find people generally will employ an agency or an outsider like yours? Is it the medium and big? I know you work with all sizes, but what, when do people finally realize they need outside help with this?

[00:16:06] Amy Stevens: Again, varies greatly. Um, so we work with organizations of all sizes. We can one day be doing a, a trust and foundations training session with volunteers at a local church, and they’re gonna do the applications themself and they want the guidance on how to, how to do that. So let’s say they’re raising.

[00:16:24] Amy Stevens: 250,000 in total to a global organization. Connor and I have worked on 200 million pound, hundred million dollar, uh, feasibility studies in the last year where big organization, but everybody’s so busy that they can’t kind of have the headspace and also the objective view that consultants give on things to, to look.

[00:16:48] Amy Stevens: So it, it really varies here in the uk, um, you know, the big national charities tend to have lots of team in place already and highly skilled individuals in development. Um, so we do a lot of the middle range in the UK where there’s team in place who may be need to upskill or expand or they don’t have quite enough capacity, so, 

[00:17:11] Multiple Voices: mm-hmm.

[00:17:12] Amy Stevens: Really does vary, but we, we will, uh, we’ll deal with all size of clients, and to be honest, you get the same joy out of the, the really small ones as you do with the massive ones sometimes. So it’s just 

[00:17:21] Simon Scriver: Oh, a hundred percent 

[00:17:23] Amy Stevens: nice to have that mix. Yeah. 

[00:17:25] Simon Scriver: Yeah. I love working with smaller organizations, but, but it’s interesting because it’s like there is a need at every stage of that growth.

[00:17:31] Simon Scriver: Like even no matter how big you get, sometimes you do need it. I think almost the trust community I’ve found is like really helpful on, in Facebook groups and even the fundraising everywhere, community people sharing applications and people really kind of talking together about how it, how um, they can help each other.

[00:17:47] Simon Scriver: Which I, which I love. And just a reminder, just a little insert of an ad because I forgot to say, um, but not to forget the trust in Major Donors Conference, the Fundraising Everywhere conference where we focus on trusts and grants. Um, and that’s happening in December, so you can find that on fundraising of red.com.

[00:18:02] Simon Scriver: I forgot to say it, nobody reminded me. Um, so the other thing, um, that one of you mentioned last year’s report, and I haven’t actually compared them side by side, but in terms of, um, changes in, in year to year, how are you finding that evolving? 

[00:18:16] Konna Beeson: Yeah, so I mean the, the biggest thing that we did was, uh, go out and ask for feedback from everyone that took part, or at least, or even saw sort of, you know, the first survey and report that we did to say, you know, what are the sort of things that you’re looking, uh, to find out more about, uh, what would you like asked and answered.

[00:18:33] Konna Beeson: So we fed that feedback into the creation of this year’s surveys and we’ll absolutely intend to do that again. Um, again, obviously the more questions you intend to ask you, you are somewhat reliant on a larger sample size, so it comes with that because obviously you don’t wanna ask. Ask too many questions because otherwise you’ll just end up spending your whole day doing it, and no one’s really gonna do that.

[00:18:51] Konna Beeson: Um, so that’s really important to get that feedback. Um, in terms of like the main differences, it’s absolutely around sort of, you know, we asked this year for the first time around, you know, cold and repeat applications. We’ve asked around the use of AI and writing techniques. Um, the, the. Size and the types of grants as well is something we didn’t ask before.

[00:19:09] Konna Beeson: So something really, really interesting that I found interesting in this was when we asked what is the smallest value grants that you’ve applied for and the highest value grants that you’ve applied for. Mm-hmm. Um, which is really interesting. ’cause you know, the sector is so, so massive and. I guess if you were probably outside of the trust fundraising sector, you might expect, oh, the larger charities will be applying only for the large grants and you know, and like that.

[00:19:33] Konna Beeson: But what we found is actually 85% of people that took part said that the lowest grant that they applied for was up to five grand. Um, and when you, when you consider sort of the broad scope types and sizes of charities that took part in this survey, that really. Points to at least one potential cause and effect of where some of these issues around high competition and, and things like that are because we’ve got, and it’s somewhat disproportionate, uh, to small charities who are most of the time only going for the sort of the smaller end of the scale.

[00:20:03] Konna Beeson: Mm-hmm. Um, but you are also competing with, let’s say, 85% of the rest of the sector at that lower level. And you obviously then get that burden on the funders themselves who are, if they’re sort of maybe a smaller funder or historically they’ve always maybe done grants of around five, uh, to 10 K max.

[00:20:22] Konna Beeson: They’re quite from this data anyway. They’re probably getting the brunt of that higher competition. And then what they do with that is sort of, you know, this ongoing conversation now where we are seeing, you know, more and more funders every day to close the doors, um, either indefinitely or to review the strategies.

[00:20:39] Konna Beeson: And so we’re gonna see quite an interesting landscape and I think that pointed to. Um, that points to one reason for that, which I’d never seen before. 

[00:20:48] Simon Scriver: Well, what does the, what I mean, unpack that for me a bit, because that, I mean, that doesn’t, that sounds like almost an efficiency problem if, if you have these huge organizations who are, who are dealing with massive grants, but are they’re also putting time into these sub 5,000.

[00:21:03] Simon Scriver: Am I interpreting that wrong, or what, what’s your take on that? 

[00:21:06] Konna Beeson: I mean, I would say ultimately, even if you’re a, you know, a. A hundred million pound health charity in the uk. You are, you still have need, you’ve still got people or research or whatever it is to support If there are funders out there that are, even if they’re only giving grants up to 5K or 10 k, I say only.

[00:21:23] Konna Beeson: Um, and that funder exists primarily to support, let’s say, cancer research initiatives. Of course, you’re gonna apply to it because you’re eligible to apply for it, and that work is still just as vital as anyone else. The, the, the, i, I suppose the ramification of that is. It’s re, it’s. It’s on the funders really.

[00:21:42] Konna Beeson: And we are seeing it, as I say, we’re seeing more and more and more funders realize that we may have to change how we do our approach. Um, whether we more do proactive searching ourselves and don’t invite applications like unsolicited, uh, which we are seeing sort of more of that. And there’s some data on that, um, which I’m sure we’ll go on to.

[00:22:02] Konna Beeson: Um, 

[00:22:02] Amy Stevens: I think it’ll see next year what, what comes out on that. Basis, won’t it? We see if it is a real developing trend or if it was a bit anomaly, really? 

[00:22:12] Simon Scriver: Yeah. From the, from the mi from the mindset of your client, uh, your clients, Amy, if they. You know, obviously they only have limited number of hours in the day.

[00:22:21] Simon Scriver: And, and you guys have, I know, touch on, on fundraiser burnout and, and overworking. I mean, does it, does it make sense for, like, how do you pick and choose how many grants you apply for? Because you can apply for as many, you know, you can keep, always do more hours in the day, which is what many fundraisers find themselves doing.

[00:22:39] Simon Scriver: But at what point do you say, I’m only focusing on, on this subset of grants, or what, what’s your thoughts on that? 

[00:22:46] Amy Stevens: So we, we have conversations with, with clients. You know, almost daily on this kind of subject. Um, and it’s often really important with setting sites for trustee leadership campaign boards.

[00:22:58] Amy Stevens: You know, the senior leadership team at charities who think that their trust fund RA raise should be applying for 250, uh, different grants every year when actually, you know, research like this proves if you actually invest the time into looking for the right match, getting yourself a, a top 30 to start with, that you can be working on.

[00:23:18] Amy Stevens: Building networks. We know that even within trust and foundations, if you can have a connection to a trustee or somebody involved in the organization, if you can get them to visit, your chances of success are so much higher. 

[00:23:31] Multiple Voices: Mm-hmm. So 

[00:23:31] Amy Stevens: we really try and get clients to focus on, you know. A, is there any easy wins to build some momentum, but then where do we go, where’s the next best bets and how can we build those relationships rather than the, the blanket approach?

[00:23:45] Amy Stevens: Because it just, it doesn’t, doesn’t yield the results. 

[00:23:50] Konna Beeson: Yeah. It’s, it’s worth adding to that as well in terms of like the data in the survey. So the one thing that we did ask in, in the first. Survey and then asked again in this was, uh, what we looked at the differences in success rates based on the total number of applications that you sent.

[00:24:05] Konna Beeson: Because what we found in the first time we did this, uh, survey was that there was a really clear, um, drop off after, you know, a certain amount of applications was sent in terms of success rates, which you could. Quite easily attribute that to, you know, burnout and, you know, your, your quality in applications and things like that is diminishing ’cause you’ve only got so much time in the world.

[00:24:26] Konna Beeson: So we asked that again, looked into it again and we found pretty much exactly the same finding as you did the year before. Which is great because it’s more validity to the findings, uh, to have year on year, the same trend. Because what we basically saw was that sort of between 25 to 50 applications, um, that.

[00:24:44] Konna Beeson: Sort of like the, the sweet spot, especially around 30 applications tended to be sort of overall your your best success rate, even though it. 

[00:24:54] Simon Scriver: Is this per year? Sorry, just to clarify, is that per year you’re talking? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, go on. 

[00:24:59] Konna Beeson: Yeah. Uh, yeah, so, um, now the, the success success rates were, you know, much higher if you only send up to 10 applications.

[00:25:06] Konna Beeson: Um, but I would say for sort of your, your average charity anyway, the sweet spot tended to be around 30. Um, so sort of between that 25 to 50 range anyway, you know, there was a, um. A, a 62% sort of success rate for, you know, for warm funders, I believe it was. And, um, and it was around 39% for cold. But then that diminishes in, uh, that goes straight down, uh, again, the further go down in the, uh, the number of applications you send.

[00:25:32] Multiple Voices: Mm-hmm. 

[00:25:32] Konna Beeson: So that’s not necessarily to say that, you know, doing more than that in terms of applications wouldn’t. You’ll you more income because it, it depends the value of the grants you apply for, which ones are successful and which aren’t. But it is a mathematical formula to factor in to when you’re doing a forecasting for that question of how many did we apply for?

[00:25:52] Konna Beeson: What’s our pipeline look like? How much time do we spend on each one? Those sorts of things. ’cause there is, generally speaking, a calculation you can do to work out again. Well at this point. Uh, you know, I could do twice the amount of work and 

[00:26:04] Multiple Voices: yeah, 

[00:26:04] Konna Beeson: exact same amount of income, so it’s actually better for me to do half of them spend, spend that extra time on potentially better writing.

[00:26:12] Konna Beeson: But also that relationship building, which you know, quite often, if you can get that weigh in of some kind, is going to be far more impactful to your success than probably anything else. Um. I 

[00:26:23] Simon Scriver: mean, it looks like, like a clear indicator of that law of diminishing returns where it’s like, yeah, you can keep squeezing out the more hours you do, but the, like you said, there’s that sweet spot where you are putting the right amount of time into them and, and still taking care of yourself because I imagine you two have seen a lot of the burnout where.

[00:26:41] Simon Scriver: Because it is a never ending thing, you know, fundraising, you can always do one more. So I, I, I do love that you’ve touched on that in terms of being realistic about what you should be putting into this and not just trying to squeeze out as much from every fundraiser as possible. I appreciate that. Yeah.

[00:26:56] Amy Stevens: We see staffings under huge pressure, don’t we, Connor? Client teams we work with who just need that extra capacity. They’ve been pulled in every direction. So having that focus to go, okay, I’ve got 20 applications to do. Is, is a good thing rather than looking at an endless list of 200 and and feeling overwhelmed by it.

[00:27:15] Konna Beeson: Yeah. And some of it’s around actually being able to use things like this to set sort of some expectations for boards as well. Mm-hmm. Which is something we talked about the first time we pulled the analysis for this together. Um, is that, you know, especially if you’ve got maybe a board of trustees that just don’t know fundraising as well, you know, you could.

[00:27:32] Konna Beeson: Perfectly be excused to think, okay, we raised this much last year and we did X amount of applications, let’s do 10% more. Um, that will get 10% more income perfectly, I guess fine of a, of a rationale if you’re not in fundraising and dunno the sector. So 

[00:27:46] Multiple Voices: mm-hmm. 

[00:27:47] Konna Beeson: It’s really helpful to have sort of year on year validity to these sort of things.

[00:27:51] Konna Beeson: So anyone having those issues can say, actually you need to trust me. Like if this is the pipeline, this is the best route. Um. To actually help avoid burnout as well. 

[00:28:01] Simon Scriver: I think that’s a great point. And a reminder, you can get a copy of this report@giftedphilanthropy.com. Um, and I think that’s a great idea to bring it to your board or bring it to your CEO if you get, are getting that unrealistic pressure to show, show what’s going, going on there.

[00:28:14] Simon Scriver: I think that’s a great suggestion. Um, one of the, one of the caveats always on benchmarking reports, and you said it yourself at the beginning, Connor, is, is, you know, you have to sometimes be a bit careful comparing ourselves. ’cause an average is. Can sometimes be very misleading to, to, to what an individual is going through, uh, or what a listener is going through.

[00:28:32] Simon Scriver: And, and one of the things you delved into is the different types of causes and different areas and what they respond to. ’cause I know that that’s, in my fundraising career, that’s one of, been one of the constant, no matter what, who you talk to. All the other causes are much easier to fundraise for 

[00:28:47] Multiple Voices: whoever you 

[00:28:47] Simon Scriver: speak to is working for the, the most difficult.

[00:28:50] Simon Scriver: So, but, but did you see a, a, a kind of cha uh, a difference between the different areas? 

[00:28:56] Konna Beeson: Uh, yes. Uh, so, um, what I did in terms of to, to retain the statistical, you know, validity of the findings as well. I looked at the different types of charities, uh, like sort of the most common ones. He took part, so those were, that were at least 10, I think it was 10 to 30% of the sample size for each of these different areas.

[00:29:13] Konna Beeson: And I, I looked into the success rates of those as well as the total income. They raised sort of compared to the average, so you can help benchmark as well. So in terms of success rates, some of the, the headlines, if you will, is that, um, those in the disability, um, sector had the highest repeat funder success rate of 75%.

[00:29:34] Konna Beeson: Um, but they had the lowest cold success rate of 22%. Um, so kind of a, an either side situation there. Um, arts and culture and like community, um, charities had the highest cold success rate. Or 34%. And Heritage, um, they had sort of the, the highest overall, uh, success rate of about 50%. Um, and actually they, they had the lowest number of applications sent as well.

[00:29:58] Konna Beeson: We ended up averaging about 6.6, um, which is, there’s lots of different reasons for that. Amy, I know you’ve, we’ve talked about 

[00:30:04] Amy Stevens: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we can mull it over and, you know, I can give my opinion on it, but we never really know the reason why, obviously. Yeah. But I think, for example, with Heritage, so.

[00:30:16] Amy Stevens: Heritage First is education. For example, education. You have a cohort of people, don’t you? As a university, you’ve got your past students and your current students as a constituency to go and ask for money. Mm-hmm. So they may be less reliant on having to work on those grants, whereas I. A heritage venue or a cultural organization.

[00:30:34] Amy Stevens: You may have a membership scheme, but it’s not quite the same. So they’re probably historically more reliant on grants. Um, and I would say as well, having those lots of capital projects and bigger capital projects within that field health as well. Um, you know, you have discrete build projects or equipment or, or what have you, don’t you, so it is interesting to see how yeah, the different groups crop up.

[00:31:01] Amy Stevens: So. I think kind of was the, the cold success was high for the more community based organizations, wasn’t it? 

[00:31:08] Konna Beeson: Yeah. Arts sort of culture and community is how Yeah, 

[00:31:11] Amy Stevens: we, we felt that might be due to a funder priority shift because we’ve seen that move towards grassroots organizations. So more first time new organizations may have been funded, which could cause that skew, but it’ll be interesting to see how that maps out in next year’s report as well, and see if we see any other correlations.

[00:31:31] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I mean, I, I assume we are seeing kind of, there is that more fashionable trend that comes in every year. I mean, I think like climate change are obviously very much in the news that maybe weren’t so much years ago. I know in Ireland the homeless crisis is, is you know, of epidemic proportions and so you begin to see a shift towards that.

[00:31:50] Simon Scriver: How quickly does it fluctuate or how, maybe more importantly, how responsive do fundraisers need to be to that? 

[00:31:57] Amy Stevens: I, I think one of the main drivers of that, what we’ve seen a lot of here is the generational wealth shift. So private family trust and foundations particularly who. Um, you know, we’re, we’re military funders.

[00:32:12] Amy Stevens: We’re heritage arts culture. Now the younger generations are taking over it’s social causes, it’s environment, it’s homelessness. 

[00:32:20] Simon Scriver: They’re so woke, they’re all so woke. 

[00:32:23] Amy Stevens: But there is a real shift in that we, we’ve kind of seen priorities changing as the younger generations wanna fund what is important to them.

[00:32:30] Amy Stevens: So that’s interesting, I think. Yeah. 

[00:32:34] Konna Beeson: I, I suppose almost the other side to that as well as like, just being sort of the funder’s own sort of interest in deciding where to go as well is that we’re actually, you know, COVID was five years ago. Um, what, what happened during COVID as well as, you know, everything else, um, was that we suddenly sort of along, um.

[00:32:50] Konna Beeson: Along with the, you know, the cost of living crisis and all these sort of things happening in that sort of same two year period so to speak, it was that all of a sudden we’ve got hundreds of thousands of completely grassroots, you know, charities. Yeah. Um, that had never really had to apply for grant funding before.

[00:33:05] Konna Beeson: ’cause they were always fine. They would do their gala ball and a few things, and that they, they would sustain the income that they needed. All of a sudden they’re all looking at their budget spreadsheets and thinking we can no longer just survive just off of what we were doing. So seeking grant funding is the natural next step, but that’s, that is the vast majority of the total number of charities are in that sort of the far under, you know, under a million.

[00:33:28] Konna Beeson: Um. So what’s happening there is that I think there was somewhat of a push as well for, um, that funders identified this and saying there is a massive need of rise. We are gonna quite literally see small charities at the backbone of every community shutting their doors forever. And I think there was an adjustment there as well to be more receptive to cold applications from smaller organizations.

[00:33:48] Konna Beeson: So it’s almost a bit, almost forced, forced their hand in some regards, if that makes sense. But 

[00:33:53] Multiple Voices: mm-hmm. 

[00:33:55] Simon Scriver: Yeah, that’s can fund, I mean, how much can fundraisers respond to these like global trends? And can you change your, I mean, I suppose you’re changing your ask. You’re changing your, not necessarily your project, but the way you present it based on those terms.

[00:34:09] Simon Scriver: How fluid do we need to be? 

[00:34:11] Amy Stevens: I, I think this is a really, really tricky subject because yes, you can look at, there may be a big funder who is all about climate and you think, can we tie in one of our projects to make it climate? But we are always really clear with our clients of what is your core purpose?

[00:34:29] Amy Stevens: Okay. Don’t change who you are and what you do to meet a funder’s criteria because you’re not being true to yourself as a charity and what you’re there for. Mm-hmm. So, I, I really struggle with that personally. I dunno how you, how you feel about it. 

[00:34:44] Konna Beeson: Yeah. Well, I. It always comes down to the case with support at the end of the day.

[00:34:47] Konna Beeson: But if you, you, I think so I don’t like saying this, but it sometimes comes down to just a feel as when you’re doing a trust application, for example, you kind of know if you are kind of trying to shoehorn Yeah. Um, you know, the, the things into make it fit, you know, trying to plug your square into the circle hole kind of, kind of thing.

[00:35:04] Konna Beeson: Yeah. 

[00:35:05] Multiple Voices: But I, I 

[00:35:06] Konna Beeson: do think, um, even we talk about this a lot, um, anyway, but I think this is actually where that relationship building side of things is really important for. Um, not just because it enables you to get ahead so funded that may have been in your pipeline. If you’re able to reach out to them, you, you’ll know first or early or, or whatever it is that if you are actually in with a chance, even though you may 

[00:35:27] Multiple Voices: mm-hmm.

[00:35:28] Konna Beeson: It may seem on paper, on their website, like, uh, you know, what we fund in eligibility. It may think, yeah, great. That seems to fit. But actually it’s, when you speak to them, you realize that no, we’re really only looking, you know, the border, this type of things. Um, so that’s really important. But the other side of that as well is that if you’ve got these, you know, good and you know, warmer relationships that you’ve built with funders, even when and if they do change their, uh, strategic direction.

[00:35:53] Konna Beeson: It’s not necessarily gonna put you out. In fact, I literally just secured a, a 20,000 grant for a, um, one of our clients this week, um, from a funder that, um, changed their strategy in the last six months and said, absolutely we do not fund this type of work. But we had a. A somewhat of a way in and we, we framed it that way and not a shoehorn.

[00:36:16] Konna Beeson: So that was kind of a persuasive shoehorning, if you will. But I don’t, I don’t have a good enough phrase for it. Um, but that’s, that’s, it’s a 

[00:36:23] Simon Scriver: skill of fundraising, isn’t it? It’s matching. It’s matching the people who wanna help with the people in need. And I mean, that’s what you guys, you know, that’s your track record.

[00:36:30] Simon Scriver: So it’s, it’s great. This, um, in terms of the report work, uh, ’cause I’m conscious of time, but what else jumped out? In terms of overall trends, like what else would you, did you come away from it that. I suppose you’re gonna apply as you work with your clients. 

[00:36:45] Konna Beeson: Yeah, so I’ll give probably the two main, uh, trends and takeaways if you will.

[00:36:48] Konna Beeson: The first one is a, I would say a really positive thing, um, which is that most trust, uh, fundraisers that took part in the survey actually forecasted their income over the next 12 months to grow or stay the same compared to the amount of people that said, um, they expected it to, to decrease, which is.

[00:37:04] Konna Beeson: Great. Um, because I know there’s a lot of gloom in the sector and, and, and things like that. And I think that really paints a good, a good picture. And I, I did look at the different types of charities and it was, there was no real difference between that. So that’s always good to know. Um, I suppose the other thing is, you know, we talked about the number of trusts not accepting unsolicited applications anymore.

[00:37:22] Konna Beeson: Um, 78% of people that took part said that they were finding that to be more. Of the case than ever. Um, so what we did in this survey was that we asked for those of you that have been successful in, um, getting funding from funders that are no longer accepting unsolicited applications. Um, like how did you do it?

[00:37:39] Konna Beeson: Mm-hmm. And, um, 35% of them was due to some kind of connection, whether it’s historic, whether it’s ’cause you know, a board, maybe it’s, uh, an existing funder of yours. Um, we’re happy to introduce you to another fund that you didn’t know of as well. Um, so that’s really important. Um, 23% approached anyway and got funding.

[00:37:58] Konna Beeson: Um, 

[00:37:59] Simon Scriver: I wanna, I wanna start on that because that’s certainly not something we would endorse or promote that know, but it’s, it’s quite an interesting statistic, I think, and it 

[00:38:09] Amy Stevens: could be a bit because. I, I, I’m a don’t take no for an answer kind of person. So sometimes if it’s no unsolicited approaches, but you are the perfect fit, 

[00:38:19] Multiple Voices: yeah, 

[00:38:20] Amy Stevens: I’ll still contact ’em and say, listen, I know you’re not accepting them, but we’ve got this project, so maybe you could let us know when you’re coming back online.

[00:38:26] Amy Stevens: Yeah. Yada, yada, yada. Just to try and start a conversation. So it may be that some of those approached anyway, actually. Did the relationship build? 

[00:38:36] Simon Scriver: Yeah, it’s a soft approach. And, and, and going back to the, the stat before Connor said about, um, 35% due to connections, it’s almost like you might not be accepting, but if there’s an introduction, if there’s a referral, and, and I think that that really jumped out at me at how many were due to connections.

[00:38:52] Konna Beeson: Yeah, I think that the last important point on that is that 19% said that they were actually approached proactively. 

[00:39:01] Simon Scriver: Wow. And 

[00:39:01] Konna Beeson: the importance of that is because we, I, I’m not gonna say obviously who it is, but we had several people that, um, said that in the survey, left a comment to say that we were, we know that they found us.

[00:39:13] Konna Beeson: Via chat pt. Um, and that’s because, you know, uh, we are just actually just, I thought we, I thought 

[00:39:20] Simon Scriver: we could go one podcast without mentioning chatt. Unfortunately not. No. Uh, 

[00:39:25] Konna Beeson: but we just, we’ve, funny enough, we’ve just done a blog on this and our website around, you know, uh, you never really needed to be, you know, visible, um, for a trust fundraising point of view.

[00:39:34] Konna Beeson: But now, you know, especially I would say the majority of funders are under resourced under. Staff and things like that, why wouldn’t they use the tools that they’ve got to try and find a proactively find,

[00:39:53] Simon Scriver: I 

[00:39:53] Amy Stevens: think’s got a connection issue. 

[00:39:58] Simon Scriver: Oh, Connie, you back? Can you hear me? I’ll just make sure you are. Oh, you’re freezing again. 

[00:40:05] Amy Stevens: Yeah. I think it, it leads on to kind of the, our last point really about fundraising and AI and, sorry, and how we need back, we do need to be up on it despite, yeah. Sometimes battling against it a little bit.

[00:40:16] Amy Stevens: Really, 

[00:40:18] Simon Scriver: I, I, I’m gonna hold it here and just kind of, can you hear me

[00:40:25] Simon Scriver: Well? I don’t worry. I’ll edit this bit out, but I’ll just, I’ll just try and get Connor back. I think his internet 

[00:40:33] Amy Stevens: might have. Yeah, I can 

[00:40:34] Simon Scriver: am my back probably now. I can hear. You can can hear you now. Can you hear me right? Yeah, that went completely. Sorry about that. Dunno why. Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of a delay there, but we’ll just make sure there’s nothing else running on your computer or anything or anyone playing Xbox or anything.

[00:40:52] Simon Scriver: No, no, no, no. I, I message my girlfriend 

[00:40:54] Amy Stevens: background streaming video or, yeah, 

[00:40:56] Simon Scriver: yeah, yeah. Just download and stuff. Um, that’s, well, well, we’ll, we’ll trim it together. So basically, um, we talk about the chat GBT thing. If we can pick up from there. So, Connie, you, you. 

[00:41:11] Konna Beeson: Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I’ll say the, the point again.

[00:41:13] Konna Beeson: So yeah, I mean, what we found is that 19% of people were approached directly and, uh, a lot of them gave a comment in the survey to say that they were told by the funder that they found them. Because of they chatt, GPTs, you know, top, you know, X types of charities in the Southwest or whatever it was. So that is really important because, uh, we’ve just done a blog on this, on our website around, um, something called a EO, uh, which is different to SEO, which is effectively how do you become visible on like, you know, conversational AI platforms like chat, GPT, because.

[00:41:49] Konna Beeson: It just makes total sense that funders themselves, as they’re under-resourced, are gonna be using tools like that as well to proactively find charities to support and, you know, you wanna be visible if you can. So looking into things like that is gonna be, I think, I think within the next like three to five years especially, we’re gonna see a very stark difference in charities that have done that well and those that haven’t.

[00:42:09] Simon Scriver: I think it’s such an interesting point and we’ve noticed the same with the Fundraising Everywhere. Website is more traffic coming from chat, GBT and, and yeah, a lot of conversations, but people not really knowing how to address it. So it’s interesting to hear that you’ve got a, an article in on your website around the A EO.

[00:42:26] Simon Scriver: Um, stuff, but it’s, it’s, it’s, I mean, talk, talk me through it a little bit because essentially the chat, it’s like scraping information from your blogs, from your social media, from basically everywhere you put out. So by, by an increased presence, you mean kind of general marketing, general branding out there.

[00:42:44] Simon Scriver: It, it differs 

[00:42:46] Konna Beeson: in the sense that this is a, I’m gonna really dumb down SEO now and I hate myself for it, but that’s perfect for me. Perfect. The beginner’s guide to this is that, you know, SEO is sort of jamming your blogs on your website and things like that with all the keywords so that Google eventually knows this is, this organization is the expert in this field because of the keywords that.

[00:43:08] Konna Beeson: The, the converse to that, which is now around a EO is because, um, things like chat, GPT, they aren’t just about a question answer type facility. They are built to be conversational. That’s actually what they’re for. Um, so. You are, you are more likely to be sort of featured within that if you’ve got more sort of, you know, conversational pieces, like, um, and it’s easier to understand and it can read the resources on your website, for example, if they’re in that sort of, it, rather than just keywords.

[00:43:41] Konna Beeson: ’cause the keywords don’t tell you enough. It, it is more than clever enough to know and it wants, you know, if someone’s typing, you know, who does the best, you know. I don’t know. Um, support for Learn Disabled people in in, in Bristol and Somerset. If you’ve got a lot of resources on your website, which you’re talking about, you know, this is why we are the best, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:44:01] Konna Beeson: Or this is what we do to support, learn disabled people in the Southwest. And it’s, it’s. Rather than just sort of jamming keywords. I think I, I’ve really dumb down that it is just really well worth looking into it. Um, 

[00:44:11] Simon Scriver: yeah, it’s, it’s so interesting ’cause I think like PE people already thought they could game the algorithm a bit and, and maybe not very well a lot of the time, but I think it’s gonna be, you know, almost impossible to game it.

[00:44:22] Simon Scriver: Like you have to have good quality information. You have to be genuinely pushing stuff out there to be noticed by these, these, um, tools. That’s my feeling. I dunno. Yeah. In terms, in terms of ai, you, you also talk a little bit about how fundraisers themselves are using it. What, what, what were you finding in that?

[00:44:42] Konna Beeson: Yeah, so we asked, you know, like how much time you spend in your activity and things like that. But as well as, um, do you use AI in any of your trust fundraising work? And what do you, what do you value most and least. Um, in terms of helping you, you know, grow income. So what we found is, I was quite surprised by this, but 42% of people said they haven’t used any AI tools at all, which I was, I was very surprised by that.

[00:45:05] Konna Beeson: Um, of those that did it was, they said it was most valuable for, say, cutting word counts or like, you know, consolidating work you’ve already done. So, a case of supports for, you know, three different ones, a different word, learns and trying to consolidate it before you edit it. Yeah. Uh, no. Huge sort of shock there.

[00:45:23] Konna Beeson: The biggest thing was actually, in terms of prospect research, um, most people found it useful for getting a higher quantity of prospect research, but the least useful for the quality of prospect research. Yeah. Which effectively you can say it is kind of pointless in that sense. However, even as from at the time that we did this survey.

[00:45:43] Konna Beeson: The ability of tools like Check GBT and, and, and Google’s deep research models and things like that have already developed so much, um, that it’s going to be, I mean, we can already do now very high quality realtime research on websites and it’s gonna advance very, very quickly. So I can actually see that area being a big opportunity actually for the sector sector to, to be able to spend less time on research, have very good quality prospect research, and be able to spend more of that time on the writing and the relationships.

[00:46:11] Konna Beeson: I think. Um, yeah, 

[00:46:13] Amy Stevens: I think it’s really helpful for a bit of fact finding as well. So I was writing an application for a, a small NGO in Kenya recently, and I needed some additional demographic stats of like a comparable area to back up what I was saying. Put it in chat, GPT, and then obviously you have to fact check.

[00:46:32] Amy Stevens: Mm-hmm. In, instead of having to kind of go through, you know, 30 different Google pages that came up, gave me an answer that I could then just go to. Is this a bonafide source? Yes. Okay, great. You know, so it is very time consum uh, time saving for things like that. Yeah. 

[00:46:50] Simon Scriver: Yeah, and I think a really important point about the fact checking because sometimes you, you literally just have to push back, but it’s so true.

[00:46:55] Simon Scriver: I mean, even just to get you pointed in the right direction or to make you think of things you hadn’t thought about. Yeah. I mean, one thing, one thing I’ve, I’ve found is like putting in things like grant applications in and asking it to like. Dissect it and tell you what’s wrong with it. And a lot of it you’re like, nah, you don’t know Stupid Chat chatt.

[00:47:12] Simon Scriver: But every once in a while it’s like, ah, that’s a good point. I haven’t thought about that. I think there is a lot of value in it. And I think, like you said, Connor, it’s changing so quickly and already changed since you’ve written this, that, how, how did fundraisers stay on top of it? I mean, obviously fantastic training@fundraisingeverywhere.com, uh, and also by reading your stuff@giftedphilanthropy.com, but where, where.

[00:47:33] Simon Scriver: Where do you guys, as trusts, grant application people, where do you stay up to date with this? I mean, 

[00:47:39] Konna Beeson: I think. Well, literally what you just said. I mean, you know, platforms like fundraising everywhere and all these things out there. Just be being mindful of, uh, you know, the sort of, I guess the leaders in, uh, the sort of the wider sector, not just in the UK as well, but this is, this is a global sort of fundraising area as well.

[00:47:55] Konna Beeson: So looking, you know, to the US and things like that as well to see, you know, who’s speaking on these topics with the most knowledge. I think that’s really important. Mm-hmm. Um, it is hard to keep up and then it’s hard to know. Everyone sees people on LinkedIn talking about, you know, the latest buzzwords in AI and they do the really, really, really long posts and.

[00:48:10] Konna Beeson: Can’t stand it. Um, um, it’s hard to know who’s actually knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t. Yeah. So I think that’s where organizations like yours are, are really valuable in getting the right speakers who are evidence experts in, you know, in AI and fundraising and things like that. Um, things are gonna change very, very quickly, but I think in a good way.

[00:48:28] Konna Beeson: Um mm-hmm. If, if we can overcome what would inevitably be sort of a skills and knowledge hurdle, um, in how to really use this for prospect research in particular, um, because. The, the things will advance far more quickly than everyone can sort of catch up and learn how to adapt their approach. I think we’re gonna have, there, there’s gonna be inevitably some kind of skills, knowledge gap and mm-hmm.

[00:48:51] Konna Beeson: So, you know, especially maybe smaller charities that aren’t gonna have, like, you know, training budgets and conference budgets and stuff. I think that’s gonna be quite a, i, I suspect it’ll be a stark difference, which is something to be very mindful of. Um, over the next few years, 

[00:49:04] Amy Stevens: my take is, let’s use it as a tool, but let’s not forget about human relationships.

[00:49:10] Simon Scriver: Mary, I love it. The, um, any, anyone who comes out with that, when we talk about anyone who uses the word human, I’m like, I’m in love with this person. Um, okay, so what does this mean for, um, for like the, the average fundraiser Who’s listening to this? Someone who’s back in their office, maybe a solo. Grant, um, fundraiser, or maybe they’re doing it as part of their job.

[00:49:30] Simon Scriver: What, what would you kind of take out of this or take back to your clients as, as maybe action points? I know that’s hard to kind of do, to do a to do list, but how would it feed into their strategy, do you think? 

[00:49:42] Amy Stevens: So for us, we’ve seen. Lots of small charities particularly need to diversify. So I think this shows us that.

[00:49:51] Amy Stevens: Is trust and foundation still a valid, you know, source to, to obtain your funds from? Yes, absolutely. If you’re doing it properly, but things are shifting. Um, and particularly in COVID, you know, we saw hospices who had relied too heavily on charity shop income and then, you know, they were closed and they needed to really diversify.

[00:50:13] Amy Stevens: We’ve had others who relied on statutory funding, which potentially given current situations could be, you know, going down. Um. Let’s not forget things like legacy fundraising. Um, quite often charities put that off, uh, and, and well, yeah, it doesn’t yield immediately, does it? And actually have they invested in that year on year.

[00:50:35] Amy Stevens: So it’s bringing all the strands together, including the trust and foundations and using research like this to inform your trust and foundation strategy. Um, but just trying to be realistic and think, you know, where are the, the income sources for our organization and what, what do we need to invest our time in really?

[00:50:56] Konna Beeson: If, if there’s one like really practical takeaway that probably everyone could do as well is exactly based on what Amy just said around all the consolidating all the different areas of fundraising, uh, that you could or are doing, is making sure that you’re not working in silo as much as possible. So even though.

[00:51:13] Konna Beeson: That would often happen. I would say ENT trusts more than any other area. We’ve talked about relationship building and the, and the importance of that. More several times in this, go away and ask whoever it is, needs to ask in your leadership team. When was the last time we’ve done a network mapping exercise of our board, of our corporate partners, of our community groups, our major donors, and things like that.

[00:51:34] Konna Beeson: Even that could potentially, um, massively benefit, um, you know, link you to funders you didn’t know existed with a really clear way in, um, you know, it’s just really, really valuable, um, to do things like that. 

[00:51:46] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I think, and you are, that’s kind of peppered throughout the report and the findings in the report is how important those relationships and ongoing relationships are.

[00:51:53] Simon Scriver: So it’s, it’s not. Like call fundraising. It’s not just like a chop shop, just getting the numbers in and then them disappearing. It’s, it’s actually putting in time to building those quality relationships, which is very clear. Uh, coming outta this, this has been great. This has been really interesting. Uh, con of, remind us, remind our listeners where is the best place to, um, get this report.

[00:52:14] Simon Scriver: So if you go to 

[00:52:14] Konna Beeson: gifted philanthropy.com and then you can go on our fundraising resources section of the website. The, uh, the original webinar we did on there, uh, going through it line by. Um, and also if you go to the bottom of the website, uh, as well, you can subscribe to our mailing list, which aside from our mailing list, uh, purposes is you’ll get first dibs on doing it next year, um, and getting the survey next year and things like that as well, which we’re gonna, as I said, we’re gonna really want a lot of that feedback from people to inform the next survey that we’ll probably do at the very end of this year.

[00:52:47] Konna Beeson: So sign up to that if you can make sure you respond to the next survey when it comes out, and we all help each other. 

[00:52:52] Simon Scriver: A hundred percent. Yeah, if we can get more people responding to this, then we’ve got more useful data. So I really do recommend everyone go to gifted philanthropy.com, get a copy of the, uh, report and sign up some email unless you will find the links.

[00:53:03] Simon Scriver: Um, in the description of this, where do we find you guys? What’s your social media? De jo? Amy? Do you hang out on LinkedIn or what your We do hang out 

[00:53:12] Amy Stevens: on LinkedIn. Yeah. Uh, that’s our only platform, really, LinkedIn. Um, but yeah, you can reach us through the website or on LinkedIn and, uh. I’m happy to have a chat.

[00:53:23] Simon Scriver: Amazing. Very good. Um, yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much guys. Do check out Amy Stevens and Caron on link, uh, on LinkedIn, uh, and do check out Gifted Philanthropy. Thank you both so much for your time. Thank you all for listening. Um, don’t forget to see what else is coming up on fundraising everywhere.com.

[00:53:40] Simon Scriver: We have our Trust of Major Donors conference in December. Um, but we’ll be, have, have plenty which is relevant to you in, in the run up to that. So do keep an eye on fundraising everywhere.com. Thank you everyone and have a good day. 

[00:53:53] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend?

[00:54:00] Alex Aggidis: And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time.

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This transcript was created using AI. If you spot any mistakes, please reach out. Thank you!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:00:59] Simon Scriver: Why does everyone, why does everyone default to, we use MailChimp as well. Does it? Why does everyone default to MailChimp? I 

[00:01:03] Sarah Goddard: think it’s because what, it’s what I learned in the charity sector and I’ve just stuck with what works. Um, I knew it, I was familiar with it, so there’s probably other platforms, but the, the, the moving it all over is a job in and of itself.

[00:01:16] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Well, everyone keeps saying there’s better ones, but I think, yeah, they must have done a big campaign towards charities years ago, and now they’re just like locked in. Everyone loves mail. 

[00:01:26] Sarah Goddard: I think, um, they had, I think they had really good free plans for the longest time for charities. Like, I think it was like a good few thousand people, unlimited amounts of emails.

[00:01:34] Sarah Goddard: You could use all the features and then they’ve slowly reduced how much charity can actually use. Yeah. 

[00:01:39] Simon Scriver: Yeah. That’s fair. Alright, um, well let’s kick us off. This is the Fundraising of Rare Podcast. Uh, my name is Simon Reiber. We are, uh, streaming live today. Um, to LinkedIn as well. So you might be watching this live on LinkedIn, or you may be listening back on the fundraising of our podcast.

[00:01:55] Simon Scriver: Either way. Really happy to have you here. Uh, my name is Simon and I am joined today by the wonderful, well, we’re talking about welcome journeys today in particular. Um, but, but I could talk to Sarah Godard about anything. So, hello Sarah. Welcome to the fundraiser. You, you no doubt I’m fundraising, don’t you?

[00:02:12] Simon Scriver: I think that’s why I like talking to you. ’cause you are, you are a big, big fundraiser by heart, aren’t you? What’s your background? 

[00:02:17] Sarah Goddard: Absolutely. I have been in sector, ooh, better part of two decades. I started out in face-to-face fundraising, so on a high street near you with a clipboard. I’m sure they’ve all got very high tech iPads and things nowadays.

[00:02:28] Sarah Goddard: But old school paper paperclip board, um, discovered. I really like the telling stories, talking to people about charities, inspiring them. Would rather do it without standing out in the blistering heat or the freezing cold snow. Um. Did an internship, fell into fundraising that way a little bit and. Still here 20 years, nearly 18, 20 years later.

[00:02:45] Sarah Goddard: Really? So 

[00:02:46] Simon Scriver: it’s amazing. And you’ve got a great track record. ’cause you, I love your, your background. You’ve worked with a lot of small organizations and medium organizations, like real mix of science. 

[00:02:55] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:02:56] Simon Scriver: Um, and, and it’s very impressive. And these days you work with a lot of people helping them in, in lots of areas, but.

[00:03:01] Simon Scriver: You’re very public fundraiser, very community fundraising minded. And aren’t you? And I, I will remind people, we, Sarah is cur curating with us our, um, our community fundraising conference on fundraising everywhere, which is happening 19th of June. But you’re a big community head, aren’t you? Like that’s where you spend a lot your time is helping people boost their community fundraising.

[00:03:22] Sarah Goddard: Absolutely. Yeah. So I started, I started off in events initially, as I think many fundraisers often do. Then that grew into doing community as well. Um, over the years I got seconded into individual giving and learn all of that, and really understood how those areas work closely together. I think once upon a time, they were very much, I.

[00:03:39] Sarah Goddard: Neither the twain shall meet. Whereas now charities are bringing those areas closer together, which I feel very passionately about because they’re all our supporters and however they choose to give our jobs are to inspire and give them the opportunity to get involved in lots of different ways. And one of the most powerful ways of doing that is absolutely engaging the community, whether it’s a local community, if you’re in a particular geographical area or.

[00:03:59] Sarah Goddard: Who are our community of supporters? Who are the people that our core speaks to, their values and their motivations and the change they wanna see in the world. Let’s engage those communities and, yeah, I can’t, you shouldn’t pick favorites with fundraising, but I’ll be honest, community fundraising will always be my true love, and I’ll be up on that soapbox, banging the drum for how awesome community fundraising is.

[00:04:19] Sarah Goddard: As long as I’m fundraising, I reckon. 

[00:04:21] Simon Scriver: But you, you make the valid, very valid point that it’s, it’s not in isolation, no form of fundraising is like, it spills out into your corporate, into your, even your trust. It spills out into your ig. Like it’s all connected. And I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today was, was focusing on that almost that, um, well, the welcome journeys we’re talking about, but that, that supporter experience, ’cause we’ve got a supporter experience conference happening as well this month.

[00:04:45] Simon Scriver: Um, and so. Maybe you could talk me through your idea of a welcome journey or how you view welcome journeys for people. I mean, for me it’s like. You know, these people who are just coming onto our list and, and those early days of it, that’s a very simplified thing. But what, what do you mean when you talk about welcome journey, Sarah?

[00:05:05] Sarah Goddard: Yeah, absolutely. So there is that, that core bread and butter that often it’s our email, email list. It’s, um, Alex Fair often talks a lot about that’s your only platform that you own. So don’t worry too much about building social media. Build your email list. And I completely agree. Like, put that, that sentiment up on a pedestal.

[00:05:21] Sarah Goddard: Completely agree with that. So often it is about someone who’s. Found out a little bit about us. Come across our website, maybe seen a community fundraiser out and about in the wild if you like, and gone, oh yeah, I wanna hear a bit more about that charity. I’ll pop my name and and details down. And if they then don’t hear from you for six weeks, ’cause that’s when your next email goes out or you know they’re gonna have forgotten about you by that point.

[00:05:41] Sarah Goddard: You know, the point of engagement appointment, a supporter takes action is their most important time because that is when they’re excited, it’s when they’re motivated, it’s when something has moved them. Keep that feeling going and keep that thing going. So yeah, in its simplest term, the welcome journeys are, what is that series of emails or series of communications, because it doesn’t all have to be by email, um, that supporters first receive when they first take an action.

[00:06:06] Sarah Goddard: Equally, as I say, it doesn’t have to be online. If a supporter has sent in a check or even if they’ve made the donation online, there’s nothing saying you can’t send them a lovely thank. Well, you should be sending them a lovely thank you letter or a lovely thank you regardless. But you can pop that in the post.

[00:06:19] Sarah Goddard: You could pick up the phone. Like there are lots of different ways that you can engage that supporter, um, and thinking about that creatively. ’cause we all get far too many emails. We all lose sight of emails. So think about how we can best engage people. But then there’s also about that welcome at different points as well and different forms of welcome.

[00:06:36] Sarah Goddard: So for your community supporters, for your event supporters, what does that welcome look like? When someone signs up to do something, when someone picks up the phone to say they’re doing their bake sale, or fill in the online form to register for your color run, is that welcome? Maximizing their excitement about that activity they’re doing, or is it a basically a receipt and a bit meh, and a bit boring and a bit, and then you’re having to work twice, three times as hard to get that excitement back.

[00:07:00] Sarah Goddard: Um, so that’s, I guess, in its simplest terms. Then I also have a, a term that I call transitionary journeys, which is about welcoming supporters from one area of the charity when they move into another, which is, should ultimately be the, the game. And, but it’s the same basic principle. It’s just how are we communicating with our supporters to continue inspiring and exciting them about the actions they can take to see some change in the world.

[00:07:21] Sarah Goddard: Really, 

[00:07:22] Simon Scriver: it’s, yeah, it’s like, it’s like that bridge between acquisition and retention, isn’t it? It’s like that, like you said, that point where they first come in, they are. They’re wanting something. They’ve, they’ve moved, they’ve taken action, which we are, we’re always so desperate to, you know, we spend so much money trying to acquire these people.

[00:07:39] Simon Scriver: Mm-hmm. But then we have this, often, this disjoint in the middle where it’s like they come in for one reason under some certain circumstances, and we are driving them away before we can really like. What is it? What is it? Are we rushing to get them where we want them? You know, we’re trying to turn them into something they’re not and we’re not holding their hands through.

[00:07:57] Simon Scriver: The experience is, is that where the problem is coming 

[00:07:59] Sarah Goddard: from? I actually think it might be the opposite. I think it’s often in charity sector, we’re too slow to try and get that second action, and we’re actually, we are really scared. We’re like the, talk about it as being the little, um, pangolin creatures we’re like, or, or please could you possibly, maybe.

[00:08:14] Sarah Goddard: Do something next maybe, but it takes us months and months and months to ask them that. Um, events is my key example here is, you know, someone would’ve spent six months training and fundraising and doing amazing things for say, London Marathon, and then they’ve had all this great engagement, all of this great stewardship, and then the communication drops off a cliff until five months later they’re sent a Christmas appeal.

[00:08:34] Sarah Goddard: And they’re like, well, I’ve not heard from you in between time, what’s going on? Because we were too shy, too nervous, too worried about offending to give them any other action in between time. 

[00:08:43] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:08:44] Sarah Goddard: Oh, but the Christmas appeal, that’s the banker appeal. We need to send that to everyone that we’ve got in the database.

[00:08:47] Sarah Goddard: We’ll send it to all of those community events people. But they’ve had nothing in between. And it’s the same with individual giving. It’s not actually the first gift that’s the hardest. It’s the second. And I think, I remember when I was in, I’d love to hear from other ideas what you’re seeing data wise, but actually prime time to make that second ask was within sort of six to eight weeks, which you say that to many fundraisers and particularly fundraisers, smaller charities.

[00:09:07] Sarah Goddard: And they go, what? That’s so soon. But that’s, it might not be a second gift. Maybe it’s just another action. Maybe it’s a micro action, maybe it’s a share. This post, it’s give your supporters the opportunity to still keep being involved in doing something and just vary and test what that second action is.

[00:09:24] Simon Scriver: We, we make assumptions sometimes about our people that like our, our, when they join our list, you know, we almost assume that they’re gonna do the work. They’re gonna go explore our website and they’re gonna know what the next logical step is. And if they wanted to help more, they would, but. I mean, that’s, that’s really a false assumption, isn’t it?

[00:09:42] Simon Scriver: Like we have to kind of put ourselves in front of ’em, like all forms of fundraising, surely. 

[00:09:46] Sarah Goddard: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It’s, I think we forget that when we’re in the detail of something, we are seeing all of these different things. We are in the trees, we think that everyone else knows what’s in our brains. And actually a no one else knows what’s in our brains at all, but especially not our supporters.

[00:10:00] Sarah Goddard: They’re not thinking like fundraisers or thinking like charity staff. They don’t know what the other options are. And I’ve got, um, there’s some data a while back. Now, it’d be great to see this research redone, but about asking supporters why did they give? And it was something like 30% of them said, ’cause I was asked.

[00:10:14] Sarah Goddard: Yeah. 

[00:10:15] Jade Cunnah: And I actually 

[00:10:15] Sarah Goddard: think it’s, you know, it’s actually a higher number than that. And also people just don’t know what the next step is. I was talking to a community fundraiser the other day on my training course who shared a beautiful story that I think sums it up where there was a minister of a church who said, oh, could you come along and represent the charity, uh, by reading this hymn?

[00:10:31] Sarah Goddard: We’re gonna read a hymn for everyone that your charity supports, and this fundraiser said, okay. That’s, that’s very nice. Thank you. Is there an opportunity to do something else? Could we hold a collection? Could I ask you to sign up to email list, et cetera, et cetera. And this, this minister was like, oh, hadn’t even thought of that.

[00:10:47] Sarah Goddard: All I thought about was the hymn and in praying for the people your charity works for. But yes, you’re right. That probably would be quite helpful. 

[00:10:53] Jade Cunnah: And 

[00:10:53] Sarah Goddard: this lovely community fundraiser, I’m sure kept a beautifully professional facing and that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Turned up to spend an hour at this church service to, to read a hy actually, that’s gonna.

[00:11:04] Sarah Goddard: Make a very tangible difference, as well as that beautiful engagement with the community is that collection and is the money that they’re going to raise. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, our supporters just aren’t in our heads and in knowing what the next step is, they’re just in their world. So, for example, this minister, he’s in his world of, it’s a church and they’re gonna read to him and say a prayer makes perfect sense to him.

[00:11:22] Jade Cunnah: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:11:23] Sarah Goddard: Fundraisers we’re like, could we. Past the collection plate round. That’d be fab. Thanks. 

[00:11:27] Simon Scriver: Yeah. I mean, I suppose we’re guilty of doing it ourselves. Sometimes as fundraisers or as marketing people, we, we like forget where we are trying to bring people and then it’s like, you know, you’re sending them these emails, you’re sending them these blogs or whatever, and it’s like, I.

[00:11:41] Simon Scriver: What is our actual goal with this? Are we just like keeping in touch for the sake of keeping in touch? Or is the goal to move them to monthly is the goal to get their company involved? Like, and, and so I guess that brings me onto really like, how do you approach this? And, and I would love anyone who’s watching this live.

[00:11:56] Simon Scriver: Um, um, please do comment. Um, and anyone who’s listening black back, please do reach out to us. But I, I had a really interesting conversation last year with, I think it was Claire Donna from More Onion. And she was talking about welcome journey journeys, a little bit about how, you know, really that first, I think she said almost six to 12 months.

[00:12:14] Simon Scriver: You might not be putting people into the general pot of communications, but having like its own dedicated welcome journey for that full 12 months, like that is the welcome journey. It’s very special. So I’m just curious in, in terms of your thoughts on a practical level, how do you start mapping out this welcome journey in an organization when you work with one of your clients?

[00:12:34] Simon Scriver: Like. What does that, what does that map look like? Is it a big drawing? Is it like a step by step in Excel? Just maybe you could talk us through the process a bit. 

[00:12:42] Sarah Goddard: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that’s really interesting. Um, from more on, you know, it being six to 12 months and I think I’d love to see how different charities have tested that and looked at that, because that to me sounds really, really exciting and something I’d love to see charities doing.

[00:12:55] Sarah Goddard: The flip side though, I think is, I work a lot with smaller and medium sized charities and the resource that a small charity has 

[00:13:02] Jade Cunnah: Yeah. Looks 

[00:13:02] Sarah Goddard: very, very different to even a medium charity, let alone the larger charities. And what I always say with my clients is we’re gonna start with where you are at and start with your resource.

[00:13:11] Sarah Goddard: And I always, always, always advocate with your big, small, medium in between. If you’re just getting started, done is better than perfect. 

[00:13:18] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:13:18] Sarah Goddard: Start simple and build onto it. It is much, much easier to start with a simple and effective journey and series of communications and do it beautifully and do it well and track some results.

[00:13:31] Sarah Goddard: Then try and have a wall of post-it notes with if this, then that. And if they do that, then they go that way. But if they go there, they go that way. If I had a pound every time I sat in a conference room with a wall full of post-it notes and all of these complicated journeys and if statements and this, that, and the other, and it never gets implemented.

[00:13:46] Sarah Goddard: Or if it does, it gets implemented really, really poorly and it breaks and it falls down and support. The bottom line is supporters don’t get communicated with. They don’t get stewarded. They don’t get welcomed, and it all falls apart. Mm-hmm. So I’m a massive, massive, massive advocate, advocate, advocate for.

[00:14:06] Sarah Goddard: And the, the process I normally recommend to charities as a start of a 10, just rather than that blank sheet of paper, is your yearly communications journey. Mm-hmm. At least one email a month, which is a stewardship piece. It’s a story, it’s impact of your work. It’s beautiful saying, this is the point of what we do, right.

[00:14:22] Sarah Goddard: This is why we are here. And you can tie that international days into things happening at your charity into, you know, whatever it might be, but at least one a month that is just pure stewardship. A beautiful news piece and story of your work. Then in between that you’ve got space for every two weeks to have what could be a call to action.

[00:14:38] Sarah Goddard: That doesn’t mean you’re going to have something every month that’s a call to action, but that’s when you start to slot in your Christmas appeal, your wear a funny hat day, you are selling this petition for our local mp, whatever it might be. Mm-hmm. So again, that call to action can be one clear call to action.

[00:14:53] Sarah Goddard: It’s not trying to ask your supporters to do 1,000,001 things. And then within that as well, it’s thinking about, well, what else do you do offline? Because most charities are gonna be looking at email. But again, do you have supporters addresses? Do you have the opportunity to send that petition or that Christmas appeal or whatever in the post?

[00:15:09] Sarah Goddard: Mm-hmm. Do you have the opportunity in there to send a stewardship piece in the post? And I would recommend if. Resource allows about four times a year. So once a quarter, give or take and alternate, ask stewardship, ask stewardship. Stewardship could be a newsletter. It could just be a little thank you postcard.

[00:15:23] Sarah Goddard: But again, it’s those different ways and opportunities to engage your supporters. And then layered over that is the all important welcome journey. Now, I generally recommend charities an email welcome journey with maybe one offline communication if you’ve got there. Details, so like maybe a postcard or a phone call, whatever your resource allows for, and I generally sort of say a welcome journey of sort of four to six emails, give or take.

[00:15:47] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:15:47] Sarah Goddard: Over maybe sort of six to eight weeks. To 12 weeks. Again, depends on resource, depends on what stories you have to tell. Depends on what you’re trying to engage supporters with. Now that is based very much on resource of small charities. Is this feasible? Can you do this? Because then you can start to build on that.

[00:16:02] Sarah Goddard: Actually, if you’ve got the capacity to build out that welcome journey, to be a separate journey to your main comms over a year. Beautiful. Do it and test that. Mm-hmm. But get the basics done brilliantly first and then bolt on and then add on, and then look at your data and tweak and amend rather than trying to do it all straight out the gate because it, it won’t work quite simply.

[00:16:20] Sarah Goddard: It’s better to do something and do it well. 

[00:16:22] Simon Scriver: Yeah. I think, I think you made some really great points there about priorities and resources and, and we might just unpack that a bit because I think like, yeah, one of the things like we do overcomplicate it sometimes, you know, and we try and like. If we start with our big list, I was just talking about this on LinkedIn, start with our big list, and then we’re trying to carve it up into all these different combinations, but sometimes it’s just about focusing on maybe, maybe the most, where most of your leads or most of your emails are coming from.

[00:16:47] Simon Scriver: So if, if most people are signing up through your website and they’re joining. That might be one segment that you start with and not like they get bogged down with everything else, but just focus on one thing. So there’s that kind of priorities thing that, where else would you generally see priorities?

[00:17:01] Simon Scriver: Like where are the quick wins when you’re working with clients and where are, yeah, what, what do you normally see falling down? 

[00:17:06] Sarah Goddard: Absolutely. Again, it really depends on where their, their people are coming from. I think one of the overlooked opportunities, particularly at small charities is that community fundraising piece.

[00:17:15] Sarah Goddard: So is your people that are coming to you and going, I’m gonna do a baked salad. I’m gonna sell my stuff on vintage, I’m gonna volunteer my time, I’m gonna run the leads marathon, you know, whatever, whatever it might be. And um, particularly small charities where there maybe isn’t a solid. Stewardship program, they’re probably being stewarded beautifully, one-on-one by a really passionate relationship community fundraiser.

[00:17:33] Sarah Goddard: Stunning, gorgeous. We love to see that until the charity starts to get so many of those supporters, that that poor fundraiser starts to get a bit overwhelmed, and that when you need a bit more of a, of a tailored, um, planned out stewardship journey for those supporters. But again, it’s about when they finish that fundraising, then what?

[00:17:49] Sarah Goddard: Then what do we do with them? Because again, for a lot of small charities, those engaged supporters who just really care about what you’re doing and want to be a part of it. And they’ll have done that thing that’s initially inspired them. But then how do we take them on that journey to what’s next? And I also see this with medium charities where I’ve got community fundraisers who are like, I really want to do that welcome journey.

[00:18:08] Sarah Goddard: I wanted that transitionary journey, but I need to get marketing buy-in. I need to work with ig. I need to do this, I need to do that. And that can be a constantly moving puzzle piece to try and understand that. Um, but again, it’s a do what you can. So actually a part of your community stewardship also includes in that transitionary journey.

[00:18:27] Sarah Goddard: That is at least in your sphere of control and influence, to take them on that transitionary journey into talking about the wider charity before they go into that broader pot. And it’s better to do that and do that well for that group of supporters before trying to build it out with others as well. So I think, yeah, don’t, don’t get stuck on, we need to have this done for every group of supporters and it needs to be perfect.

[00:18:45] Sarah Goddard: Start with one segment and start with the one that, as you say, look at your data. Where are most of your supporters coming from? Mm-hmm. Is it that you host a conference every year and most people on your email list is ’cause they came along to that conference, meaning maybe they’re more academically or service-based incline, so therefore your supporter comms maybe needs to look a little bit different ’cause you need to talk to ’em about that before going in on the fundraising stuff.

[00:19:06] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. Um, 

[00:19:07] Sarah Goddard: not every communication is gonna be perfect for every single person. It, with all the segmentation and all the data analysis in the world. You’re gonna get an email that goes to someone where it doesn’t meet their exact values or motivations because you are not a mind reader. Quite simply. You dunno everyone’s preferences and insights and interests.

[00:19:23] Sarah Goddard: So do as much as you can with the data you have and accept the done is better than perfect would be my suggest. 

[00:19:29] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I think that’s a real, really realistic thing to highlight. Once you get into automations and grouping things, there will be stuff that. Isn’t perfectly fit for it, but you’ve made a great point there.

[00:19:37] Simon Scriver: Like when you start with small organizations, they usually have the very best welcome journeys because they’re one-to-one. Mm-hmm. And I think like that’s a really interesting way to approach this is, is you’re trying to like still keep that one-to-one feeling, but you are like, I. Grouping people so that you can just send them the same thing and kind of save that bulk stuff.

[00:19:55] Simon Scriver: You, you talked about community fundraising, I will say to anyone who’s listening or watching this, a reminder that Sarah is curating our, uh, the Fundraising Everywhere Community Fundraising conference, which is happening on the 19th of June. We’ll be unpacking a lot of the community stuff and Sarah will be hosting that herself.

[00:20:11] Simon Scriver: We’ve got some great speakers for that. But Sarah, you drew like a really distinct, clear distinction there with like, um, say for example, your donors. Versus your community fundraisers, the people who are running the marathon for you. I mean, those are two, what seems like two very clearly different welcome journeys.

[00:20:28] Simon Scriver: And when you talk about those transitional journeys, you’re trying to move them different places presumably. So is that the kind of thing that that people watching this should be starting with are, is it those easy distinctions between like. Event fundraisers and your VIPs and stuff, where do, where do they start when they’re, if they’re getting their first audiences together?

[00:20:49] Sarah Goddard: Sure. I’d say yes and no. 

[00:20:53] Simon Scriver: That’s the answer to everything in fundraising, isn’t it? It’s, it depends or yes and no. 

[00:20:59] Sarah Goddard: So. I think the key difference between donors, for example, and your community fundraisers, is that because your community fundraisers are doing something that is gonna be over a bit more of a prolonged period of time, whether it’s a bake sale in two weeks or a marathon in six months, there’s a bit more of a multi-step stewardship journey for the action that they’re doing because you’re gonna be giving them fundraising ideas and training tips and telling ’em thank you, and maybe going along to their event or whatever, whatever it might be.

[00:21:23] Sarah Goddard: So there’s gonna be. Multiple steps in that stewardship for the action that they’re taking. And often then a higher return on investment on that because that person’s gonna raise a thousand pounds in a marathon or 500 from their bake sale for multiple steps, whereas your donor that’s given 20 pounds on your website, um.

[00:21:39] Sarah Goddard: You should hope. Absolutely have a beautiful thank you for them. And it doesn’t just have to be digital. You can pick up the phone, send something offline, et cetera. But there were significantly fewer steps connected to that key action. But actually the thing that look, so that’s where it’s different.

[00:21:53] Sarah Goddard: However, when we then think about what other, then follow on communications once that action is completed. Mm-hmm. So Donor gives 20 quid. Donor gets beautiful. Thank you. Donor. Gets a couple of email, welcome. Journey goes onto an email. Welcome journey. Supporter has signed up to do the marathon. It’s all the gorgeous stewardship.

[00:22:09] Sarah Goddard: Knows more about your charity, but maybe in a very specific way than what does their welcome journey look like. This is where you it. Those journeys don’t have to look drastically different in terms of. Those journeys should share impact, share stories, share different voices within your charity. So don’t have it all come from the director of fundraising or the ceo.

[00:22:30] Sarah Goddard: Have an email. Come from a nurse in your hospice. Have an email come from someone who’s working on the frontline. Have it come from a family member. If you can get, you know, permissions and all that. Good jazz. Have different voices, different content, different ways of talking about why your charity is here.

[00:22:45] Sarah Goddard: Um, woven into that are the opportunities to be involved in other ways, micro actions. Follow us on social media, forward this email, sign this petition. Cheer at the next London Marathon cheer point. Offer the opportunities to be involved and don’t pigeonhole and silo your supporters. These are donors.

[00:23:01] Sarah Goddard: We’re only gonna ask them for money. These are community fundraisers. We’re only gonna ask them to do things. Actually, your community fundraisers may really want to give a regular gift. Your donor might be your next amazing marathon runner. And when charities start siloing and pigeonholing and only talking to them in a certain way, it’s when you are limiting your fundraising.

[00:23:18] Jade Cunnah: Mm. 

[00:23:18] Sarah Goddard: And this is again, where I’d say small charities actually have the superpowers because those silos often don’t already exist. They just are our supporters and that’s what we need to get to, is they are our supporters. And it’s just about offering different opportunities at different times to inspire them and.

[00:23:33] Sarah Goddard: We are never gonna be an expert at making the exact right ask at the exact right time. We’ve just gotta test things and try it out. 

[00:23:38] Simon Scriver: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that’s such an important point about silos. And it’s funny that like those silos are manmade creations. Like they’re not there from the beginning because people are, are donors or are fundraisers.

[00:23:50] Simon Scriver: They are just humans who, who experience different things. And so it always amazes me that we do sometimes really box off. Like we will not ask our fundraisers. For donations and we weren’t, but, but I mean, audiences like that are surely gonna be higher performing than cold, than trying to like get brand new people in who’ve never heard of your organization.

[00:24:10] Jade Cunnah: Always. 

[00:24:11] Simon Scriver: Why do, why do we do it? Is it literally just a departmental thing or is it the fear of scaring off donors again? Like I don’t, 

[00:24:19] Sarah Goddard: where does it come from? It’s a little bit of that fear of like, well, we can’t override. I think there’s, I also be very interested to see the global divide in this, if anyone’s listening from different countries where they maybe don’t have this fear.

[00:24:29] Sarah Goddard: But I definitely see those little, those little Pangolin creatures of being the most British. They’re not British. They live in, I don’t wanna say South America, um, but they just feel like they epitomize sort of British culture. Or Please, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m so sorry to ask. I’m so sorry to. Face if you wouldn’t, you know, this sort of scared approach of, um, not wanting to over ask or overdo things.

[00:24:47] Sarah Goddard: Agile supporters want the opportunity to be involved. 

[00:24:50] Jade Cunnah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:24:50] Sarah Goddard: If we don’t get, and I think my best example of this is there’s a local charity to me who are just beautiful. They do gorgeous, gorgeous work with women who don’t have like. Uh, necessarily the right to remain, leave to remain and under fives.

[00:25:02] Sarah Goddard: And they basically just give these moms and babies a safe place to play a vegetarian meal and access to services from other charities like Shelter or the government or whatever, which they wouldn’t have normally had access to. And for that charity, I’ve done fundraising. I’ve sat on their fundraising committee.

[00:25:15] Sarah Goddard: I go and pick up buggies and deliver them. I talk about ’em on a daily basis, it seems like I would never consider myself a regular donor or a volunteer. I’m just, I support that charity ’cause they’re gorgeous and I think they do great work and that’s what your supporters are thinking. So we need to take these manmade boxes we’ve built around our departments and around our groups of donors and around everything else, and break them down and say.

[00:25:37] Sarah Goddard: Our supporters want the opportunity to be involved. Our supporters want to hear about the impact of their gifts, and our supporters want to be thanked. This is a model that I use a lot, that I’ve talked about, which is the three dials of stewardship, which bits you dial up or dial down. The gratitude, the impact, and the opportunity to be involved in other ways, and that’s the bit that we miss off.

[00:25:55] Sarah Goddard: And we just need to put this British Pangolin fear to one side because as long as we’re asking politely and with reason, and actually it’s not about asking, it’s about giving the opportunity. 

[00:26:07] Alex Aggidis: Then our 

[00:26:07] Sarah Goddard: supporters will take up those opportunities when it works for them. When it doesn’t work for them, it’ll be a no thanks, but very, very rarely will your supporters be offended that you dared ask.

[00:26:14] Sarah Goddard: And if they did well. Okay. What would you like us to do? Not right to you anymore. Okay. No problem. Mr. Jones, thank you again for your support in the past. Like, 

[00:26:22] Simon Scriver: it’s funny, and I mean, don’t get me started on the Brits, but like in in the example like the organization that you are passionate about. It’s like you, you sound really passionate about it, but I imagine you’re not thinking about it 24 7.

[00:26:34] Simon Scriver: You know? And I imagine you don’t know every single thing that’s going on in there and every single thing they need. So like you said, it’s like opportunity. Sometimes it’s just like putting the opportunity in front of people and then it may be fits or it may doesn’t, but it’s, I. There’s, there’s a, there’s a reason to, to make these put time into these journeys and these communications isn’t there?

[00:26:53] Sarah Goddard: Yeah, absolutely. And that, that charity, they’re a small charity, a limited resource. I helped ’em set up their email list many years ago, and I haven’t had emails from ’em in a long time. I dunno if I’ve been taken off the list, if it’s been a spam issue, if they maybe just didn’t have the resource to keep sending those emails, whatever it might be.

[00:27:07] Sarah Goddard: And every now and again, I go. I need to drop them an email and ask them about that and see if I can help. Yeah. When I’m a fundraising consultant, I do that 24 7 and I love that charity and I don’t always remember to drop ’em that email. If they sent an email out to previous volunteers and went, can anyone help us sort out our email list, I’d be like, oh, amazing.

[00:27:22] Sarah Goddard: Brilliant. Yes, of course I can. No worries. Like that’s 

[00:27:25] Simon Scriver: fine. Yeah. Um, uh, we we’re coming towards the end, but this, this concept you have of transitionary journeys, like, it’s really interesting and we got, we actually got an email to, to, um, fundraising everywhere the other day, and it was asking about people’s likelihood to move from one audience to the other and things like that.

[00:27:42] Simon Scriver: Do you have any, I mean fundraisers fundraiser sarah.com is um, is the website, fundraiser sarah.com Do get on Sarah’s mail list and do follow Sarah on LinkedIn, ’cause Sarah shares some really great tips. But in terms of that, that transitionary, so I’m trying to catch myself on saying it transitionary. Um, any, any other big highlights from that?

[00:28:01] Simon Scriver: Obviously people are gonna come to the community fundraising conference, learn loads about all this stuff, but any other like, jump out things in that transitionary in, in terms of these journeys and how we get people to do more than they originally signed up for. What’s your thoughts? 

[00:28:14] Sarah Goddard: Yeah, it’s again, just get it in place.

[00:28:17] Sarah Goddard: I often ask when I do this session at conferences and things like that, I say, who has beautiful stewardship for your community? Fundraisers, events, fundraisers, et cetera. And how many of them then fall off a cliff at the end of that journey, only to be sent the Christmas appeal, the newsletter every six months later and everyone sort of sheepishly puts their hand up.

[00:28:32] Sarah Goddard: I’m like, how many of them fall off the cliff and never get. Anything again until the next year’s marathon or whatever, and the, the rest of the room’s hands sheepishly go up and I’m like, just get something in place. So again, that three to five email journey that takes your supporters from you did the marathon, you’re epic, you’re amazing.

[00:28:47] Sarah Goddard: You smashed it. You’re so awesome. Here are some other areas of our charity we may not have talked about over the last six 

[00:28:52] Jade Cunnah: months. 

[00:28:52] Sarah Goddard: Here’s someone else’s voice. Here’s other ways you can be involved. That doesn’t mean to send them a list of absolutely everything, but again, give them some micro actions and in your final communication, it’s, we’re gonna stay in touch.

[00:29:03] Sarah Goddard: You’ll get regular emails from us, monthly emails, whatever it is, and we’ll also let you know about other ways you can get involved because we know you care. Bring it back to them and their motivations. We know you care about reason your charity exists because you raised 2,500 pounds running the marathon for a few epic thing you.

[00:29:18] Sarah Goddard: So we’re gonna stay in touch and let you know about other ways you can help. Make change here. So just bring it back to those motivations and support and get something in place so that the communications don’t drop off a cliff after six months of gorgeous stewardship to only be sent something again a year later.

[00:29:32] Sarah Goddard: ’cause then they won’t respond. But if you keep the communication consistent and keep those little asks or opportunities more to say, woven in there, people be more likely to take up those opportunities because they know they exist in the first place. 

[00:29:45] Simon Scriver: You make, you make it sound so logical. And I think that, that there’s a truth to that.

[00:29:48] Simon Scriver: It’s like some of this stuff we are, it is quite. It’s not obvious, but when you sit down and think of it as a, as a supporter, like if I was doing the marathon and I raised this, what would I want to hear? What’s the logical thing when we put time aside to think it through? It kind of, it kind of does all make sense.

[00:30:05] Simon Scriver: It’s just. What, what is it? I feel like it’s maybe when we’re looking at spreadsheets and data, it’s like, it’s hard to forget about the individuals that are going through, but 

[00:30:13] Sarah Goddard: we like to overcomplicate things. I think we like to think it’s, that’s that sort of chimp paradox, isn’t it? We like to think where these highly intellectual, academic data-driven beings that must make all decisions in this very intellectual way, blah, blah, blah.

[00:30:27] Sarah Goddard: Oh yes. Oh yes. Um, yeah. We want to overcomplicate things and actually. Take it back to basics, take it back to human-centric people-focused basics of good, clear communication of storytelling, of honest, authentic gratitude. And you can always build out from there. You can always add in lovely, complicated, wizzy, clever things, but just take it back to basics.

[00:30:50] Sarah Goddard: Do the basics brilliantly and the rest will follow. That’s my general mantra on it. 

[00:30:55] Simon Scriver: I think that’s great and I think it, it, it’s like you said earlier, it’s almost emulating those that first, those first days of a charity when you’re really small. And it’s your first donor or your first supporter, it’s like.

[00:31:06] Simon Scriver: Naturally the journey is perfect. You know, and it’s like, how can we, how can we bring that in? Sarah, it’s been so great chatting to you and, and, and I always love, um, getting your thoughts on this. I will say to everyone, um, find fundraiser, uh, fundraiser, sarah@fundraisersarah.com. Uh, fundraiser sarah.com is the website and there’s some great resources on there.

[00:31:25] Simon Scriver: And Sarah, you’re great on LinkedIn. I would highly recommend people follow you, uh, on LinkedIn. Sarah Godard. Where, where are you spending most of your times these days online to get your knowledge and, and things like that. You’re going to uh, going in a lot on LinkedIn into the group. Yeah, 

[00:31:39] Sarah Goddard: LinkedIn and Instagram.

[00:31:40] Sarah Goddard: I’ve been having a lot of fun with like reels and trending things and being a bit silly. I’m a performing arts kid at heart. That’s where I started like, 

[00:31:46] Jade Cunnah: oh my God, anything 

[00:31:48] Sarah Goddard: gets to me. Having a bit of a laugh, being a bit silly, but balancing that with actually genuine, like helpful tips and things like that as well.

[00:31:54] Sarah Goddard: So yeah, Instagram, LinkedIn, that’s where to come find me fundraiser there on both. Um. And yes, always feel free to send me messages, tell me what you wanna hear more of as well. So always helpful to know what people actually want to know about. 

[00:32:05] Simon Scriver: So Amazing. Yeah, I’d second that. And Sarah’s stuff is great, entertaining and useful, but do reach out to her.

[00:32:10] Simon Scriver: And Sarah Reminder, um, for everyone that Sarah is curating our community fundraising conference, so the Fundraising Everywhere Community Fundraising conference is happening on the 19th of June. How’s it looking, Sarah? I haven’t looked at, I haven’t looked at the program, I’ll be honest, in a few weeks, but it’s so 

[00:32:25] Sarah Goddard: exciting.

[00:32:26] Sarah Goddard: There are so many brilliant speakers and from such a wide range of charities as well. So there’s gonna be so many practical tips for big, small, medium charities. Um, there’s a couple of fab people, Redco, Smoss, and Mon Send. They’re both drawing on marketing expertise. So again, bringing this world of community marketing together.

[00:32:41] Sarah Goddard: Together. Um, we’ve got a fabulous panel of speakers who have built their careers starting out in community fundraising and are now doing epic leadership roles across the sector. They’re gonna be hugely inspiring to hear from, um, and way more. Go to the website, go and check out all the speakers and buy your ticket because you’re gonna wanna be there ’cause it’s going to be 

[00:32:58] Simon Scriver: epic.

[00:32:59] Simon Scriver: Amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I’m really looking forward to this and people are getting excited about it. So do check it out@fundraisingeverwhere.com. You can find all of our events, but we’ve also got a link here. Uh, whether you are watching this or listening back to it, you’ll find we’ll find a link in the description.

[00:33:13] Simon Scriver: So join us all at the Community fundraising conference on 19th of June. Uh, and you will have, uh, the recordings available to watch back if you can’t join us live. Sarah, thank you so much for your time. It’s been so lovely chatting to you. Um, but I’m gonna say goodbye to you and, and say to you, I hope you enjoy the rest.

[00:33:28] Simon Scriver: To your day, but thank you for your time. 

[00:33:30] Sarah Goddard: Thank you Simon. Thank you. It’s always fab talking fundraising with you too. 

[00:33:33] Simon Scriver: Good. I love it. And thank you all for listening or thank you for watching live. Uh, we will see you, uh, we’ll, we have our supporter Experience conference coming up first. Um, but then next month the Community Fundraising Conference.

[00:33:44] Simon Scriver: You will see both Sarah and I. Thank you for listening. Uh, thank you for watching. Thank you for being part of the Fundraising Everywhere community and we’ll see you again soon. Take care. All. 

[00:33:54] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend?

[00:34:01] Alex Aggidis: And if you would like to give us a little ly or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time.

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This transcript was created using AI. If you spot any mistakes, please reach out. Thank you!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:01:00] Jamila Daley: Um, so welcome. My name is Jamila, um, and oh, just said it. But welcome to Mastering Out of Donor Engagement. This is about captivating our donors through strategic touchpoints and creating those lasting connections that we need in order to continue to engage them and for them to, um, really, really just love us and what we do.

[00:01:26] Jamila Daley: Okay. Now let’s see if I can, okay. This is easy. Oh. This is very small. I apologize. I’ve just downloaded, um, everything into PowerPoint and it seems to have taken things a little bit smaller. But basically what I am, um, wanting you to do is pop your name in the chat, your charity name in the chat if you can, um, your charity type and your location.

[00:01:53] Jamila Daley: And feel free throughout this to be popping. Uh, questions in the chat box, um, throughout this, so that hopefully at the end I’ll have enough time to answer some of your questions. Okay. So let’s see if the next slide is any better. Okay, so that is super. So what we’re gonna be covering today is the importance of donor engagement.

[00:02:17] Jamila Daley: Not only that. The, uh, key touch points in your donor engagement journey? Um, well, it’s getting smaller and smaller. The simple, um, simple donor communication strategies that I have for you. Uh oh wow. Smaller again, storytelling for emotional connection. And implementation of effective stewardship and recognition strategies.

[00:02:43] Jamila Daley: Uh, I think guys what I’m gonna do though is so that everybody has this, the slides for them is I’m gonna send, um, through to the team a version of the slides that are ever slightly readable. ’cause the font is significantly bigger on the version I have. Okay. Apologies for that. So just a little bit about me.

[00:03:01] Jamila Daley: So, um, I’m not gonna go this far back, but this is me about two or three. Um, and yeah, my name’s Jamila Jamila Daly, and I’m the, um, founder of a consultancy, a fundraising consultancy called Tab People. Now, I’ve included a Christmas tree and the check because my earliest memory. Memory of charity, of fundraising, of giving was sitting at my mother’s feet at Christmas while she wrote out checks to her, um, her chosen charities that she, you know, I guess back in the day they sent out a lot more, um, donor.

[00:03:40] Jamila Daley: Engagement to, well, we didn’t have GDPR, so lots of more, um, what you call it, cold mail. Um, but she keeps on that. She liked and she’d write out checks and I just remember so vividly sitting and watching her do that and thinking it was an amazing thing, not really knowing what charity was. Um, and yeah, that was, I guess, the beginning of my journey into fundraising and charity.

[00:04:04] Jamila Daley: Um, I just didn’t know at.

[00:04:09] Jamila Daley: Okay, so for us, the importance of donor engagement, I’m just gonna leap straight in. Um, your engagement of your donors is, oh my gosh, it’s the cornerstone of your strategy. Um, and. What can I say? It’s about building strong relationships. It’s about engaging, it’s about building loyalty. It’s about, um, them investing in us and us investing in them.

[00:04:41] Jamila Daley: Um, and it is crucial. It is absolutely crucial. Um, the reasons for this are. Increased donor retention. So engaged donors are more likely to give us more money, um, remain, uh, committed, um, and foster that strong connection. When I, uh, one of the things I think a lot of organizations may be experiencing, especially at this time, um, during post covid, um, cost of living crisis is.

[00:05:13] Jamila Daley: Significant donor attrition or reduction in, um, the amount of, um, donations they’re receiving. Um, but one of the ways we can work, not work against this, but one of the things that we can do to increase this is to engage our donors, really get to know them, really let them get to know us. It will help us stabilize our donor base and our donor income.

[00:05:41] Jamila Daley: Another thing is our giving levels. Um, engaged donors tend over time, especially when asked, and that’s really important, especially when asked. I’ll say that again. Um, increase their giving levels to their charities. Advocacy, now it’s a big word, but really. Engaged. Um, donors advocate for the charities they tell their friends.

[00:06:06] Jamila Daley: Um, one of the charities that I worked with calls it gossiping their mission, their, their donors gossip, their mission. They tell their friends, they tell their families. They, um, tell their colleagues at work. They put it out to the professional networks, which for us, um, in the charity side means that we are reaching new people, we’re expanding our reach.

[00:06:29] Jamila Daley: Attracting new supporters that may be through whatever reason, whatever we’re doing in our marketing, in our outreach, we would never reach anyway, but we’re doing them through our engaged owners. Now, this is part of the same thing, but the UK giving report from this year, 2024. Says that donors tend to, uh, find out about charities that they support through their own experience, um, and, um, via their friends and families.

[00:06:58] Jamila Daley: And what that means is, um, hospices that have, um, had family members, um, that go through the, have massive amounts of donor loyalty, um, occurring in their.

[00:07:15] Jamila Daley: What’s the word I’m looking for? Like in their donor backgrounds? Um, in the donor database. I, I, I hate using that phrase, but they have them in their ecosystem. They’re part of their family. Okay. So.

[00:07:32] Jamila Daley: Lastly, it’s that lasting impact. It’s that final gift. Engaged donors are the ones who are more likely to leave a gift in their will for you, which is, yes, it’s the last gift they’re ever gonna give you. It’s probably gonna be the most significant. Um. That you, um, have, I’m sorry, I keep on getting distracted by the chat.

[00:07:56] Jamila Daley: I keep on seeing things moving, so I keep on looking to see if there’s a question. Um, but I think Tash is on that. So, um, I will leave that to Tash. Okay. Um, but what I really wanna just really drive home is how engagement, that donor engagement really plays a vital role in fostering that long-term support and loyalty that we need to survive.

[00:08:21] Jamila Daley: Um, and I’ve seen it in so many places, whether I, I, I did hear, um. Tail end of the last panel that Thankathon. Um, I’ve been experiencing quite a few of those recently and also talking to people about thanking quite a lot. And that is just such a powerful, actually powerful two-way, um, way of thanking and engaging, um, your donors.

[00:08:47] Jamila Daley: Um, I actually hear a lot more from the members of staff who just loved how it made them feel. Being able to thank somebody and doing over the phone and hearing that smile across the. Just amazing. Okay, so. One other thing we wanna do when we’re engaging our donors is communicate about what our donors, our audiences, care about, not just our own internal agenda.

[00:09:13] Jamila Daley: Um, we’ve all seen these examples where people are telling us, um. You know, what they’ve done, uh, how they’ve, um, the new photocopier they’ve got and how the donations have helped, you know, ease whatever it is administratively in the background. That’s all well and good, but is that really what our donors wanna hear about or do they wanna hear about what, um, has happened for their beneficiaries or in the initiatives that the organization has Now, this is really whistle stop, so I hope you’re taking notes, although I guess you’re recording this, so there’s opportunities to go back.

[00:09:48] Jamila Daley: So some of those donor touchpoints include, actually, let’s go back. What is a donor touchpoint? I don’t want to teach anybody to, um, things that they already know, but I feel like just in case there are a few people out there, um, that don’t know what a donor touchpoint is. It’s basically an opportunity, a connection between you and I.

[00:10:10] Jamila Daley: Me the charity, you, the donor, um, it’s, um, an opportunity for me to share information or an opportunity for you to share information. Um, so, and with your donor, that that information would be how much they wanna give you, what their name is, their email address, where they live. Um, for us, it’d be our campaigns, what we stand for, our mission, our vision, um, how much money we need to keep this going so that.

[00:10:38] Jamila Daley: We can help them, our donors achieve what they wanna achieve or see us achieve. And donor touchpoint can occur at any point in our donor journey. So from the time they first hear about us to their first donation, to through their second donation, we hope, um, through, um, to their. Oh, what do you call it?

[00:11:01] Jamila Daley: Becoming maybe a long term or regular donor or making a significant gift? Not necessarily that last time gift. Um, so as I said, it can occur at any point during donation, so before, during a donation or after a donation. And it can be, um, for example, information, our website, information on our social media via our newsletter.

[00:11:25] Jamila Daley: Um. If we have a print adverts or if we do posts, um, if any of our members of staff are lucky enough to be featured in media, um, mainstream media, those all don’t have touchpoints. And they’re important because they can influence people’s perceptions of your charity. Um, you have charities who have that.

[00:11:53] Jamila Daley: Look of being bootstrapped. Um, as in they always look like they’re quite small. And I’m trying to think of one that I’ve worked with recently, quite small. And, um, maybe just about to grow, but not quite there. Um, and that may not, that’s just perception. That may not be their reality. Um, I’ve worked with organizations that have got great, uh, branding and, um.

[00:12:19] Jamila Daley: Like comms because maybe that’s where their CEO or significant part of the team is working with, um, or coming from. But they’re actually a small charity. There’s two or three people in need. It’s just, it’s part of their skillset. Um, and I. So I’ve mentioned website as part of one of your, um, touchpoint. I think I’ve mentioned, um, your campaign as a touchpoint.

[00:12:43] Jamila Daley: Um, actually any donors advocating for you is a touchpoint. Um, any, anywhere that they see your name or make a connection to you is a touchpoint. Asking them for a donation that’s a touch point. Okay. So we can. Specifically with our touch points, we can motivate donors to make initial donations. So, um, I was recently working with, um, a small organization and they’ve never made, um, an ask before.

[00:13:21] Jamila Daley: Um, they have several projects. They had over 6,000 people on their, um, email and subscription list. Regularly, they had their own forum, so regularly engaging in their own form, but they never asked them for money before. Um, and so that, that, that was a touch point. Like we, we put together something that would, we could make an ask from, but we’d also done a lot of work as an organization to let them know what, what the need was, why they should get involved, why they should be interested, which motivated them.

[00:13:57] Jamila Daley: Motivated them to then make that initial donation. Off their first campaign. It was a beautiful site. It, I’m gonna be honest, everybody in the team was very, very nervous because they hadn’t done it before. Now, um, we can also try some of those touch points. Also, encourage, um. Those repeat donations, which really and truly as, um, somebody that’s a specialist in individual giving, that’s what I want.

[00:14:29] Jamila Daley: I, I, I would rather have somebody giving me 25 pounds a month, month in months out for a couple of years, ideally than somebody giving me a hundred pounds and me having to try to find, um, but being encouraged to give repeat donations. Um. So, um, maybe it’s how we ask. So on our donation form where we have the one-off gift tab or the, um, regular giving tab, and maybe they have different amounts so people can have a look.

[00:15:03] Jamila Daley: Um, maybe we also would talk about, um, or featured donors who want, who give us regularly and what that’s meant. It’s another way of banking those donors, but it’s also a way of letting other donors know that it’s an option for them. Um, let’s see. No, did it hit? Yeah. Okay. So, um, one of the things we also wanna do in, in our touch points is enhance our donor experience.

[00:15:32] Jamila Daley: So a lot of donation forms stop at things like just asking, um, for the name. Email address, address, maybe a contact telephone number, um, the amount they want to donate. Obviously the donation details, but other, there are other bits of information that we can gather to help us enhance their donor experience.

[00:15:56] Jamila Daley: So, for example, we could be asking, you know, like, do they prefer, actually, it’s pretty much a standard now, but asking if, um, people wanna receive information by email or by post or, um. SMS or WhatsApp. I’ve seen, I’m seeing WhatsApp groups, um, more regularly are being set up. So business WhatsApp groups, so basically where you can send out information, um, but that it’s not like a channel that everybody engaged in.

[00:16:26] Jamila Daley: It can chat. Probably just be admin so they can send out information and make sure that they’re, um, it’s, well, it’s a bit like a newsletter where everyone, we can make sure everyone’s receiving the information that we need them to receive. Um, and it’s also about just understanding through that their preferences, their needs so that we can improve their stewardship and enhance their donor experience.

[00:16:56] Jamila Daley: Um, I’ve personally found that, um, I’ve worked with. Uh, a group where they needed to do a bit of capital work. It was a, it a, it was a small piece of capital work. It was worth about 21,000 pounds. And they put up pictures and let everybody know about the scaffolding and why the scaffolding was up. ’cause it was a building that needed the work.

[00:17:22] Jamila Daley: Um, and

[00:17:26] Jamila Daley: three days, yeah, three days later, they received the check. So the person broke the check almost as, as soon as they received the email. Um, when we checked on our database, the, um, donor was a regular donor, but not a significant amount. Not somebody that we could think would be able to just turn up and sign a check and hand in a check within 24 hours.

[00:17:53] Jamila Daley: So again, you know, these touch points help us understand. Enhance our relationship with them so that when we make an ask or when we don’t have an ask, they are listening. They are ready to respond when we make an ask, if that’s what we’re doing, they’re ready to get involved. Okay. So I wanted to keep this quite simple because we do have only a little bit of time.

[00:18:26] Jamila Daley: Today. Well, you know, I could talk all day, but we only have a little bit of time. So a simple donor communication strategy for you all. Okay, so I hope you’ve heard this before, but I’m gonna say it again. Personalized engagement. Now I would describe personalized as making sure you’re using the person’s name.

[00:18:46] Jamila Daley: If they, um, donated to a campaign. You are, um. The name of that campaign you are mentioning how much they gave and actually how much, how thankful you’re, um, if there are already some outlines of what the outputs are, what you think the impact is, letting them know again, what those things are. It’s not about, um, and it can be automated, but still feel personalized.

[00:19:16] Jamila Daley: Um, it’s not about a bespoke letter that talks, um, um, about, um, how they came or everything you know about them and how they’ve come to support your charity. It’s, it’s just a little bit of information that makes it feel like they’re seen. They’re heard that they’re known to you, that you love them, um, and I would hope you would love them ’cause they’re their donors.

[00:19:38] Jamila Daley: So you are their, your lifeblood. It’s also about transparent reporting. So I’ve experienced in this, in a lot of areas, in a lot of charities where. They don’t say anything to anybody. So they ask you for money and then you don’t hear anything back until maybe their annual report, maybe their impact report.

[00:19:59] Jamila Daley: There’s no, like if I, if a, say for example, you’re an international charity and you’ve asked for money to build toilets, um, or a series of toilets, uh, in another country. I would say that, you know, you’d report each time a toilet’s been completed or started, you’d report back to your donor saying, we started the build, we finished the build.

[00:20:24] Jamila Daley: You know, like transparent reporting. We wanna make sure that people are informed about the progress, the outcomes of the initiatives, not just something just at the end, little and often. Um, this transparency helps us build trust and reassures our donors that their, their contributions are. Part are making a tangible difference.

[00:20:46] Jamila Daley: Um, yeah. Okay.

[00:20:53] Jamila Daley: Okay. So I love this one. Um, and I earned and odd about using the word exclusive, but recognition and attentive. And the reason I’ve used the word exclusive is ’cause I’m. For our long term, um, donors. Now, I’m not caveating that to, um, the size of donation because I have worked with an organization where a lady was giving, I think a month, um, but she did so for 30 years.

[00:21:22] Jamila Daley: So actually the lifetime value of her donation was, um, wow. Oh, I overrun a bit. Lifetime donation was about 30,000. Wasn’t as much as um, you know, others, but it was good. Okay. Feedback loops. Okay, so I love this feedback loop. So it is, we wanna understand their donor of motivations, but we wanna understand their concerns and expectations.

[00:21:54] Jamila Daley: So to do that, we ask, we thank, we report, we repeat. I would add in that, in that virtuous cycle, when we’re ask, you know, before we report or repeat, we ask them what they thought. So ask thank report, repeat, and then ask them a little bit more. Ask for some money, thank report, repeat, so on, so forth. Okay.

[00:22:21] Jamila Daley: Okay, so, oops, we’ve skipped a slide there, but. Storytelling, that emotional connection. We wanna interview people. We don’t want surveys, we don’t want, um, what should we call ’em? Uh, like fill in a form. We wanna interview them, find out what their stories are, because when we’re writing it, somebody else is not gonna get that emotional connection unless we can put it on the page.

[00:22:49] Jamila Daley: We wanna use simple language and short sentences. It’s an amazing fact. But in the uk, the National Reading Age is 10 years, so people aren’t stupid, not by any means, but if they need a dictionary to understand what you’re talking about, what your website says, what your campaign says, they’re not gonna engage with you.

[00:23:06] Jamila Daley: They’re not going to, uh. What’s the word? Give, use vivid stories and sensory descriptions to transport your donors and supporters into the situation so they can understand it. They can close their eyes and see it. Okay. Incorporate things that are relatable and resonate with your donor experiences and mission.

[00:23:28] Jamila Daley: Now this can be quite intangible, but I remember, um, a couple of stories. I can’t go into details ’cause you it’s personal stories, but I remember the fact that they kept on referring to the blue big pen being held in the hand and I couldn’t understand why they kept on referring to it and they explained because.

[00:23:45] Jamila Daley: With the story. There were lots of intangibles, lots of things that weren’t relatable, but one thing they, they, everybody had always used and kind of understood was this blue big pen. So it was something really small and minded, but I could relate, I could understand what that was. It was strange. It was interesting, it was fun.

[00:24:03] Jamila Daley: Um, and infuse emotion, highlighting the impact and the significance that they’ve had on your course. I’ve said this before and I wanted to include it. It’s not a written a mistake. Communicate about your audiences, what your audiences care about, not just what your your agenda is. Okay, so last part. I’m almost there.

[00:24:31] Jamila Daley: So these are some of the simple things I think you need to do. So promptly acknowledge and thank your donors for their donation, no matter the size. So if it’s email, if it’s a letter, you can decide what that thank and acknowledgement looks like, depending on size or what you do as an organization. But that thanking it goes a long way.

[00:24:57] Jamila Daley: Like I’ve said before, share the impact and the updates that illustrate how their donations are making a difference. Donors wanna see tangible results. Oh, I like the, so I’ve just seen the scrolling pop the questions in the chat. Oops. Yeah, please do. Um, recognize donor milestones. So annual milestones. So when that 12 gift for your regular, um, donor comes in, so that 12 once a month, that’s a year.

[00:25:24] Jamila Daley: Celebrate it, send ’em an email. I don’t know. Send ’em a postcard saying that they’re one year. You can think of other things. 10 years, um, when they’ve, um, donated a thousand pounds or 5,000 pounds. That’s, that’s a milestone. Recognize it. Celebrate it. Offer exclusive opportunities for deeper engagement. I love opportunities for volunteer roles.

[00:25:46] Jamila Daley: Now, not every organization can do that, but it’s a great way to do that. Another one is virtual events, where they get to sit around like a round table with the CEO and find out a bit more, ask questions. They get to feel engaged. They get to see seen. They get to invest in you, and you get to hear what they think.

[00:26:05] Jamila Daley: Okay? Constantly communicate and cultivate. So it can be little things like just letting, like I said, little updates. Um, especially during periods where you are not asking them for a donation, where you’re not asking them for no money. Like I said, stewardship builds don, you know, builds trust, builds loyalty over time.

[00:26:26] Jamila Daley: Okay, so these are my top tips. Keep track of what you want to achieve. Get your leaders and your colleagues to buy in, especially as they can make or break your donor engagement strategy. Get your, um, tailor your key messages to your different donor groups. There is nothing worse than re sending an email to somebody that knows 10,000 pounds, asking them to consider doing, doing a, uh, like a 10 pounds a month donation.

[00:26:50] Jamila Daley: That’s not the right message. Share your impact and show how they are making a difference. And if you doubt and if you, um, if you doubt, thank, thank, and then thank again. I’m gonna skip this one, but I’m gonna include it in the slides ’cause I think I wanna get to the questions. So any questions? Um, looks like there has a question.

[00:27:16] Natasha Evans: Yes. We’ve got some questions in the chat. Would you like me to read them out for you? 

[00:27:23] Jamila Daley: Yes, please. 

[00:27:23] Natasha Evans: Because I 

[00:27:23] Jamila Daley: can’t see 

[00:27:24] Natasha Evans: them. No problem at all. Um, so there’s one interesting one, which I’ve, I’ve heard this debate before, so I’m really keen to get your thoughts on it. Does celebrating donor milestones cause the donor to drop off?

[00:27:38] Natasha Evans: There is some evidence to suggest that it can 

[00:27:42] Jamila Daley: Yes and no. So for example, if you haven’t been doing anything to engage them and they’ve completely forgotten that they even donate, then yeah, they might think, oh, why am I giving them money? But if they’ve known that they’re being donated, you know, they’ve been donated to, you’ve engaged ’em, they’ve told you, you told them so many different ways of how they have made a difference.

[00:28:04] Jamila Daley: Mm-hmm. Then that actually gonna. Make a difference and keep the market going. And then maybe the next communication I may have is, would you like to increase your donation by 10% this year? You know, or something like that. But yeah, it’s two sides of a different kind. But there is, it is based on, I think, what we’ve done with them, not necessarily the, the milestone itself.

[00:28:25] Natasha Evans: That’s brilliant. I absolutely love that. I am going to rewatch this and take note for note. So if that question comes up again for me, I can literally, you’ve got,

[00:28:42] Natasha Evans: I was trying to leave enough time for questions. Well, I think we probably have time for maybe one more. Um, so there’s a question, which is when you mentioned the personalized gift acknowledgement. Is this only in the thank you after the gift or the journey to follow? 

[00:29:01] Multiple Speakers: Ooh, I like 

[00:29:02] Jamila Daley: that one. 

[00:29:03] Natasha Evans: So 

[00:29:04] Jamila Daley: personally, I owe no.

[00:29:07] Jamila Daley: Okay. I would say after the gift, because then if somebody thinks, oh, why they spending money on thanking me? Well, you’ve just given us money and we wanna make sure you feel special. But if they come down the line and say, Ooh. You know, like, I don’t know, six months later, we sent ’em a thank you gift. They’d be like, why are they spending money on this?

[00:29:28] Jamila Daley: I haven’t given them any money recently. Mm. Like, are they, do they have that much money? But, and it doesn’t have to be like, it can be digital. It can be, um, yeah, it can be digital. It doesn’t have to be a physical product, especially with the cost of postage these days. Um, it, it can be something like that.

[00:29:52] Jamila Daley: I cards. 

[00:29:54] Natasha Evans: Uh, yeah, me too. I actually got one myself. I loved it. Yeah, 

[00:29:58] Multiple Speakers: I have as well. I watched times. I was so disappointed when the working. 

[00:30:04] Natasha Evans: You expired too much. You pressed it too much. Watched it back. 

[00:30:08] Multiple Speakers: Yeah. 

[00:30:09] Natasha Evans: Oh, brilliant. Yeah, so shout out for.

[00:30:15] Jamila Daley: Platform. Absolute. 

[00:30:17] Multiple Speakers: Get any affiliates on this? 

[00:30:20] Natasha Evans: Um, is there time for one more question? I think let’s go for it because I really wanna, um, read out another one. Um, so thank you so much for this. It has been super interesting to hear from you about this. I have a quick question. This is from Lucy about how you would determine when having non donation related touchpoint in a stewardship journey that this is classed as marketing slash cross-selling.

[00:30:46] Natasha Evans: So I’ll take, I’ll give you a moment to digest the question. Okay. You can see that on your screen. 

[00:30:52] Jamila Daley: So I wouldn’t non donation related. So. It is not as a fundraiser. It’s not that I think everything is donation related, although I feel like I am very money motivated as a fundraiser. But I do think that everything, if we look at what business does, everything they do helps us to get to a sale.

[00:31:19] Multiple Speakers: Even if 

[00:31:20] Jamila Daley: it’s not like, buy my product, buy my product, buy my product, it’s like my product is better than this product. It’s, you get this, um, it’s, it’s, it’s the VIP of this or this person is wearing it. Or you know, like, so some of that’s social selling. There’s lots of things that aren’t necessarily asking you for a donation, but they are gearing you up so that when that ask comes it.

[00:31:47] Jamila Daley: You are more likely to make the donation. I hope, Lucy, that I’ve answered your question, but that’s how I’ve understood it. You can tell.

[00:31:59] Natasha Evans: Rather than having the asking for, asking for money, saying thank you, asking for money, saying thank you, you are peppering that experience with those almost like buffer moments to build up that loyalty, that trust, that commitment again, so that when you do make the ask, they’re like, yeah, of course.

[00:32:24] Jamila Daley: They’re gonna tell their friends, they’re gonna follow it. It on you’ll, you’ll find out about people you didn’t even know about. Like I’ve said, like I’ve had that before where they said, oh yeah, I’ve worked with an organization where they’re based in Essex, in a small mm-hmm. Area, Essex. And their like, their work is there.

[00:32:42] Jamila Daley: They don’t do any other work. The donation came in from Canada because they knew somebody who knew somebody who volunteered, who had a child that. And they knew we had a campaign like I would never have, like our campaign would never have reached them without us building up that loyalty, having those touch points and somebody saying, oh.

[00:33:04] Jamila Daley: Um, thankfully we also had a donation platform that accepted Canadian dots. 

[00:33:08] Natasha Evans: Hey, you’re ready and waiting to accept the donations. I love it. Yeah. 

[00:33:18] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend? And if you would like to give us a little ly or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us.

[00:33:30] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much. See you next time.

*************
This transcript was created using AI. If you spot any mistakes, please reach out. Thank you!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:00:59] Simon Scriver: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another special episode of the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. My name is Simon Scriver. I am one of the co-founders of Fundraising Everywhere and delighted to be your host again today. Uh, and I have a super special guest there. I know I say that every, every episode. Um, but we are very excited because it’s birthday season.

[00:01:18] Simon Scriver: It is just giving’s 25th birthday, and you know how much we love just giving. So what we have done, if we, we have the wonderful Pascale Harvie, the president and general manager, just giving onto the podcast. I’m Pascale, you’ve been very good to make some time for us. You must be very busy. How are you? 

[00:01:36] Pascale Harvie: Uh, thanks for having me Simon.

[00:01:38] Pascale Harvie: It’s a pleasure. I’m good. I’m very excited as well. I’m excited to share the, some of the research that we’ve been doing and just overall, I think the team’s just really proud of what we’ve been able to achieve. 

[00:01:50] Simon Scriver: It’s been incredible and it’s been, I mean, just giving has become part of the lexicon, isn’t it?

[00:01:57] Simon Scriver: Like it’s a household name in turn. I mean, it’s almost a verb. And, and, and what you’ve achieved over the last five years, 25 years have been so impressive. But before we, before we get into it, I do want to, I have a little, a little virtual birthday cake for you, Pascale, and it’s not AI generated. I have respected the creative commons.

[00:02:16] Simon Scriver: This is, uh, this is a rightly attributed birthday cake to you, so I wanna say happy birthday, Pascale. 

[00:02:21] Pascale Harvie: Oh, I’m impressed. Thank you. Is that getting delivered to my front door, Simon? Because it, 

[00:02:25] Simon Scriver: well, I, I actually have, I have an extra special one for you. ’cause when I was looking for this, I found this weird cake.

[00:02:31] Simon Scriver: And I dunno what you, I dunno, if you know what this is. It’s a lace, it’s a lace monitor cake, birthday cake. Do you know what a lace monitor is? It’s, it’s from your neck of the woods. 

[00:02:41] Pascale Harvie: Um, you can have that one if you like. They’ll stick with the other one. 

[00:02:45] Simon Scriver: I thought that would make you feel at home. It’s a, it’s an eastern Australian, uh, and native lizard.

[00:02:50] Simon Scriver: Um, but, but Pascale, tell me, tell me a little bit about your history. How are you involved with just giving and, and what, maybe just a little bit about your journey to this point. 

[00:03:00] Pascale Harvie: Yeah. I have been, um, fortunate enough to be involved with just giving probably over the last five years. And prior to that, I, as you can tell from my accent.

[00:03:12] Pascale Harvie: Have come across from Australia. I was running a very similar business called Everyday Hero, uh, in the peer-to-peer space, uh, with the startup of Everyday Hero and working alongside of that and part of Blackboard for many years. And then with the acquisition of Just Giving came across to help steward and work along the wonderful team at Just Giving.

[00:03:35] Pascale Harvie: Prior to that, I actually worked in the not-for-profit world. I was fortunate enough, I worked with Oxfam. Corporate fundraising and then for a smaller organization called Child Wise, which looks after child sexual abuse and exploitation across Australia and Southeast Asia. Um, and I learn a lot in that journey.

[00:03:55] Pascale Harvie: Um, and I’m, I mean, look, I love the, I love the sector. I love the fact that we all turn up every day to help make the world a better place. And, um, it’s hopefully it’s what drives me and it’s what drives the team across just giving as well. And you, 

[00:04:12] Simon Scriver: and you’ve got such a wonderful team. I’m not just saying this, but our, my team or the fundraiser and every team are always raving about, um, how easy it is to deal with you and just the passion behind it.

[00:04:22] Simon Scriver: And, and from when I’ve seen you speak, I’ve, I’ve sensed that passion and, um, and the fact that you’re an, you’re an ex, well not an ex fundraiser, but you’re, you’re a fundraiser. Do you know, we wouldn’t let you on the podcast if you weren’t a fundraiser. So you, you’ve earned your, so, so, so 25 years is, yeah.

[00:04:41] Simon Scriver: I mean, it’s, it is kind of incredible because it’s, that’s before I started my career as a fundraiser. It’s before Facebook. It’s before YouTube. It’s before it’s. It’s kind of mad, isn’t it? Like, I mean, how were people sharing, sharing, just giving pages before Facebook? Do you know? Like were we, were we spelling it out for people and writing it on a piece of paper?

[00:05:03] Simon Scriver: It’s hard to picture. 

[00:05:05] Pascale Harvie: No, you know, 25 years ago, actually, when you think about it, is not that long ago. It was the start of 2000 and we did have phones. We might not have had a Apple iPhones, but we did have phones and we did have the com, the internet. I think overall, you know, like we are incredibly proud to have been supporting fundraisers and helping people raise money close to their heart, raising over 7 billion for charities and causes during the last 25 years.

[00:05:32] Pascale Harvie: And to sort of mark that amazing, the, the amazing people, the amazing fundraisers that we see every day. And we’ve seen over the years, we launched a report, which explores the last sort of 25 years of giving. As well as delving into giving today and predictions about the future of fundraising, uh, and what that could potentially look like, because as you said, it’s a, it’s fascinating when you look back over the last 25 years and you look at where we are today to wonder what that’s gonna look like in another 25 years.

[00:06:03] Simon Scriver: And, and the rapport you’ve released that, um, kind of reflects on the 25 years. And, and as always, just given a very transparent about kind of sharing. Data, information and, and really learnings. You know, I, I remember gonna conferences, uh, more than a decade ago, listening to just givings learnings shared, and, and you bring that back to the office to, to implement.

[00:06:24] Simon Scriver: So I’m really curious. But beyond that, huge 7 billion pounds raised figure. What are, what are the other, the kind of things that stood out for you in the report? What were the other kind of highlights that you were taking around to people you, yeah. 

[00:06:38] Pascale Harvie: I think, you know, overall, and I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone, but the UK has a really strong culture of generosity.

[00:06:46] Pascale Harvie: So over 82% of people said that they’ve done something charitable in the last year that could be volunteering, donating could be fundraising. It’s a, it’s a large amount when you think about it, and 35% of people plan to fundraise again this year. So I think for me it was just reminding of, you know, it was a good reminder for all of us that in general people are charitable and there is a really strong culture of generosity.

[00:07:15] Pascale Harvie: However, really surprising to me was that we found overall Gen Z in particular have a strong sense of responsibility to give back with. And you know, over a quarter of them said that they wanted to make a world, the world a better place. What’s really interesting in that is their, our fundraising or out donating fundraising, um, people of my generation, the elder generation.

[00:07:41] Pascale Harvie: Um, and by actually double, they are raising or donating, which is incredible. And they’re also influenced by celebrities, influencers, which I guess is, um, something that we should expect. And even politicians, interestingly, um, Christiana Ronaldo came out as, um, one of the celebrities that people who had inspired people the most to do good in the uk, followed by Sir David Attenborough, which perhaps won’t come a surprise to many.

[00:08:11] Pascale Harvie: I also think probably the younger generation, they potentially, to your earlier point, may be giving more because they’ve grown up in a world where online fundraising is the norm. They’ve used technology from the start, and that makes it easy for them to donate in just a few clicks or to set up a page in just a few clicks.

[00:08:31] Simon Scriver: Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s been, it’s really interesting and, and I can hear you, your dog is chipping in with some key points there because I’ve probably about animal charities ’cause you haven’t highlighted that often, I think. Um, but, but that, that Gen Z point is, is really interesting. ’cause people like me who are aging rapidly, you know, many people kind of struggle to understand what’s happening a little bit with Gen Z.

[00:08:56] Simon Scriver: You know, even, even being online all the time. It’s moving very quick and it’s hard to keep up. How, how just giving, keep up with that multi-generation who are behaving very differently and the way technology is moving, how do you begin to even approach staying on top of it? 

[00:09:12] Pascale Harvie: Yeah, it’s um, it’s an interesting 

[00:09:15] Pascale Harvie: one.

[00:09:15] Pascale Harvie: I think we last year might have, I’ve lost track of time, but we, we released our first sort of integration of ai. Which was really about helping fundraisers write a personal story for their page, which we know helps people connect and understand their story better, which often leads to more donations. So the integration and making sure that you are looking around the corner as to what come, what’s coming and what and what technology we’ve got to help people on their journey, um, is really important.

[00:09:50] Pascale Harvie: Cryptocurrency. I tell you what, on top, the cryptocurrency is a huge opportunity for donation growth. Last year on the JG platform, we made it possible for people to donate via cryptocurrency. And two weeks ago we had our biggest donation ever of 75,000 that came through one go in cryptocurrency. 

[00:10:13] Simon Scriver: Wow. I 

[00:10:14] Pascale Harvie: know.

[00:10:15] Simon Scriver: And what, and, and I mean, you probably can’t. Or don’t know the story behind it, do you? No. Something, something’s happening out there, isn’t it? 

[00:10:22] Pascale Harvie: Yes. Absolutely. 

[00:10:26] Simon Scriver: Um, well, we’ll, we’ll get on, I, I’ll get onto the future a little bit ’cause I’m gonna get ask you to look into your crystal ball. But looking back over those past years as well, like I almost on a personal level, Pascale, what is, what stood out for you?

[00:10:39] Simon Scriver: What do you, what do you, if we did that? This is your Lifebook. Of just giving, what would be the big guests that came out, or the big moments that were highlighted? 

[00:10:49] Pascale Harvie: Yeah. You know, there are so many standout moments. The, yeah, I mean, I’m sure you remember the ice bucket challenge in 24, um, that really marked the start of viral fundraising campaigns and challenges.

[00:11:04] Pascale Harvie: So I think over 6 million pounds was raised for m and d related charities on just giving. Then obviously in 2020 when the world went a little bit crazy and we saw the world virtually come together amid Covid hyphen 19. Um, I think just looking purely at the NHS charities, I mean over 96 million pounds was raised for the N-H-N-H-S charities on just giving, and that doesn’t even count some of the, you know, the viral campaigns that were happening and people walking around their backyards.

[00:11:39] Pascale Harvie: Um. In the 2.6 challenge. There was just so many different virtual events that came together over that time. Actually feels like a lifetime ago, but at the same time, it feels like yesterday. 

[00:11:52] Simon Scriver: It do. Uh, do you know what, ’cause I mean, I’ll have to check the tape, but I think you said the ice bucket challenge was in 2024.

[00:11:59] Pascale Harvie: 2014. 

[00:12:00] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think we’re think, oh, sorry. 

[00:12:02] Pascale Harvie: I didn’t mean to say that. 20. No, I, I think 2014, I think it’s 

[00:12:06] Simon Scriver: funny because it was like, I was like, yeah, that was only a few years ago, but it’s like, oh, no way. That is like, well over 10 years ago now. 

[00:12:13] Pascale Harvie: Yeah. 2014. Apologies, Simon. 

[00:12:15] Simon Scriver: But it, it’s been a, it’s been amazing.

[00:12:17] Simon Scriver: ’cause yeah, those things that you kind of forget about those, like big culture moments around Covid back garden, walking around. Um, um, do you know the. Just giving has have almost been a little bit of a constant throughout that. Do you know like that almost under, not, I don’t wanna say under the radar ’cause you guys are very much there, but it’s like you’re, the infrastructure that was there ready when those things kicked off, you know, it wasn’t built for that, it was just already there and part of our lives.

[00:12:47] Simon Scriver: And I think that’s like something to be especially proud of. Do you know that it’s not a forced thing, but you are just peppered throughout all these incredible waves and moments. 

[00:12:57] Pascale Harvie: Yeah. Well thanks for that, Simon. I think, as I said at the start, you know, like we are really privileged that we’re a part of that every day, and we’re really proud that we support those fundraisers, the charities, et cetera, to help people raise money for things that are close to their heart.

[00:13:16] Simon Scriver: Well, on a, on a person, I, you probably hate the personal questions, but on a personal question, like what, what stuck out for you in terms of either fundraising. Donating, you know, what is it that moves you? Because obviously we can look at the data 

[00:13:29] Pascale Harvie: Yeah. 

[00:13:30] Simon Scriver: And not, but all within that, there’s just all these millions of individual stories.

[00:13:34] Simon Scriver: I’m curious for you, do you, is there anything you remember where you really were pushed to give or take part in? 

[00:13:40] Pascale Harvie: You know, I can look at that in a couple of ways in answering it. I think there are so many inspirational people that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. Um, and we do feel incredibly lucky to witness this day in, day out.

[00:13:54] Pascale Harvie: Um. I’m going to mention a couple of fundraisers I think that have really stood out for me, um, over the last five years of being involved with just giving. Um, one of them is the heartwarming story of a hundred year old Margaret. So Margaret got poor eyesight and bad hands, and on her a hundredth birthday, she made over a hundred jars of marmalade, um, to raise funds for the Nightingale Cancer Support Center.

[00:14:22] Pascale Harvie: When we spoke to her, she had her son-in-law there who was helping her with her page and the internet and everything, but she, for her, she wanted to raise the money for the Nightingale Cancer Support Center and she made these a hundred jar of mom laid to sell. And you know, it’s just a really nice reminder for us that.

[00:14:44] Pascale Harvie: It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s just that act of doing something that helps, you know, it brings you part of the community. It makes you feel good. She was so proud of a hundred as she should be, jars of marmalade and what she’d managed to achieve considering her poor health and bad hands and all the rest of it.

[00:15:02] Pascale Harvie: And then you’ve got little kids like Frankie McMillan, who at just the age of just seven, he became the youngest Britain ever to summit to the highest point of man Olympus. Whilst raising thousands of pounds for charities and inspiring so many other kids to get outdoors and do healthy, amazing things that they love.

[00:15:19] Pascale Harvie: And then you’ve got people like Lloyd Martin. I mean, he’s on a mission to show the world the people with Down Syndrome can do anything that they set their mind to. And he set the Guinness World Record as the youngest person with Down Syndrome to complete a full marathon at the age of 19. Uh, I mean, he’s incredible, but I think.

[00:15:39] Pascale Harvie: You know, for me, one of the people that continues to inspire me is Adele Roberts. I mean, she’s an inspiration. She’s, as most of you would know, has bowel cancer. She’s a bowel cancer survivor, living with a stoma that she has nicknamed Audrey, and like Be’s whole story is just incredible. You know, she’s been fundraising for years now, and she’s even secured the Guinness World Record as the fastest person to run a marathon with a colostomy bag.

[00:16:06] Pascale Harvie: Her current fundraising challenge sees her running the world by taking on the big six marathons across the globe, and she’ll finish it at the London Marathon this month. I mean, it’s just incredible. 

[00:16:19] Simon Scriver: It, it is amazing. And it’s, it’s like, what’s that quote where, you know, in times of trouble you look for the helpers.

[00:16:27] Simon Scriver: Do you know? Yeah. You don’t, you don’t look for this problem. You look for the helper and it’s like when you browse, just giving, yeah. It’s wild, you know, it’s just, you know, you’ve, what, what was the number you had in your report? It was 13 million fundraising efforts, like 13 million people, and then each of those people surrounded and that, that effect and it’s just so wonderful.

[00:16:46] Simon Scriver: And one of the things I, I do love about just giving and, and is, is that you cheer lead. Do you know, you highlight these stories, you talk about them. You’re not, you know, you’re not talk, always talking about the platform, you’re not talking about the features. You’re not talking about the star. You’re always cheerleading and, and I’ve been really privileged to go to the Just Giving awards where you do that in spades, like, and where it, it is just been so, so incredible.

[00:17:10] Simon Scriver: Um, so I, I do, anyone who’s listening to this, I do recommend looking at this 25 year report. This we will link so that you can, uh, uh, um, read it and download it. Because again, you’ve pulled out these stories and you’ve highlighted it. I mean, that, that’s clearly a conscious approach. Is it Pascale from just giving, I mean, you are always talking about.

[00:17:29] Simon Scriver: Fundraisers and the, and the, and the causes and the impact and that in inspiration that that must be a conscious decision. 

[00:17:36] Pascale Harvie: It is, but it is about celebrating those people because that’s what I mean, and I, I don’t say it lightly when I say that we are so privileged to deal with these individuals on a day-to-day basis.

[00:17:49] Pascale Harvie: Grant that inspiration? Yes. It’s about the platform. Yes, it’s about the technology. Yes. It’s about being compliant and secure. And I can bore you, Simon, with what that looks like and how much, how hard we have to work to ensure that we are a secure, reliable platform that I know, uh, can trust that you or myself, whoever, to use it as a tool to give that it’s secure, safe, all of those things, and it’s leading with technology and helping the charities.

[00:18:17] Pascale Harvie: Um, to raise as much as they possibly can to fulfill their missions. But fundamentally, it comes down to these incredible individuals who do amazing things and the fundraising teams that enable these individuals to do really incredible things. It’s, um, yeah, so I see, yes, it probably is a conscious thought, but it, it truly is what we focus on as a business.

[00:18:40] Pascale Harvie: They’re amazing individuals that do incredible things and helping those charities. To support those individuals or to go further with their virtual events. 

[00:18:50] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I think, I think that I, your, your dog is just, uh, a chip in there with an agreement. No, no. We, we need a chorus of dogs cheering on after every, every time we make a good point.

[00:19:02] Simon Scriver: Um, but you, you said something there, which I do wanna highlight, you know, about the, the charity teams and the fundraising team who are, who are managing this, you know, who are that kind of bridge between the, cause the platform. Fundraisers, you know, they’re, they’re in the middle there and they work so hard and they’re, you know, so many people are having such a tough time at the moment in terms of everything that’s going on.

[00:19:22] Simon Scriver: Yeah. So it, it’s great. You know, I find just giving a, always very supporting of their charity clients and, and I’ve said it to so many people for like, just pick up the phones just giving. ’cause it’s like, it’s just advice, you know? It’s almost like an advice line and a helpline. So on that note. I would love to come back to that crystal ball and, and think about, you know, what our learnings are over these last 25 years and what’s, what’s important for the fundraisers and the charities who are listening to this.

[00:19:49] Simon Scriver: You must talk to a lot of charities every day, every day, and, and hear their woes and struggles at the moment. Pascale, what do you think is, is important right now for the fundraisers who are listening? What do you think is, is, is ahead of them over the next, um, months and years? 

[00:20:06] Pascale Harvie: You know, it’s really interesting because the traditional fundraising, like bake sales, um, continue to feature, as does marathon cycling and walking events, and the viral moments like your ice bucket challenges.

[00:20:21] Pascale Harvie: So we, along with those sort of traditional activities, we are seeing gaming events becoming so much more popular with Gen Z. Also the trend of people taking on extreme challenges like ultra marathons, iron Mans and Skydiving. I think the, um, the second year, so 2001, uh, there was like 14 people that were fundraising for extreme challenges and last year there was tens of thousands of fundraisers.

[00:20:49] Pascale Harvie: I think things like the gaming is really interesting and again, I will say that one thing has remained constant and that is. To your earlier point, even in difficult times, people’s unwavering dedication to supporting causes that they care deeply about and their incredible capacity for kindness and generosity.

[00:21:09] Pascale Harvie: Um, and it does continue to inspire and it should continue to inspire and amaze us as fundraisers working for charities. It should continue to inspire amaze every day. I think from a charity point of view, when we researched the charity, 65% of those charities said that they feel positive. About their prospects with 94% of those charities saying that they’re on track to meet their fundraising targets, which is a really good thing.

[00:21:34] Pascale Harvie: Mm. 

[00:21:35] Pascale Harvie: But the interesting part was that only 5% believed that those aged 18 to 24, the Gen Zs have the biggest potential for donation growth. With over half the charities focused on those 35 plus to help drive donation growth. This obviously contradicts what the consumers have told us in our research. It also contradicts what I probably would’ve said to you prior to the research being taken.

[00:21:58] Pascale Harvie: So I think we should take a moment to think about it. I think they also say things like that they like the transparency, they like to know where their funds are going. So it’s important that we start to understand what they’re looking for and how we can show up in that area and also show up through different types of events potentially.

[00:22:18] Pascale Harvie: Um. I think the other finding was that 45% said the biggest opportunities for charities to boost donations was through further integrations of things like ai. Um, and again, I think it’s really important to make sure that you’re keeping up with technology called that’s the right word, trends. Um, because it’s expected, especially by those Gen Zs.

[00:22:42] Pascale Harvie: They are, they’re the ones that are gonna hold us all accountable to make sure that we’re up and, um. Ahead of the curve, basically with technologies make their lives as easy as possible. So yeah, I think there’s some really interesting things, but I think the age of the, um, of the fundraisers and the donors came as a real surprise.

[00:23:04] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I think that’s something definitely not to be sniffed at. And it obviously goes hand in hand with the technical, technical, I’m struggling as well, technological change. So, no, I think, I think that’s a really important and, and as we come towards this end, you know, I, I. I dread to ask you this, but we have to, it’s almost like fixed in every, in every interview now it’s ai.

[00:23:24] Simon Scriver: It’s what, what do you think, what, what do you have on in the path for ai? What do you think is in the pipeline? What should we be doing now? What, what’s your overall thoughts on AI and, and this weird place we’re at the moment? 

[00:23:37] Pascale Harvie: Well, I think we need further integration of ai. Um, you know, it’s relatively new.

[00:23:43] Pascale Harvie: We talk about it. We’ve got our on the JG platform, the new AI story enhancer tool. What we know from that is that it does make, it does help people raise more. So by giving people the tools they need to easily build a story in this case on their, um, peer-to-peer fundraising page. We know that that interaction helps them go on to raise more money.

[00:24:07] Pascale Harvie: So if that’s just one small slice of what, thinking about fundraising as a whole. It’s definitely really important to make sure that we are bringing it into our worlds. Um, I don’t think we sh it’s not these sort of tools, even cryptocurrency are not things that we should be scared about. I think these sorts of tools are things that we need to be embracing.

[00:24:27] Pascale Harvie: We need to be bringing in people who specialize in those areas, who understand it. Um, speak to the younger generation. If you don’t have people like that in your teams, understand where they’re thinking, what they’re doing. What that looks like. It makes a big difference. Uh, I just, I don’t think that we can pull the shutters down and continue fundraising like we always have.

[00:24:52] Pascale Harvie: We just need to embrace things like ai, which will not only make our lives easier, it will help us raise more funds. 

[00:25:01] Simon Scriver: That makes sense. And I, I think, I mean, like, I think I, and a lot of fundraisers look to just give him for that. Learning sometimes because you have access to so much, um, you know, so many different clients, so many different fundraisers, so many different pages.

[00:25:15] Simon Scriver: You have that kind of benchmark data, um, to see what is working. So I mean, I will be watching with the close eye how you guys start to use AI more and, and, and how that impacts results. That I think that’ll be super, super interesting. Super. Yeah. 

[00:25:28] Pascale Harvie: We look forward to sharing it. Simon. 

[00:25:30] Simon Scriver: Aw, you’re so generous with the.

[00:25:33] Simon Scriver: I love it. Um, but I will remind everyone again, just, uh, anyone who’s listening to this, please do. Um, look at the t what, what just giving a published for their 25th anniversary, uh, 25th birthday, sorry. Uh, it’s very, very interesting insights in there and as always, very generous. Um, and if you’re not on the just giving list, mailing list as a fundraiser, I feel like that’s an essential that you should be on that.

[00:25:53] Simon Scriver: Pascale, for you, what’s, what’s your personal goals as we start to wrap up? What’s your personal goals for the next six to 12 months? Where do you see yourself? 

[00:26:01] Pascale Harvie: Where do I see myself? You know, really honestly, if I look at it from a six to 12 month focus, I, we, there’s so much more that we wanna be doing from a just giving lens.

[00:26:13] Pascale Harvie: Um, we wanna make sure that we are embracing the technology side of it. We’re looking at the North American market as well, and also the learnings from there as to what we can bring back to the UK world. Um, so I think it’s as simple as saying that we. Literally, uh, my plans and the plans of the, the team that sits across just giving is to help make 2025 even better for the charity partners that we have, um, and that we work with and to, um, to enable the technology that we’ve talked about and be thinking around the corner so that we can, you know, bring that back to the not-for-profit world to help them continue to be as successful as they can be.

[00:26:56] Simon Scriver: I love it. I love it. And, and I, I mean to say thank you again because honestly, the impact just giving has had, you know, it’s peppered throughout my fundraising career. Every client I’ve ever worked with, every charity I’ve ever stepped in, you know, just giving us that, you know, it’s part of it. And the support we’ve got from your team and the support from just giving around our digital learning grant and the support you give to our community in delivering conferences.

[00:27:19] Simon Scriver: It, it really. It really is one of those suppliers where like, I’m proud to really work with them because it’s like, you live your values. Do you know, it’s not just like corporate spiel. It’s like every single person we deal with in your team has just been so wonderful and just so supportive. So honestly, happy, happy birthday and thank you so much.

[00:27:38] Simon Scriver: Thank you for, for everything you 

[00:27:39] Pascale Harvie: tam and thank you for your kind words around the team. You’re only as good as the people around you. Yes, Simon. And, and there is a incredibly fabulous team that’s across just giving, so thank you. And we love working with fundraising everywhere. By the way. We love working with yourself and Nikki and the team, and Cam and everyone doing amazing things.

[00:27:59] Pascale Harvie: So the feeling is mutual. 

[00:28:01] Simon Scriver: That’s great. I appreciate that. I, it’s, it’s so lovely team and we do have such a wonderful team. I mean, it’s not me, I mean, me and you, we just sit around and chat and take our dogs for a walk and stuff like that. It’s just the rest of the team 

[00:28:11] Pascale Harvie: try to keep the dog quiet.

[00:28:13] Pascale Harvie: Apologies again 

[00:28:14] Simon Scriver: for that. It’s No, I, I love it. I, I, I’m so obsessed with these little cute dogs at the moment. I’m, I’m desperate to get a little sausage dog, but, um, we can’t that for a different podcast. We’ll talk about that. Simon, 

[00:28:27] Pascale Harvie: thank 

[00:28:28] Simon Scriver: you so much for your time. Thank you everyone for listening. Again, please do check out, um, the report and everything published by Just Giving, and, and my name has been Simon Scriver.

[00:28:35] Simon Scriver: I am the co-founder of Fundraising Everywhere. Please do reach out to us if we can help with anything. Um, but otherwise, thank you all for listening. I. Great to be here. Great to still be here and have a good day. Take care. 

[00:28:47] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend?

[00:28:55] Alex Aggidis: And if you would like to give us a little like of Scribe, it really helps more fundraisers that you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time.

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This transcript was created using AI. If you spot any mistakes, please reach out. Thank you!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:00:59] Simon Scriver: I love the, I love the brick work. It always means,

[00:01:01] Amy-Jane Meerman: yeah, it’s, uh, it’s real brick as well. Yeah. Oh,

[00:01:04] Simon Scriver: oh, fancy. You must, you must be very well, it’s very

[00:01:06] Amy-Jane Meerman: fancy. Yeah.

[00:01:08] Simon Scriver: Alright, well let’s kick us off. Hello everyone and welcome to the fundraising of our podcast. Uh, whether you are watching this back, uh, somewhere on social or you’re listening to us on, on, uh, our podcast.

[00:01:19] Simon Scriver: You are very welcome. My name is Simon Scriver. I’m one of the co-founders of Fundraising everywhere. Um, and this month we’ve been talking a lot about face-to-face and we’ve been talking a lot about telephone fundraising. Um, and a while ago I was fortunate enough to see, uh, my guest today speak, uh, at a previous conference, well, at a conference that I was speaking at where we were shouting about, uh, how great telephone fundraising is.

[00:01:40] Simon Scriver: And you don’t often see that. Um, and so we are very, very happy to have our speaker, uh, um, Amy Jane Mimon, who’s coming to speak to us at the conference. That’s happened on April 24th. We have our telephone fundraising conference, which is happening on April 24th. Um, so you can get tickets for that or you can watch it back on demand.

[00:02:00] Simon Scriver: Um, but let me go ahead and welcome our guest. Hello, Amy Jane, how are you?

[00:02:05] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’m fine. Um, busy week, but, uh, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Yeah.

[00:02:12] Simon Scriver: Well, well call centers are never quiet, are they? And then you have to bounce, you have to balance it. So I’m so grateful that you’ve made the time for us.

[00:02:19] Simon Scriver: Um, because you, you are a big telephone person, aren’t you? I mean, what you, you work at the crew, uh, you manage the call center. Could you tell us a little bit about your role and what the crew do?

[00:02:29] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Um, so I talk, I will talk a little bit. So, uh, we are in Belgium. Uh, I’m Dutch, so, uh, sometimes I have to search a little bit for my words in English, but it will be fine.

[00:02:41] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, yeah, about me. Um, I. 10 years ago, I, um, I did a, a job interview for being an agent at the crew. Uh, the first week I thought, oh my gosh, this is horrible. I wanna go, I wanna go. I wanna go. Um, uh, because you have to talk to people the whole day. Uh, you go home with, uh, pain in your ears, uh, and, uh, 10 years later I’m still there.

[00:03:07] Amy-Jane Meerman: So, um. It, it already shows my passion, I think. Um,

[00:03:12] Simon Scriver: I’m always curious how people fall into this. Was this, is this a job? ’cause it’s just like, here’s a job, or were you coming from, um, speaking on the phones? Or what were you doing beforehand, before you found

[00:03:22] Amy-Jane Meerman: No, I, I wanted, uh, I want, I was very artsy, so I wanted to do a, uh, and, uh, patronage and, uh, I, I did a lot of things in, uh, in, in, in the sewing.

[00:03:34] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, so no, it was, it was just. I wanted to work somewhere and this came on my path. And, uh, like I told you, the first week, uh, became 10 years. Yeah. And

[00:03:44] Simon Scriver: this is, this has become your passion instead of creative being Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Really.

[00:03:49] Amy-Jane Meerman: Absolutely. Yeah. I, I have to, uh, to admit as well, if you, if, if I was, when I was little, uh, I wanted to be a superhero.

[00:03:57] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and so it was, okay, um, how can I become this superhero? And, uh, as time goes past, uh, and you get older, then uh, it all gets a little bit limited and, uh, you have to, to see what is really possible. Uh, so at the moment when I stepped in, in the call center, um, I already liked working for the NGOs. Um, and yeah, it, it, it’s a real passion because we are.

[00:04:24] Amy-Jane Meerman: We are, uh, doing lots of good on the world. Yeah. And I can do that from my hometown. So,

[00:04:31] Simon Scriver: and, and, and, and you guys have been doing some amazing work and, and I, I love chat. I love chatting to you and hearing you speak about it, but I’m really interested in how, in, in this kind of management style, ’cause there’s such an interesting thing when people start working in telephone fundraising or, or face-to-face fundraising, that those kind of what are viewed as like almost junior positions of fundraising.

[00:04:52] Simon Scriver: So many people kind of fall into it and, and so many people come out of it again, you know, you do, I mean, I’m not speaking for your call center, but call centers. I’ve worked with, there’s quite a lot of churn in that staff. Um, and you said yourself in that that first week can be hell. I’m, I’m really, I’m really curious.

[00:05:11] Simon Scriver: What kept you going? Then I’d really love to understand like how you bring that into your management now. Like how you get, get your new telephone people to not hate it in that first week and, and push through it. What’s, tell, tell. Start by, start by telling me about you. What, what, why did you stay beyond that first week?

[00:05:30] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, well it’s, it’s like, um. Life, live and, uh, I cannot tell your romantic story. Uh, I was alone, uh, at, uh, at a young age, uh, here in Belgium, married at a young age, and, uh, yeah, then was looking for, for a job. And, uh, and I. This was what I found and actually, uh, going to school and I always was not fitting, uh, I was not fitting in the school system.

[00:05:58] Amy-Jane Meerman: I was never fitting anywhere. Uh, and so I was very happy to, to be able to, to get a job like this. Uh, to be honest, I, I. I didn’t know if I could do it, if I was worried enough. And, um, all, all sorts of things that I have outgrown at this moment, but, uh, was very, very, uh, visible and very, uh, present at this, at that time.

[00:06:18] Amy-Jane Meerman: So it was not a romantic story of, oh, and then I saw the light and I saw how good the work was of NGOs. No, um, it was not that romantic. Um, but, uh, and. If, uh, if I bring my feeling at that first week, uh, back to, to this conversation, um, I see a lot of young people stepping in the call center, um, not knowing what they want to do, uh, dropped out of school, young moms and, uh, people with a lot of potential.

[00:06:49] Amy-Jane Meerman: So I, I want to. Really, uh, highlight that they have a lot of potential, uh, step in with very low self-esteem. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s a little bit of an honor knowing that I came from that situation in now, being able to give chances to people that, uh, start the same way as I did.

[00:07:09] Simon Scriver: That is a beautiful story, like a true telephone fundraiser.

[00:07:12] Simon Scriver: You’ve, you’ve turned it into a, into a really beautiful, because it’s true. I mean, I, I did my days as a, as a cold caller outside of the sector and I’ve worked, you know, and managed telephone fundraising and it, there is a confidence that I found through it, and I have seen what you are talking about where people kind of discover their voice.

[00:07:33] Simon Scriver: A little bit or learn to learn to talk, I think. Yeah. And, and, and there is something about that, that apply that you then bring into every other part of your life. And more and more we’re seeing people who started as telephone fundraising move into heads of fundraising positions or even, even, you know, CEOs and things like that.

[00:07:50] Simon Scriver: Like it is a career path Now, do you, mm-hmm. Where do you see your team and your staff? Is it, do you see them moving into higher fundraising roles? What are the opportunities that you see with, with the people that you work with in that situation?

[00:08:05] Amy-Jane Meerman: I. Well, that’s why I’m really happy you invited me to talk, uh, because they are only going in those higher, or have building up their career into fundraising if we treat them well at the beginning.

[00:08:17] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, I think that’s, uh, that’s a, a very important thing to save. If you put targets on their head and they have to call, call, call, call, call, uh, the, the whole 40 hours that they’re there, uh, they’re not gonna love their job. They’re not gonna love the fundraising. They’re not going to be. Committ it, uh, to, to NGOs and what they’re doing.

[00:08:37] Amy-Jane Meerman: They’re going, they’re going to be your biggest critics because you didn’t treat them well. So, um, I, I think that’s the most important thing for all NGOs doing tailor marketing, if it’s in-house or um, or outhouse. Um, be realistic. You’re not only, um, you’re not only trapping yourself by losing donors, precious donors, but you’re losing high potential in who’s going to be the next fundraiser.

[00:09:06] Simon Scriver: Mm-hmm. Do, do you find like your clients and the NGOs that you work with, do. Is there a pressure sometimes, you know, that kind of, that causes Absolutely. Causes this channel. Like, why, why is this? Yeah. Absolutely not always happening. Yeah.

[00:09:19] Amy-Jane Meerman: I, I absolutely, and, and, um, let me say, they are all so, um, so, uh, so loving of what they do and they want to change the world like I do.

[00:09:29] Amy-Jane Meerman: And, um, but they come in and they say, oh, I had a, I had a board meeting and they told me that the fundraising department has have to fix this. Problem. So they already step in with high expectations and Okay, they are going to fix our problem. No, we’re not. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, we’re not. Uh, we’re going to help you.

[00:09:48] Amy-Jane Meerman: But fundraising takes time.

[00:09:51] Simon Scriver: It’s, it’s that, I mean, you talk so much about it. When I saw you speak that kind of learning and development and investing in our staff and team, what are, what are some of the ways that you, at the crew. I guess, I mean, I, I’d love to talk about the new people especially. Do you know, but, but everyone as a whole, like what, what are, what are the common things that you might do or, or how do you, how do you.

[00:10:12] Simon Scriver: How do you decide where your focus is when you’re trying to keep these people engaged and keep them working for you?

[00:10:18] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, so again, uh, not a romantic story, uh, that I have to tell, but, um, I became, um, manager four years ago. So as I told, I started as an agent, uh, them team coach. Uh, I, I was project leader and um, my formal manager got sick.

[00:10:37] Amy-Jane Meerman: Uh, and it was, it was supposed to be like a tree. Uh, interim, uh, interim, uh, job for me. Uh, it was full vacation. I said, okay, why not? I’m gonna do it. Four years later, I’m still there. But yeah. Uh, again, nice story.

[00:10:56] Simon Scriver: I hope you, I hope they’re not still sick, are they? I hope, I hope it’s No, no, no, no. She’s,

[00:10:59] Amy-Jane Meerman: uh, she’s very well and still working, uh, within the company now, um, with another role she really loves.

[00:11:05] Amy-Jane Meerman: So, uh, that’s, that’s all, uh, sorted out. Um, but. You know, um, we came out of, of difficult times. Corona was not an, an easy time, face-to-face stopped, uh, which means, meant that, uh, we didn’t get a lot of contacts to call. Yeah. Um, so also before that, um, t fundraising was not at all as professional as it’s.

[00:11:28] Amy-Jane Meerman: Should be right now. Uh, I think there’s a big evolution in KPI controlling, uh, measuring and all stuff that did that wasn’t there 10 years ago. Um, in, in my view, um, so. I had to build everything from, from scratch. So having a, a whole team, uh, team coaches, um, making sure that onboarding for agents was, was well, well arranged, um, because indeed it is, uh, uh, it’s busy, it’s call center.

[00:11:59] Amy-Jane Meerman: Come in, sit on your chair and start calling because, uh, every minute has to be profitable. Um. We had to change that. We had to change to, okay. Take a step back. What do you need if you come in a call center? Um, I think the most important thing in my team is that they are part of everything. So it doesn’t work without the, the, the callers.

[00:12:25] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, that’s, that’s the biggest part. If, if they’re not there, then what am I doing? Uh, so if they come in, um, we show them everything about. Us, uh, our way of working, um, making sure that they know, uh, everyone in the company that what is my role? What is the role of the DA data? Where can they go in in the first week if they have questions?

[00:12:48] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, what is the system for, uh, asking, uh, asking, uh, uh, a day off, for example? We are very flexible because I think, uh, it’s needed. Um. Explaining all, uh, all, all the organizations that we work for. Um, and, uh, little by little explaining them, um, how it all works. Um, when I was an agent, I didn’t know how it worked.

[00:13:17] Amy-Jane Meerman: Mm. Uh, I didn’t know what return on investment was and, um, how important, um, it was to, to have conversion and, and calls per hour and, um, and everything that’s behind there. Um, uh, I. Didn’t always feel I was listened to. Um, and not by fault of anyone, but, uh, it’s difficult if you have a lot of people that you have to listen to, to, to really listen.

[00:13:43] Amy-Jane Meerman: Mm. Um. So I think them, uh, being involved in everything we do really makes it a part of, okay, we are a team and we’re doing this together and we’re getting results together. Um, so also micromanagement. That’s not how we do it. Uh, um, and if I talk about how we work. A lot of our projects or clients or new clients, yeah.

[00:14:09] Amy-Jane Meerman: But it’s not a social, uh, we have to have, uh, results. Yes, of course. I’m well aware. Uh, and it’s all possible even if you do it on a, on, on a human, uh, way. So it’s all, yeah, it’s all possible.

[00:14:24] Simon Scriver: I mean, it’s because it’s, it’s a similar conversation that that kind of, we were having when in, in my call center days, and, and I’ve seen lots of clients have, and it’s, it’s really, it’s really strange that.

[00:14:36] Simon Scriver: People don’t see, you know, that we, I, I mean, I include myself in it, that sometimes we overlook that investment in people and time into their training and making them, like you say, understand what’s going on around them. And, and we’ve kind of found ourselves in this, in this strange catch 22 situation where we.

[00:14:56] Simon Scriver: We, we feel like we can’t afford to put time into them, and then we wonder why they keep leaving and keep moving on, but then we don’t change anything. So what, what do you think is the, the future? Like how do you change it? I mean, you can control it and change it in your, your place, but what about the callers or what about the heads of fundraising who are getting it from their board and you know, all this pressure?

[00:15:18] Simon Scriver: How do we on a practical level, start to get people to take this training, this learning and development? How do we get ’em to take it seriously? I.

[00:15:27] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah, it’s, it’s, um, I, I just want to add as well that we are a call center of all kinds of people. Uh, we are very inclusive, and so everyone, uh, is welcome. And, uh, we really look at, at, uh, at what they can do rather than how they look or what their disability is, or, uh, um, so I think that’s a very, very important thing to say, um, because we have a team.

[00:15:50] Amy-Jane Meerman: If, if you accept everyone. Then it becomes a team that’s warm. Um, so I, I always look for, for people that, um, that yeah, that really are, um, that really are, uh, loving, uh, and, and warm and want to work for NGOs. I think that is already the start. So if you. Engage. Uh, if you have, uh, someone coming by that wants to work at our call center, we really already look at does this person fit in our team?

[00:16:22] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and yeah, you know, I don’t want car sellers. Uh, they, they can do leads very well and I’m aware, uh, well aware. Uh, and that’s all a hype now. Yeah. Leads, were gonna do a campaign on new donors and yes, we won it all. I get it. Yeah. Um, but no, uh, that’s not how it works. So. To to, to make it start by just being very realistic in who is in your team as well.

[00:16:49] Amy-Jane Meerman: So that’s the fir that’s really the first step. That’s our responsibility to have a team that, that works well together, that’s in there for the good reasons. Um, and. For, for the organizations. Yeah. You have to be realistic. You cannot get it all. Um, uh, um, I understand that you want, uh, 10 calls at 10, uh, uh, negative, positive calls per hour.

[00:17:14] Amy-Jane Meerman: I get it. Uh, I know that you want the highest conversion rates, and I want, I know that’s, uh, I know that you want return on investment as soon as possible. I, I get it. Um, and, but it’s. It can all be done if you do it very humanely. Um, I, I think sometimes if you look at organizations, they are very harsh for, um, the, the suppliers.

[00:17:39] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, uh, if you look at the agents, they have to be, uh, ongoing every minute of their weekly, uh, weekly planning. Uh, so, um, and if I ask, okay, but the, the 38 hours, if you do 38 hours. Aren’t you getting a coffee? Do, don’t you do a talk with your colleagues? Don’t you do? Yeah. Can you pee? I think. I think you can.

[00:18:02] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, if we don’t treat them as robots and real human Yeah. Uh, then, then, uh, that’s a big, uh, problem solved. Then you have to invest time. Yeah. The, the thing that is, uh, that. That happens sometimes is that, uh, you have a, uh, you have your project and the projects, uh, manager of the NGO, um, and they have a lot of trust in us.

[00:18:26] Amy-Jane Meerman: Mm-hmm. Sometimes it’s a lot of trust, sometimes it’s a lack of trust, but, uh, it’s, it comes down the same thing. Um. They, they think, okay, hey, they have it under control. Uh, I, I, I, I leave it for what it is and I will see the results when, when it’s done. Um, and that’s such a shame because, uh, you have this, uh, really motivated team that wants to, that wants to call for your, for your NGO and wants to get, uh, good results and, um.

[00:18:54] Amy-Jane Meerman: Then engage with them. Come here to, to explain them. What do you do? Give them your passion, uh, and uh, come back to listen to conversation. Have, have good feedback, uh, moments, uh, after that. So I think it’s a partnership that is really important

[00:19:09] Simon Scriver: on, on so many levels there. ’cause you, you mentioned like a kind, a few stages in the chain and I feel like we are losing some of that.

[00:19:16] Simon Scriver: Um, team. Feeling a along the way. So sometimes it’s with like the, the agency managers and their staff, you know, not treating them, but sometimes it’s the NGOs themselves and how they view their suppliers is kind of over there. And then I, I would, I would argue it’s the same with like fundraising departments in an ngo O sometimes the rest on the board and the ceo, they, they view fundraising as something over there.

[00:19:40] Simon Scriver: Yeah. And so, well, I mean, we joked at, at at that, at a conference we both spoke at. We were talking about how. Telephone fundraisers are almost the bottom of the ladder sometimes in terms of how they’re viewed and, but really when you’re talking about results, I mean telephone is performing, isn’t it? I mean it is delivering sometimes way better ROI than some of the accepted channels.

[00:20:01] Amy-Jane Meerman: Exactly. Yeah. I find that

[00:20:03] Simon Scriver: really interesting.

[00:20:04] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, is such a good way to, to keep in touch with your donors. Um, also, and I think, uh, if you talk about all the KPI, uh, stuff, um, we forget about retention. Mm-hmm. Um, and, you know, uh, benchmarking with other call centers and I’ve heard it all.

[00:20:24] Amy-Jane Meerman: It’s okay. You can benchmark, uh, um, no problem for me. Uh, but you know, if, if you really want to benchmark, you have to wait six months and to see. Who of the donors is still there. Um, for example, you have all those methods of how to negotiate and no, and to get it into a yes. And, um, that’s, that’s great. But I called for some years, uh, and I’m so grateful that I had this experience.

[00:20:51] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and this is also what I tell every moment. I can pick up the phone and do some calls. Did you write a script? Then call someone and do your script. And I can assure you that half of your script goes away. Um, but do it yourself. Try to, to see what is possible. Oh, we don’t want calls longer than five minutes.

[00:21:11] Amy-Jane Meerman: Okay? Try to call yourself and then you see that what is really possible, um, that is so important, and okay, if it’s, if it is longer than five minutes, uh, if it’s a great conversations and, and, and the donor is very happy with your cause and, and keeps on giving and maybe. Takes you up in their, in, in their, in their lack.

[00:21:31] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, then it was all worded. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, we also forget. So, uh, yes. Agents, but we also forget that donors are people.

[00:21:40] Simon Scriver: Yeah. You know, and they really open up, they really open up on these calls, don’t they? They get into conversations

[00:21:48] Amy-Jane Meerman: if you do it well. Um, but if I have to, uh, if I have to like do this for all, uh, the demands of, of projects, and again, I get it.

[00:21:58] Amy-Jane Meerman: Everyone is on the pressure and I get it. Um, but I really have to look at, okay, this, I won’t tell the agents and that I will tell the agents because that is relevant. And the other thing, yeah, that’s not under their, their control. Very, very important that I do that because sometimes mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, you, you should not break their mojo.

[00:22:18] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah, yeah. Uh, keep them going like they want to. Uh, like they, they’re going on well. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s so important that we don’t, we don’t go into very commercial. Um, we want results. Uh, donors absolutely sense it and with good reason. Uh, um, you have to have the, the good. Good talks to, to have, uh, donor value for a long, long time.

[00:22:45] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, where I wanted to go to as well. Uh, when I talk about retention, we often don’t get back retention. So we have a return on investment and looks very good and, um, but the retention is so important. Yeah. Uh, to see how the quality of the causes, how your strategy. Is going, uh, um, we sometimes we had, um, um, projects that say, okay, double the amount.

[00:23:11] Amy-Jane Meerman: Uh, so if you do the call for upgrade, then double the amount and first results looked fantastic. Okay? Lots of people doubled it. And, um, but if you looked at, at, uh. There was also a project that sent it emails to, uh, the donors that said no. Mm-hmm. Um, and uh, out of that came a lot of people that were not really happy with that question.

[00:23:33] Amy-Jane Meerman: Mm-hmm. Um, so what happens? Retention goes very bad and then your donor value goes down, but if you don’t look at it

[00:23:39] Simon & Amy-Jane: Yeah.

[00:23:40] Amy-Jane Meerman: Then you think you have done a good job. Yeah. Uh, and, and that’s so important too, if you want to qualitative. Good fundraising. Yeah. Uh, tailor fundraising, then it’s so important to, to, I think retention is one of the most important KPIs.

[00:23:55] Amy-Jane Meerman: And then you have complaints or is, is one of the most important KPIs. Yeah. Um, and, um, and yeah, we have to, to kick take. More care of that.

[00:24:05] Simon Scriver: Yeah. But I, I think the retention point is so important about, because it is so often that that agencies and, and callers themselves never get any feedback about what happens after that call, really.

[00:24:17] Simon Scriver: And so how can we expect to adapt and improve if that’s not happening? So I love the way that you’re leading on this. And I love, I just wanna say, I love what you’re saying about pick up the phone and try it, and then you’ll understand it because I think like,

[00:24:31] Simon & Amy-Jane: yeah.

[00:24:31] Simon Scriver: We have such a fear in the sector. You know, people who work in all levels of fundraising have such a fear of picking up the phone sometimes.

[00:24:36] Simon Scriver: But actually when you do it most of the time, the vast majority of the time, it’s a really positive experience, isn’t it? Yeah. And it’s just like, so, so I love that advice. That’s, that’s gonna be my send off for people is my thing to do. So I want you to tell me, Amy Jane. Before, and then we’ll quickly talk about your session.

[00:24:53] Simon Scriver: If someone’s picking up the phone, now imagine someone watching this or listening to this is picking up their phone. How do you get them fired up? What is your, what is your message to them, uh, as they switch off this podcast and pick up the phone for the first time?

[00:25:07] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Uh, so yes, I want them to call. Uh, so I’m, I’m going to think of something really good.

[00:25:13] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, I, um, I’ve put you, I, yeah, I really, really cherish. I had some great stories and some great conversations that I would never forget in my life. Um, some, yeah, it’s, it’s special. It’s very special if you connect with someone. Um, and, um, what is my advice? So. Especially if you never called and you’re scared and, okay.

[00:25:40] Amy-Jane Meerman: I will tell you a story about, uh, about someone that came in our call center. I use it a lot for the new agents. Um, so there was a, an Indian guy. It’s, it’s to make the image a little bit, uh, visible. Uh, and at that time he could still, uh, look at every website and, uh, he was looking for cars under, under while calling.

[00:26:02] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and um, he said like, this. So Really he said, and he talked about, yeah, madam. You know, how many trees are going, do you know how many trees are lost each year? Um, and I thought it was so funny. Uh, it, it was, it was, there was no, uh, cells, uh, there were, the energy was so, so relaxed.

[00:26:29] Simon & Amy-Jane: Yeah.

[00:26:29] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and at the end of the day, he had, he had like top scores that I couldn’t, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

[00:26:36] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Yeah. As I was sitting next to, uh, next to the lovely guy, uh, and for a week and every day had he had like results that I couldn’t top. And yeah, I, the secret was he was calm. Mm. He didn’t say a lot. He just said what mattered because tree mattered and trees, uh, and people had, okay. Yes. Right. Yeah, they need more money for that.

[00:27:04] Amy-Jane Meerman: I understand. And so you don’t have to, to go into a whole scripting period and, and putting a lot of hours in preparations and no, just, just have a real conversation. Uh, have a real conversation like you, like you would with, uh, a close friend or not close friend. Um, look for me if I’m, uh, next. To someone on the streets, uh, I would begin talking.

[00:27:30] Amy-Jane Meerman: Uh, not everyone has that, uh, gift or curse. Um, so I understand if it’s, it’s scary to do, but just pick up the phone and if you don’t know the answer, you can say that. Mm-hmm. Oh, I don’t know. I come back to you on that, on this because it’s a very interesting questions. Or, or this is my first time calling, so if it’s not really, uh, uh.

[00:27:51] Amy-Jane Meerman: Ex, excuse me, I’m trying my best, um, be as humanly as possible. Uh, it’s okay. This is, this is a, um, this is a sector that you can be, that you’re forgiving, uh, forgiven for making, uh, here and there some, some mistakes and just do it.

[00:28:10] Simon Scriver: Mm. I love that. I lo I think that’s great, but, and humans are so forgiving and humans do love to talk.

[00:28:16] Simon Scriver: I mean, not always authentic, not everyone, but, but shockingly amount, like we fall into these conversations all the time.

[00:28:23] Amy-Jane Meerman: Be authentic. Be yourself and, and you. You can be yourself, um, if, if in every, any, in any sector, this is a sector to be yourself. Uh, so go for it. Yeah.

[00:28:34] Simon Scriver: You remind me. I, I’ll, I’ll just tell this story and then, because no one wants to hear from me, but you remind me.

[00:28:39] Simon Scriver: When I worked in a call center, non NGO years ago, and there was a guy and we were selling on the phone, and he, you know. Some people are so desperate to sell. And when I was new you, you’re so desperate. And this guy who was just such a good salesman and he was so relaxed. And I remember one time he, he, someone wanted to buy from him and he put them on hold and he went to the vending machine and he got a drink and he came back and he opened his drink and then took them off hold.

[00:29:04] Simon Scriver: And he was just like, there was none of that desperation. It was just exactly casual and it just reminded me of your.

[00:29:10] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s really the secret. So if I see people, especially if you get a lot of nos, and so, um, just just be honest. If you call people that, uh, don’t have a structural donation, uh, then maybe out of the hundred 10 will say yes.

[00:29:26] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, so out of the 10, one will say yes. Uh, and so you will hear a lot of nos and it’s okay. A no is good as well. So that’s something that I learned in, in this call center as well. And no is very valuable as well. Uh, uh, have that No, it’s okay. Um, and um, if you look at it that way, then I. Then it’s, it’s, it goes on its own.

[00:29:47] Amy-Jane Meerman: You don’t have to pressure so much. You don’t have to push, uh, so much. And if you have a good, uh, uh, if you have a realistic and, and, and, uh, and good, I wanted to say story. It’s not a story if you have, yeah. You call for an NGO and they really have, uh, something that they need the fund for. People will understand.

[00:30:05] Amy-Jane Meerman: You don’t have to push. Um, again, about the retention, just going back a little bit, um. If it goes about, uh, people that say, I don’t have a budget. And I think this is a very important one. That’s why I, I want to put it in. Um, I don’t have a budget. There are whole methods to go around to this. No. Turning it into a Yes.

[00:30:28] Amy-Jane Meerman: And, um, they are very proud of, uh, also the agent. Oh ha. I, I, yeah. She said yes at the end. Um. We have to, we really have to, uh, look better at ethical how we, how we work. Ethical. You know, I called for a long time and, um, and if you have been poor yourself, my mother, uh, was, uh, was alone with, uh, with us children.

[00:30:51] Amy-Jane Meerman: She was poor. She’s very, very giving. Um, and um, when I was calling a lot of people. Are poor themselves. Mm-hmm. So if you know people that wanna help other people are often people that know how it feels to, to need help. Mm-hmm. Um, so we commercialize it in the sense of yeah. But if they say no, you just have to go around it.

[00:31:13] Amy-Jane Meerman: You have to say that. Yes, I understand it. And, and, uh, um, yes, absolutely. I agree that you have to do some efforts to, to motivate someone to give. So I don’t say no, don’t do it, but there is a line. There is an ethical line that you should not pass. Mm-hmm. Uh, if someone is talking about hardship and you’re still trying to push to get that result in, um, it’s, it’s not kind of ethical.

[00:31:39] Amy-Jane Meerman: And, um, I, I just want to, to return on the retention. If you do it and you’re very proud of yourself because I have done it, um, we see and analyzes that that person doesn’t stay a long time. Mm-hmm. Yes, you have upgraded for five euros, for example. Mm-hmm. Um, but if they only stay three months after that, then you better should have left that person.

[00:32:03] Amy-Jane Meerman: Be the gift that he already had and was comfortable with. Maybe he would have supported another 10 years. But, so I, I think the whole idea of, of, um, of tele fundraising, having to get these results. Continuity. It, it always has to be better and better and better. Mm-hmm. That, that is not okay. Um, I, I think sometimes we lose a little bit of what fundraising and people that are giving for NGOs, what that really means because we’re so under pressure.

[00:32:37] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, and yeah, that’s important.

[00:32:39] Simon Scriver: Yeah. And I thi I think, you know, you said earlier about, about good telephone calls, and I think there is, you know, there’s, there’s this, sometimes there’s this split between either telephone’s great. And you just do as much as possible and sell, sell out, and also telephone’s terrible.

[00:32:55] Simon Scriver: Don’t touch it, don’t do anything. But you, you know, you and your team seem to have found this lovely space and, and you can feel it off you, the empathy mm-hmm. And the warmth. I can imagine that coming through in the calls and Yeah, and then it isn’t a sales call, it’s, it’s presenting this opportunity and if it’s not the right time for them, then that that’s okay.

[00:33:11] Simon Scriver: So I love what, yeah. I love what you, you

[00:33:14] Amy-Jane Meerman: know, the empathy and the warmth comes true and it scares. Uh, it scar projects because okay, she’s soft. Uh, and if I do pitches, um, for, for great NGOs where I really want to work with, um, there, there is a real reluctancy to, uh, to. Not to understand me, but to, to believe me, uh, to, to know that you can have good results by doing it a little bit softer.

[00:33:46] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Um, and, and that’s sometimes a point that I have difficulty with. Like, uh, yeah. But I care about results of course.

[00:33:54] Simon & Amy-Jane: Yeah.

[00:33:55] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, so yeah, that’s a little bit of, of the challenge, uh, that we have in the fundraising, uh, community, I think. Yeah. Um, and yeah, my. What I really, really, really would love, and that’s why I am saying it right now as well, um, to have a universal, uh, way of looking at KPIs.

[00:34:17] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, we have a very, um, we have a very broad, uh, result file with KPIs to exactly see if there’s a problem in the call list or there’s a problem with the agents or there’s another problem. Um, so I, I, I would so much love. To have a universal, uh, result file that we can all use and, and some of a method that we can all use.

[00:34:41] Amy-Jane Meerman: I think if there was. If there was a time to start doing that, it, it’s, it, we are there, we’re there, um, uh, to, to, to do the ethical fundraising and, uh, to care about all people in the sector. Um, it’s, it’s now the time to do so for organizations to share with other organizations what works and what doesn’t work for call centers to share their information.

[00:35:05] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, I think it’s, uh, I, I, I know it’s. Difficult topic, but it’s time to do so. We are under pressure. We have to, we have to work together. Um, so that’s, that’s my message, uh, as well.

[00:35:19] Simon Scriver: I love it. And I think you’re leading by example and I’m so happy that you made the time to speak with us and you’ve been, you know, when I’ve seen you speak, you’ve been so open and, and so generous in what you share.

[00:35:29] Simon Scriver: So I’m really, really grateful for that. Amy Jane, and you are going to be speaking at the Fundraising Everywhere telephone fundraising conference, uh, on the 24th of April. Anyone who’s listening that wants to see, uh, uh, hear more from Amy Jane, uh, and see all of our other great speakers that is on the 24th of April, and tickets are available.

[00:35:46] Simon Scriver: You can check the description. Amy Janey, what are you speaking out about? About the conference.

[00:35:51] Amy-Jane Meerman: Yeah. Uh, so firstly, I just want to say thank you so much for how you organize all of this. You have put a lot of, of work in the before, um, the sessions and, and I think that’s so special. Um, so I just want to thank you for, for the guidance, uh, that you give the speakers.

[00:36:09] Amy-Jane Meerman: I, I, I really want to say that as well. Um, what am I speaking, uh, about? So it, it comes back on the same, I’m a people person. I want. Talk about how, how much I love people and how interesting it is to, to connect with people. Uh, but not only this, I think, um, I I wanted to variate a little bit about, uh, about the topic than I already did, uh, in, in session that we were in together.

[00:36:35] Amy-Jane Meerman: Um, but um, yeah, the, the pitfalls and, uh, and. The, the opposite. So the, the wins that you can get out of working with tech. Um, so AI is a very big topic, you know, it’s great and I love it. It’s my best friend, Che Chit. I love Che Chit. Uh, if I, if I work through the, the, the night and, uh, and up till, uh, one or two o’clock, yeah, let’s hip focus, um, then, uh, then that’s my best friend.

[00:37:06] Amy-Jane Meerman: And, and, you know, uh, you get a polite answer back and it’s great and you want it to, to have ideas for scripting or what to talk about in podcast with Simon, then, then it’s just easy. You ask it, you get it back and um, great. But I have seen so many things go around and, uh, many promises made and, uh, and yeah.

[00:37:28] Amy-Jane Meerman: Of course you have wins, big wins, and you have pitfalls. And, um, I think if you are under pressure, then it’s a very, very difficult path. Uh, and, and you don’t know what to choose. So, um, I’m very passionate to talk about that as well because I’ve seen so much in the last four years.

[00:37:45] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Is a, is AI gonna take a, well, no spoilers, you can tell us.

[00:37:49] Simon Scriver: Yeah, it’s

[00:37:49] Amy-Jane Meerman: a spoiler

[00:37:50] Simon Scriver: take over. Telephone fundraising, I feel like. Yeah,

[00:37:52] Amy-Jane Meerman: yeah, yeah. Then you really have to, to visit the session. Uh, yeah, yeah,

[00:37:55] Simon Scriver: yeah. But Amy Jane has, has the answer, so I’m really, I’m so happy that you’re gonna be presenting and thank you so much,

[00:38:02] Amy-Jane Meerman: Amy

[00:38:02] Simon Scriver: Jyn. For anyone listening or watching, where’s the best place to find you?

[00:38:05] Simon Scriver: Do you hang out on social media or LinkedIn, or how do people get in touch with you? Yeah, yeah,

[00:38:09] Amy-Jane Meerman: yeah. LinkedIn, uh, for now it’s LinkedIn. Um, so there you can find me, uh, our website, of course, uh, the crew, Belgium. Uh, and yeah, thank you so much for asking that as well. Uh, you are all welcome to connect, um, because I have a lot of things to tell.

[00:38:26] Simon Scriver: Brilliant. Well, I’m, I’m so glad I’m here to listen to it. So, yeah.

[00:38:29] Amy-Jane Meerman: Thank

[00:38:30] Simon Scriver: you very much, Amy. Jane. Can,

[00:38:32] Amy-Jane Meerman: can I just share one last thing before you end? Um, okay. So the last thing I want to share with the world, uh, is, uh, what I tell all the agents the first day that they begin. This is the place where you are going to discover that there are more good people than bad.

[00:38:49] Amy-Jane Meerman: Uh, and, and that’s how I want to end this, uh, this session.

[00:38:54] Simon Scriver: I love that, Amy Jane and everyone, it’s such a delight. So, great. Thank you very much. And to all of you listeners, I wanna say thank you so much again for tuning in. Uh, whether you’re watching this, uh, listeners to this on the podcast, watching it back somewhere on LinkedIn, um, or maybe you’re watching it, uh, after the conference even, don’t forget the telephone fundraising conferences happening on the 24th of April, and the link for that is in the description.

[00:39:17] Simon Scriver: My name has been and is Simon Scriber. I am one of the co-founders of Fundraising Everwhere. This has been the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Thank you everyone, and have a good day.

[00:35:26] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend? And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us.

[00:35:39] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much. See you next time.

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