Helping a comms team to embrace and shape its role as fundraisers
Fundraising strategy - Global Care
“David is very easy to work with but at the same time he didn’t pull his punches and I appreciated that. He took time to talk to loads of people across the organisation, not just the Fundraising and Comms team, so he had a good handle on us. I don’t think I’d have had the confidence to act on his recommendations if he hadn’t done that.”
Carolyn Savjani, Head of Fundraising and Communications, Global Care
Background
Global Care works to support children living in extreme poverty, and to break the cycle of poverty through education. Head of Communications, Carolyn Savjani, had been with the charity for 20 years in different roles, the last seven in her current post, but had become frustrated that the charity never seemed to grow. “I felt we had a really good comms strategy, we worked really hard and delivered good results but we couldn’t break the £1m barrier.”
In a small charity meet-up online, Carolyn got talking to Action Planning Associate Consultant Kate Nicholas. “She came back and said, ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything to learn on the comms front but you haven’t got a fundraising strategy.’ It was a lightbulb moment.”
Carolyn saw that the team needed to take “much better ownership” of its fundraising role and embrace the fact that raising awareness isn’t good enough, they needed to raise funds and be bolder about asking. She came to Action Planning for help.
Brief
We were asked to run a fundraising workshop, to develop a clearer understanding of what a fundraising strategy for Global Care should look like. David Saint took the brief.
Process
David interviewed people across the charity to gather their views on the fundraising functions and why they thought the charity wasn’t growing. This helped to clarify the need within the organisation and David delivered a workshop that really challenged Carolyn and her team to change their whole mindset: to recognise the size of charity Global Care is; that all their communications are essentially fundraising; to keep in mind the return on investment and lifetime value; to live up to their name and think beyond their regional confines; and to remember the real reason for their efforts, i.e. to help more children and do more for them, not simply because we want to be a £1m charity.
Outcome
“Taking ownership of our role as fundraisers was perhaps a confidence thing but talking to David about what that looked like and how to get there has really helped our confidence. He forced us to adopt a more fundraising-centred mindset. I never thought of myself as a head of fundraising, but now I’ve changed my job title to Head of Fundraising and Communications.
“I found it challenging as a team leader as well as for the organisation. We felt a little bit overwhelmed by recognising the scale of the changes that we needed to take, but that turned into excitement as we saw the way we needed to go about it. Nobody was resistant. Everybody recognised that if we want the growth that we want to see, doing the same things is a stupid way forward. It needed to change and David was very clear on how it needed to change.
“Within the team we’ve got lots of skills but nobody who is a fundraising specialist, so we’re looking to appoint a fundraising officer, three days a week. We’re also seeking – and David has helped with this as well – a Trustee with fundraising experience. I wanted someone who could mentor and challenge me. We’ve got a solid candidate that we can investigate that with.
“We’re making changes in terms of things we need to focus more on and the things we need to do less of and we’re exploring ways of attracting new supporters, such as through education. All this is a result of focusing on fundraising strategy. We now have a five-year plan on how we’re going to get to over £1m and we really needed it. I didn’t have the confidence to do it.”
Consultant’s insight
This was fun! It was a classic case of the benefit of an external perspective – Carolyn and her team really did have most of the right elements of the picture in place, but the frame was wrong. And coming from the outside I was able to draw them back, out of the picture, and look at the frame. Suddenly the frame became ‘Fundraising’ rather than ‘Awareness raising’, and everything else started to fall into place.
I wouldn’t want to minimise the challenges – that involved a big shift in mindset and culture and priorities. But Carolyn and the team were really up for that, and embraced it. I am thrilled that they have implemented some of the changes really quickly and are ambitious for growth. I am sure they will achieve it.