​We work with many charities and social enterprises who are trying to get new fundraising income streams up and running and/or are tight on unrestricted funds. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that we sometimes get asked if we’d consider working on a commission or performance-related pay basis.

I can see why, at first glance, this might appeal to organisations that have limited cash available to resource fundraising, or feel nervous about committing to expenditure without a guaranteed return. Investing in fundraising often feels like a Catch-22 situation, particularly when you’re prompted to do it because other funding sources have dried up.

However, there are many reasons why payment by commission is actually harmful to you. The simplest answer is that the Institute of Fundraising discourages both fundraisers and charities from taking this approach, however this in itself doesn’t explain the challenges and issues that can arise as a result.

Here’s why we don’t undertake any fundraising work on a commission basis, and why you should think twice about doing so:

In fundraising you inevitably hear ‘no’ more often than ‘yes’, so a fundraiser working on a results basis would have to set a fairly high commission percentage to make it work. Imagine how a funder or donor would feel knowing that the first x% of their donation is going straight into somebody else’s pocket – particularly if they’re donating a large amount, and particularly at a time when there’s so much focus on how donations are used and what percentage is spent on overheads etc. Payment by commission can lead to you excessively rewarding a fundraiser, and is very likely to cost you donations.

Fundraising is already a delicate balancing act between the financial needs of the organisation, the wishes of the donor and any ethical considerations. Now factor in a fundraiser who feels desperate to secure that donation, otherwise they won’t get paid. Sometimes we all have to walk away from potential donations, for example if the donor seems vulnerable and unsure about giving, or if the organisation may be compromised in some way by accepting. Paying a fundraiser on a commission basis makes it less likely they’ll make that difficult decision to say no when you need them to.

Fundraising is a collective effort. When we work with an organisation, we may be responsible for crafting the ask and coordinating the process, but we can’t do it without you: your project information, your impact data and your contacts. If the fundraiser is the only one who loses out if things go wrong, you’re not creating the right conditions for success. When you pay a fundraiser a salary or a day rate, you’re making an investment in fundraising too, so the whole organisation has a vested interest in playing their part.

As per Simon Scriver’s blog, a surprisingly small percentage of a fundraiser’s role involves asking for money. They spend most of their time researching prospects, building relationships, saying thank you, gathering project and impact data, and developing processes: this is essential for successful fundraising, even if it doesn’t always lead to a donation. If a fundraiser only receives commission, they’re not being paid for the vast majority of their hard work. So will they still feel motivated to do those all-important support tasks? If they're pressured into a quick-fire ‘spray and pray’ approach, this has a negative impact on your organisation.

Fundraising is a long game. You might wait 6-12 months to hear back from a trust. A corporate donation or major gift is often years in the making. Several fundraisers may feed into the process (one makes the introduction, one writes the copy, someone else attends the final meeting). So how do you decide who receives what commission, and when? How do you avoid multiple fundraisers ‘competing’ for the same commission? How do you reward a fundraiser who moved on ages ago? And how can a fundraiser plan their income with so much uncertainty?

We work with a broad range of organisations, from start-up social enterprises with a £50,000 turnover to charities running multi-million pound capital appeals. The work involved with a £10,000 application and a £1million ask may actually be similar, yet payment on a commission basis values them completely differently. If a fundraiser is working on both simultaneously, with competing tight deadlines, you can imagine which one will get most of their attention, even if this is sub-conscious.

​So here's the clincher: payment by commission, which at first glance may seem so appealing to you as a smaller organisation, can in reality penalise you and de-value your donations.

​If you’re looking for fundraising support, get in touch with us now and we’ll explain exactly how our day rates and fixed fees work – but don’t expect us to use the word ‘commission’ at any point!

As an organisation, how do you manage risk in your fundraising activities? Do you focus on financial or reputational risk, or both, or other things too? Do you keep going until you’ve eliminated every possible risk from your plans? If so, are your activities still worth doing by the end?

I recently popped along to the Arnolfini for the latest Bristol Fundraising Group talk about risk management in fundraising. The speaker was the excellent Ed Wyatt, an experienced Compliance Manager for multiple big charities and long-time fundraiser and trustee. Ed has kindly given us permission to share some key learning points here…

The problem

Conversations about risk in fundraising can be frustrating and unproductive. It can feel like natural risk-takers and risk-averse people are speaking entirely alien languages, and often the loudest voice in the room wins.

This can have several consequences:

• In their bid to find The Next Big Thing in fundraising, some organisations instead stumble into The Next Big Headache.
• Being too risk-averse can dilute promising fundraising ideas until they’re perfectly safe but no longer appealing or profitable enough to be worth doing.
• In trying to avoid risk, it’s easy to inadvertently take the biggest risk of all – stagnating in a tough fundraising climate, then hitting financial difficulties as your safer income streams dry up.

Reviewing your current fundraising portfolio, and where you might find The Next Big Thing

In his talk, Ed demonstrated a simple way of reviewing your current fundraising portfolio and defining your activities using four categories:

Low risk, high reward activities are the obvious sweet spot to aim for. Most of your fundraising probably falls into this category already but, since everybody else is thinking the same thing, the growth potential or uniqueness of these activities may be limited.

Low risk, low reward activities might've been very easy to get approval for, but they may not be worth the effort. And in the unlikely event that you have any high risk, low reward activities, you should flag these up urgently. In both cases, terminating these activities could be a good way to free up capacity for something else.

That leaves high risk, high reward activities. Scary territory, but if you’re looking for The Next Big Thing in fundraising, you may need to creep beyond your comfort zone into this space.

To do this, first you need to define your organisation’s risk appetite (the blue line above) - the line you're willing to creep up to, but not cross. ‘High risk’ and ‘low risk’ are likely to mean very different things if you work for an international conservation charity with a history of provocative campaigning activities, compared to a local community library.

Your risk appetite should depend on the nature of your mission, your beneficiaries, your financial position and the characteristics of your existing fundraising activities. It’s crucial to avoid being guided by anybody’s personal judgement, even management and trustees – we recently explored this same topic in our blog about ethical fundraising policies.

It’s vital to remember that ‘high risk’ must never mean breaking the law, fundraising regulations, your internal guidelines, your ethical fundraising policy or your gift acceptance policy.

Identifying risks in new fundraising opportunities

Before you decide what level of risk you’re prepared to live with, you need to identify all possible risks associated with your activity or event. Ed suggested using your own ‘risk library’ of common categories that most risks fall into, for example:

This works best as an energetic debate, not a dreaded tick-box exercise for one person alone behind a desk. Try to ask a few different personality types to sit in a room together and discuss - both natural risk-takers and risk-averse people have a key role here. You need to create the right atmosphere and reassure people that there are no right or wrong answers at this stage.

This was illustrated nicely by a group exercise at the end of the talk. Ed asked us all to imagine we were the Fundraising Team at a local animal park, who had been approached by an events company with a new idea: a series of late-night parties at the animal park for 18-30 year olds. This would be a new and potentially lucrative audience for the charity, but hardly risk-free.

My group had five minutes to consider all possible risks, and came up with the following:

As you can probably guess, this was a light-hearted attempt at risk assessment. But Ed said that humour is a useful tool in real-life scenarios too. ‘Eaten by a bear’ might have been a joke, but it helps to highlight a real risk (injury inflicted by the resident animals) that the organisers of this event might otherwise have forgotten to flag up.

Discuss how to manage risks but decide what level of risk you’re ultimately comfortable with

When deciding what to do about each risk, use the Four Ts:

• Transfer – some risks can be transferred to a third party if you have the right contracts in place and pay for the privilege. For example, you can buy insurance, pay for a first aider, or work in partnership with an events company.
• Tolerate – for some risks you might decide to do nothing, out of choice rather than ignorance. For example, the risk might be low impact, integral to your idea, or too expensive to mitigate. If you tolerate a risk, you should always monitor it in case circumstances change over time.
• Treat – develop policies, processes and procedures in the event that something goes wrong, and make sure that people are trained to follow them.
• Terminate – this involves finding a way to eliminate a risky element entirely – or if you can’t, being brave enough to walk away from your idea if necessary.

It’s crucial to adopt a varied approach. Tolerating everything would be reckless, but treating everything is likely to be exhausting and impractical. Transferring everything would be prohibitively expensive, and terminating everything would leave you with a vanilla fundraising activity, or no activity at all.

By taking ownership of your risks, and making sure they’re all within an acceptable level, you can move to a more Zen-like state with your fundraising. Most lucrative fundraising activities carry some level of risk, so you need to think back to your risk appetite (the blue line below) and decide what level of risk your organisation is prepared to accept given the circumstances:

Contrary to popular belief, compliance and risk management shouldn’t be about saying ‘no’ - it's more a case of ‘not like that’. Risk-free activities are rarely financially or commercially realistic, but that’s not an excuse for failing to take responsibility of the situation or control of your risks.

In other words, don’t let your participants get eaten by a bear, but don’t let compliance bears eat up all your good fundraising ideas either.

For many charities and social enterprises in a tight financial position, it's the classic dilemma. You need to invest in fundraising, perhaps to replace dwindling income from other sources, but have less disposable cash than ever.
 
So building the case for investing in fundraising – whether that means a new staff member, hiring a consultant or increasing your marketing budget – isn’t easy. Particularly when it involves dealing with management or trustees who may know less about fundraising than you, and are naturally risk averse.
 
If you were asked to put together a robust and convincing case for investing in fundraising, where would you start? How would you address people’s concerns? Here are our top tips:

1. Show how fundraising success would boost your overall mission
 
When I'm working with an organisation on their fundraising strategy, I initially ask two questions: Why have you decided to focus on fundraising? What do you hope to achieve through successful fundraising?
 
Many organisations set ambitious goals for their project work, but fail to show the same fundraising ambition. But the two things are inextricably linked – if you’re trying to double the number of people you help, or move into a new region, you'll likely need a step-change in fundraising.
 
So try to make people focus on how much more the organisation could achieve if it raised more money. You’ll stand a better chance of convincing management and trustees to make the investment needed.
 
2. Educate people about your current fundraising efforts
 
I’ve worked with organisations whose CEO or trustees have been genuinely surprised by how much they’re raising in certain areas, or completely oblivious about simple blockages that are holding back fundraising. However, people will make better long-term decisions about fundraising if they understand this properly.
 
Inspire confidence in your future plans by emphasising which areas are already proving successful, and which ones have the potential for a drastic improvement with a little more investment.
 
3. Show the long-term financial return…
 
Investing in fundraising never yields an immediate return. Encourage trustees and management to consider the bigger picture by modelling your return on investment (i.e. how many pounds you raise per pound spent) over 3-5 years.
 
Fortunately, there’s a way to do this that doesn’t involve plucking figures out of thin air. Check out the excellent Gimme Gimme Gimme guide by nfpSynergy, which outlines 12 different types of fundraising and provides average return on investment figures (based on a sector-wide survey) for each. You can then adjust these benchmark figures slightly, depending on where your own fundraising is stronger or weaker. While this guide is several years old, it still provides the most up-to-date figures that we're aware of.

If you’re investing in an area of fundraising for the first time, assume a more conservative return on investment in the first year while you get things up and running, gradually increasing over several years.

4. …but don’t make promises you can’t keep
 
If you’re persuading your organisation to take the plunge and invest in fundraising, it’s tempting to promise the world. But over-ambitious projections will only cause disappointment and financial problems later.
 
If you’ve taken a methodical approach to forecasting return on investment (see above), stand firm and don’t allow other people to push you to unrealistic levels. Don't just say what is necessary to win their support.
 
In my experience, many organisations confuse fundraising targets with project budgets. Just because your projects and running expenses will cost £150,000 next financial year, you can’t necessarily expect to raise £150,000. That’s a bit like assuming you'll come home to a full fridge, just because you’re hungry.

Ultimately, to avoid going hungry, you either need to make time to cook (i.e. ringfence existing staff time for fundraising) or buy something ready to eat (i.e. pay someone else to do the work). Your fundraising projections must be based on what you put in, not what you need to get out.

5. Emphasise the risk of not investing, to balance up the risk equation
 
For risk-averse trustees, certain questions weigh heavy on the mind. What if we recruit a new fundraiser and they’re not up to the job? What if we spend more on fundraising but fail to generate more income?
 
These are legitimate questions, but only part of the picture. Over the years, I’ve seen few organisations invest in fundraising and regret it, but plenty pay the price for standing still.

Income can disappear remarkably quickly, for instance if you lose a statutory contract or a major event flops, but can take years to build up. So asking ‘what might happen if we don’t invest in fundraising?’ is equally important.

It's helpful to highlight fundraising opportunities that you’re currently not able to capitalise on, or looming threats that you need to plan ahead for. This is about human sustainability too – if staff have been working extended hours to cover gaps in capacity, it’s vital to emphasise the human cost if this were to continue.
 
6. Choose the best way to present your business case
 
Building your case can take a long time, but you might get just an hour of people’s time and attention to win them over. So finding the right format is crucial – should it be a presentation or a written report? Should you provide all the information on the spot, or ask people to read something in advance and come with questions?
 
There’s no right or wrong answer. It depends on what you’re personally most comfortable with, and how your audience typically like to receive information (your CEO or Chair could offer some insight here). Don’t offer to do a long presentation if you’re not very good at them and think you’ll struggle to get the key information across. Don’t spend ages writing a long report if you know people are unlikely to read it.
 
Some final tips for presenting things in the right way:

• Explain any fundraising-specific jargon or acronyms, to avoid confusing people.
• Check your work carefully - glaring budget mistakes or grammatical errors undermine your credibility.
• Avoid controversial or sweeping statements that may aggravate people or cause them to focus on something that isn’t important. Most organisations have their own historical ‘red flags’ which you quickly learn to avoid!

“Have you got a good template for developing our fundraising strategy?”

This is one of the most common questions we're asked, but one that we don’t have a very helpful answer for. Which is another way of saying that our stock answer is “No”.

There’s a very deliberate reason for this. A fundraising strategy template puts the emphasis on writing – it fuels the common myth that your fundraising strategy can be written by someone in isolation, with just a handy structure to help pull out and shape the information in their head. But I’ve seen plenty of beautifully written fundraising strategies that ended up in the bin or a dusty drawer within six months. 

Writing isn’t the most important part of creating a fundraising strategy – it’s talking. To create a really good strategy, first you need to assemble the key people who understand your organisation and your previous fundraising efforts. Then you need to discuss your key opportunities and challenges, and make difficult decisions about how to use your limited resources.

This is why, instead of a fundraising strategy template, we have a series of exercises and processes that we can help you work through to arrive at some key decisions and conclusions. Yes, we can ultimately help you to write up those decisions and conclusions in a structured way, but – cheesy as it sounds – our emphasis is on the journey as much as the destination.

Of course, just saying "No, you can't have a template - go away and do loads of work instead" feels a bit mean. So here are a few reasons why developing your strategy needs to be a collaborative process, and what to focus on:

No one person has all the right answers

Even in a very small organisation, it takes more than one person to create a great fundraising strategy. You’ll benefit from involving your wider fundraising team, project staff, trustees, even key volunteers, supporters or donors. Often these people won’t have the right answers either, but they can ask the right questions to help you get there. Sometimes they’ll even have the wrong answers, but a successful strategy relies on bringing them along for the journey (more on that shortly).

Of course, involving lots of people in the process can feel unnerving – what if certain voices dominate the discussion, or nobody has anything to say and there’s an awkward silence?

When we support an organisation to develop their strategy, we work through a series of processes and structured exercises to help everybody contribute objectively to piecing everything together. This includes:

• Our ‘Enhanced SWOT Analysis’ process to help identify your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to fundraising, then link them together to form a clear list of strategic priorities to underpin your strategy.
• An audience mapping exercise to help you map out and prioritise the different ‘audiences’ (both individuals and organisations like trusts) that you could engage with your fundraising.
• A ‘visioning’ exercise to help everybody discuss why a strategy is needed, what the organisation could achieve by growing fundraising income, and how much risk they want to take to get there.

Everybody brings different and valuable ideas to the table - so finding a way to capture and structure those ideas gives you a much stronger foundation for your strategy.

You need to debate, make and document difficult decisions

Some organisations mistakenly think that creating a fundraising strategy involves listing out all the conceivable types of fundraising you could do, with an action plan and an income target for every area.

The big issue here is assuming that you have the resources to do everything, and that all types of fundraising are equally valuable. For smaller organisations, this usually results in spreading yourself too thin, and doing many things badly rather than a few things well. Even for bigger organisations with capacity to try everything, it still ignores the reality that spending twice as long on Activity A might be better than doing equal amounts of A and B.

So Challenge #1: Making Difficult Decisions. If we focus on an individual giving programme rather than trying to do an annual event too, can we expect a better return? Do we need to prioritise some quick wins from trusts and foundations in Year 1 to safeguard our key service activities, before we try to tackle corporate fundraising?

It takes more than one person to answer these questions – you need a collaborative process, built on the processes and exercises described above.

That still leaves Challenge #2: Documenting Difficult Decisions. What if you’ve decided to discount a type of fundraising that some of your staff enjoy and have good previous experience with? What if a new trustee joins tomorrow who loves major donor fundraising, and can’t understand why you’re not doing it?

A good fundraising strategy doesn’t just explain what decisions you’ve made, but why. Crucially, this applies just as much to the things you don't do. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for deciding not to do certain types of fundraising – for example we don’t have the right expertise, the organisation isn’t ready, it’s too risky. Documenting these choices builds confidence in your strategy, and makes it less likely that people will challenge it in the near future.

Fundraising success depends on the whole organisation

Successful fundraising requires a lot more than a good fundraising team – management need to know how to support your efforts and set realistic targets, project staff need to provide the right information to help you write convincing proposals and report back on grants, and you’ll need cooperation and a joined-up message across your social media, newsletter and at events.

However, all staff are busy and they’re not going to drop everything to prioritise fundraising, particularly if they don’t understand the significance. So taking a collaborative approach to developing your fundraising strategy – and involving the wider team – helps people to appreciate any challenges that are blocking successful fundraising, and the often small things they can do to make a big difference.

Creating a fundraising strategy is a dynamic and different process for every organisation

We’ve successfully helped dozens of charities and social enterprises to create their fundraising strategy, but it’s never been exactly the same process twice.

Depending on your focus and circumstances, you’ll need to do bespoke bits of extra work. This could include anything from analysing why you keep losing out to similar organisations for key grants, segmenting your database to analyse how many people are donating at different levels, or creating an ethical fundraising policy to help you decide when to accept – or reject – donations from companies.

If you involve a broader range of people in developing your fundraising strategy, you have more chance of identifying any weak spots where you need to do extra work, then getting everyone on board to fix them.

This is another reason why a fundraising strategy template is misleading – because it implies that every organisation can just work through the same content, whereas in reality everyone’s circumstances are different.

For more info on how we help organisations to develop their fundraising strategy, click here.
Alternatively, check out our fundraising strategy training courses and free resources.

​One of the first rules of trusts fundraising is that relationships are crucial – but forming them can feel harder than ever.
 
This is the inevitable result of an ultra-competitive climate. With so many funders inundated by interest, they’re taking steps to minimise the number of applications they receive, and the time they spend communicating with applicants.
 
As a result, many fundraisers scratching their heads by the lack of feedback, the requests for no unsolicited applications, and cryptic guidance notes. Sometimes it feels like funders and fundraisers are barely speaking the same language – but with more understanding on both sides, there’d be less wasted time all round.
 
We recently launched a new one-day trusts fundraising course – and, in response to the widespread confusion and frustration out there, we included a ‘What funders say, what they mean and what to do about it’ segment.
 
Having gathered feedback from loads of charities and social enterprises, and compared it to our own experience, we’ve developed a list of five frustrating things that funders say, and what you can do about it:

1. We don’t fund core / running / salary costs
 
The funder’s point of view: personally I think that charities need to invest in being strong, well-run organisations more than ever, despite the media obsession with things like management and admin costs. Sadly, funders are often more drawn to shiny, tangible projects. There are legitimate reasons for this: funders have their own charitable objectives and wish to demonstrate impact for what they give, and projects often feel cleaner, simpler to understand and more likely to produce short-term results.

However, it’s easy to misunderstand what funders mean when they say they don’t fund core or salary costs. Often, they mean they won’t fund these costs as stand-alone items, or don’t want to pay to simply keep people in jobs. It doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t fund core or salary costs as a part of a project, if packaged well. 

How to respond:

• Develop thorough project budgets which include a proportionate contribution towards key staff costs.
• Include a contribution towards overhead costs where possible – if in doubt, check with funders what they allow.
• Identify specialist funders who do fund running and/or salary costs
• Adopt a full cost recovery model where you understand the true cost of your projects and develop funding applications to match – this will prevent you having to ‘dip in’ to core funding to sustain projects. 

2. We only fund new ideas and activities
 
The funder’s point of view: a bit like magpies, funders are often attracted to shiny things – that means new, exciting and innovative projects. This can be infuriating, particularly if you’re seeking funding for a project that you know works and is needed more than ever. It’s often driven by concerns about sustainability – funders don’t want to feel relied upon to keep supporting the same work year on year, or may feel that it’s better value for money to make a smaller contribution to test a pilot project that can then be scaled up.
 
How to respond:

• Take every opportunity to speak to funders before applying – ideally a written application shouldn’t be the first they hear about your project.
• Don’t take your projects for granted – they may not feel new to you, but can you still explain why they’re innovative in your field?
• Show the learning process – have you evolved your approach over time, based on lessons learned and feedback from beneficiaries? Does new research or the political climate make your work more necessary?
• Show how your project can be a catalyst for policy change, or broader work by bigger organisations.

3. We don’t fund work which is a statutory responsibility
 
The funder’s point of view: this is something I find very frustrating, particularly at a time when an increasing number of activities are seemingly being abandoned by statutory services. However, many funders simply don’t want to feel that they’re just picking up the slack for government spending cuts, or don’t recognise how what you’re doing is different – particularly in areas like residential care, housing and employment support.
 
Applying for direct replacement funding is a bit like going on a date and talking about your ex-partner the whole time – if you make a funder feel like you’re only interested in them to replace something you used to have, don’t expect them to feel special and excited about partnering up with you.
 
How to respond:

• Take the time to research and explain why your work is vital in relation to the social context and what your beneficiaries need, rather than just pitching it as the same project that used to be statutory-funded.
• Show how your work is different, better or more innovative than related statutory services.
• Demonstrate social return on investment – does your work actually save e.g. the NHS money?
• Know when to walk away from a funder that simply isn't the right fit – this avoids wasted time all round.

 
4. We don’t accept unsolicited applications
 
The funder’s point of view: in the current climate, many funders are inundated by applications, lots of which are poor quality or don’t meet their priorities. As a result, they choose projects based on personal recommendations or their own research. This helps them to make better use of their limited resources.
 
How to respond:

• Don’t just apply anyway – funders won’t change their mind and won't appreciate you ignoring their guidelines.
• Send a short letter introducing your work, enclosing an annual report or inviting them to visit you – make it clear that you’re starting a conversation, not asking for funding.
• Develop a relationship – do you know anyone who can introduce you? Can you subscribe to their newsletter or connect on social media?
• Ask their advice – have they funded similar projects that you can learn from, or do they know any other funders who might be able to help?

 
5. We don’t enter into discussions about funding in advance or provide feedback
 
The funder’s point of view: again, this is often driven by a lack of resources. Funders prefer to dedicate time to the organisations they’re funding. Also, feedback can be contentious – perhaps they used to provide it, but often got a negative reaction. Finally, they may simply have nothing meaningful to tell you, if they couldn't find any fault with your project but had to make a tough decision between several organisations they liked.
 
How to respond:

• Critique applications yourself in advance – read any guidelines carefully, see how you compare to other similar projects they have funded, and ask someone less familiar with your work to review your work.
• Look to build a relationship with funders in advance, so they’re more likely to help you.
• Phone rather than email – you may get ‘off the record’ feedback, rather than a generic email response.
• Meticulously record any feedback – you won’t get much, but you can gradually build a picture over time.
• Accept that competition is tough and move on – your time may be better spent on the next application.

To learn more about how to build relationships with funders, write compelling applications and develop a successful trusts fundraising programme, click here to check out our training courses.

If you were asked to create an ethical fundraising policy, what would you do and where would you start?
 
With the latest wave of bad news stories – especially the Presidents Club scandal, which saw charities scrambling to hand back donations – I’ve been contacted for advice by several organisations who, quite sensibly, want to avoid getting in a similar position themselves.
 
An ethical fundraising policy sets out what your organisation is willing to do and not do in relation to fundraising, based on some agreed ethical principles. This often includes (but shouldn't be limited to) when you may choose to reject a donation.
 
If this sounds like a straightforward exercise, it shouldn’t be. It goes without saying that ethics aren’t black and white, so putting together this policy must involve careful thought and reflection.

Here are six guiding principles to keep in mind if you're creating an ethical fundraising policy:

1. Start a conversation - don’t search for a template policy
 
A common mistake is to assign this task to one member of staff, and ask them to find an example policy that can be adapted quickly for your organisation.
 
However, creating an ethical fundraising policy goes right to the heart of your appetite for risk, your charitable objects and the areas of particular sensitivity for your cause. As such, it's crucial that trustees and senior management are involved.

This process should start with a conversation. This is arguably the most important stage, since you need to debate different scenarios and views, and arrive at a position that feels right for your organisation. This is usually a thought-provoking exercise that improves everybody’s understanding and appreciation of the complexities involved. If you treat creating the policy as a box-ticking exercise, you’ll miss out on this valuable development opportunity.
 
2. Take a broad view – don’t over-react to one event
 
It's common to be prompted into action by a single event, like a high-profile bad news story. This isn’t a problem as such, but you shouldn't let it skew your whole approach.
 
In the wake of the Presidents Club scandal, many charities are focused on whether they should accept (or return) certain donations. However, this is only part of the puzzle – your policy may need to cover the ethical standards you expect your suppliers to meet, how you check those standards, and how you interact with vulnerable donors.
 
It's helpful to start by making a list of all the circumstances and ethical dilemmas your charity needs to consider. This should be informed by the types of fundraising that you do and your existing risk assessment, as well as by external events.

3. Define your attitude towards risk – avoid making decisions that you’ll reverse later
 
Keeping everyone happy is rarely possible, as recent developments show. Many people were outraged that charities like GOSH had accepted donations from the Presidents Club, but others were reportedly angry when they considered handing them back.

There are no right or wrong answers, so you need to judge what feels appropriate for your organisation, anticipate how your supporters and beneficiaries might react, and be prepared to justify your decision. It's no good having a policy in place, then caving in as soon as you put it into practice and people object.

Defining your organisation’s attitude towards risk is essential – this is why trustees and management must be involved. Accepting some donations can be risky, but being totally risk-averse is a risk in itself – it can demoralise staff, or damage your financial position. This is inevitably a sensitive balancing act. It may be helpful to consult key donors and beneficiaries when creating your policy, to anticipate objections in advance.

4. Make it relevant to your cause – don’t be over-simplistic
 
When defining whether to accept or reject donations from individuals and companies, you may be tempted to start by creating a list of 'no go' areas, like if they are linked to alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography.
 
Unfortunately, the world isn't that simple - household name companies sell alcoholic products, and established publishing companies produce pornographic magazines. If you're not careful, you could find yourself turning away a lot of donations!
 
You need to be more specific and mindful of your cause and charitable aims. It's not about what staff or trustees personally think is ethically correct, but whether a donation might damage your mission or beneficiaries. An animal welfare charity might be reluctant to accept a donation from a cosmetics company, but happy to do so from an alcohol brand - whereas an addiction charity might take the opposite view.

 5. Include specific processes and procedures - not just general guidelines
 
Your policy should not only set out your position, but explain how to action it - for example, do you subject donations over a certain amount to more rigorous background checks? What do those checks involve? How do you go about reporting serious incidents?
 
This will help staff to put your policy into action, and also show anybody reading it that you're serious about fundraising ethically, rather than just treating it as a tickbox exercise.
 
6. Make your policy part of the bigger picture - don't see it as enough in isolation
 
It's tempting to sign off your ethical fundraising policy and assume it's 'job done' - but in reality, this is an ongoing commitment and part of a larger compliance picture.
 
Your policy shouldn't just sit in an obscure corner of your shared drive. It must be an ongoing reference point that's displayed clearly for staff to refer to when needed, and part of induction processes for staff and volunteers. Fundraisers should feel able to raise any concerns or discuss situations they feel unsure about. Management and trustees should review your policy periodically, in response to changing fundraising practices, issues affecting the sector, and changes to your own fundraising portfolio and risk assessment.
 
Aside from creating an ethical fundraising policy, you may also want to, for example, review your Data Protection compliance ahead of the arrival of GDPR, ensure your trustees are aware of their legal fundraising duties as set out in the Charity Commission's CC20 document, or produce a short supporter promise outlining your commitment to good fundraising (I've always liked this example from Mind).

Trustees’ Week is a great opportunity to celebrate the amazing contribution being made by over one million voluntary trustees in the UK – and rightly so. But are trustees doing as much as they can to support their charity’s fundraising efforts – and is your organisation missing a trick?
 
The UK is the sixth most giving country in the world and has a proud charitable tradition, despite plenty of negative media coverage in recent years. This simply wouldn’t be possible without the work of trustees, who dedicate their time to making vital decisions about a charity’s work and strategy.
 
On average, trustees give almost five hours per week of their time – based on the median hourly wage, this is worth a staggering £3.5bn a year to the sector (source: Civil Society). However, in our experience, often only a small amount of this time is dedicated to supporting fundraising. Generally, the charities that we work with have few (if any) trustees with fundraising expertise or knowledge. 
 
Smaller charities inevitably tend to have few paid staff, so it’s essential that their Boards bring expertise related to governance, financial management and their specific area of work (for instance, education or social care). As a result, fundraising can seem a lower priority – charities may never get around to looking for trustees with fundraising experience, lack the contacts to find the right people, or not have a vacant space on their Board.

Many trustees therefore feel they lack the knowledge and confidence to support fundraising – but with a bit of encouragement, there’s so much they could do.
 
Leading the way on a whole-organisation commitment to fundraising
 
Fundraising relies so much on contacts and having a captive audience. However, for obvious reasons, smaller charities rarely have the large supporter bases, volunteer networks and marketing budgets enjoyed by household name charities. As a result, they need as much help as possible from all the people already involved in their work.
 
Charities raise more money when all their staff and trustees recognise the value of fundraising and the importance of supporting it however they can. That doesn’t mean people need to put their hands in their own pockets, or feel under pressure to always help in the same way. There are so many small things that trustees and staff can do that help to make a huge difference:

• Introductions - fundraising staff will always appreciate it if you introduce the charity to your own personal and professional contacts. People who think they’re not well-connected always have more useful contacts that they imagine, and sometimes one introduction can be a game-changer.
• Sharing your charity’s events, campaigns and social media updates – it only takes a moment, but can greatly expand your organisation's reach.

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• Volunteering at events – this provides a morale boost to the fundraising team and helps keep costs down.
• Being a sounding board – working for a smaller charity can be a lonely experience, so fundraising staff often appreciate a second opinion on a funding application, feedback on an event idea or just the opportunity to talk through a tricky problem.
• Providing fundraising-friendly information – donors don’t give to charities, they give to causes – and the best way to bring your cause to life is through stories and information from your frontline staff and other people who know the organisation well.

​Typically, everyone involved with your charity wants the organisation to do well, but sometimes reality gets in the way and people feel too busy to help. If trustees lead by example, staff and volunteers are likely to feel more motivated and capable of supporting fundraising too. If your organisation can create a top-down commitment to fundraising that everyone can get behind, amazing results will be closer than you think.

Developing the right culture for fundraising
 
As well as leading by example and providing hands-on support, great trustees can also shape the entire working culture of a charity, creating an environment where fundraising – and fundraisers – are able to thrive. Here are five ways of doing this:

• Compliance – to win back declining public trust, the charity sector has created a new approach to self-regulation – we have a new regulator, a Fundraising Preference Service and clarified legal fundraising duties for trustees. Trustees must understand this regulatory environment and ensure that your fundraising activities meet all the requirements. This means establishing compliance as an important issues, and creating a transparent environment where people feel able to raise and discuss concerns if needed.
• Donor centricity – financial difficulties can sometimes lead to charities putting undue pressure on their donors or focusing on short-term return, so it’s important for trustees to emphasise the value of putting donors front and centre. Excellent fundraising means building relationships and starting conversations, involving supporters in your plans, and treating donors as people, not cash cows.
• Investment – we all know that you can’t raise money without spending it, but in a tough financial climate it can be tempting to cut corners. This can have a bigger negative impact on your staff than you realise. Trustees are ultimately responsible for guarding against this – that means ensuring there’s sufficient staff capacity and supporting resources for your fundraising plans, and investing in training and development opportunities for staff.
• Space to breathe – too many fundraisers gradually become fire-fighters, with too many commitments to be able to do everything properly. Having the time and space to review activities, reflect on progress and plan improvements is so important. Staff don’t always recognise when they need to take a step back, so it’s often up to trustees to help prevent burnout and encourage reflection.
• Risk and innovation – new fundraising activities don’t always work, but the risk of failure is often smaller than the risk of standing still. If your charity is afraid of failing, you'll be reluctant to try anything new – so trustees need to encourage the right amount of risk-taking, and accept some possibility of failure as the price to pay for progress and innovation.

Developing a whole-organisation commitment to fundraising, and creating the right culture for fundraising to thrive, is of course easier when you have fundraising expertise on your Board. However, in a tough financial climate, you can’t wait until tomorrow to start. While most trustees won’t be able to help with all of the above, we guarantee that every trustee can do something - and staff will appreciate it more than you may expect.

​​Just when many charities were wondering how things could get any worse, along came the decision to leave the EU.
 
There were already plenty of worries to keep people up at night. Sustained media scrutiny of fundraising practice and charity governance. A disillusioned public with decreasing trust in the sector. The need to get to grips with new fundraising responsibilities for trustees and a new Fundraising Regulator. Further clouds on the horizon in the form of the much-discussed Fundraising Preference Service and incoming EU Data Protection law.
 
Brexit has now added a load more challenges into the mix. It's confirmed a growing belief that the values of many charities are out of step with a large part of the general public, and emphasised the need to win back public trust. Another financial crisis would mean that your beneficiaries need you more than ever but funding would be harder still to find. The huge uncertainty may make many trusts, corporates and high net worth individuals more reluctant to hand over money in the short term at least.

Are you feeling depressed yet? Believe it or not, the aim of this blog is to make you feel more confident and positive about these challenges so bear with us for a bit longer!
 
The sheer volume of bad news for charities recently can make it tricky to absorb everything, understand how it impacts your organisation and decide what to do next. Every day brings new articles and concerns. But if you can cut through the noise and work out how to identify what really matters to you and what you can do about it, you can feel a lot more confident about the future.
 
Last month we ran a workshop at JustGiving about how to future-proof your fundraising efforts in the current climate. We worked with a range of small charities to explore the biggest current challenges are and how to move forward. A big part of this focused on what tools you can use to understand the impact of external factors on your charity and plan for the future.

Here are four great tools for future-proofing your fundraising in the current climate:
 
1. Horizon scanning
 
There's a big difference between being broadly aware of the challenges facing the charity sector and being able to decide and prioritise what's most relevant to your charity.
 
Doing a horizon scanning exercise is a great first step. Start by brainstorming a list of all the different possible issues and trends that you're aware of. Be as specific as possible – for instance don't write 'Brexit' but focus on individual factors like 'corporates less likely to make donations in the short term due to uncertainty'.
 
Next, estimate the likelihood of these things actually happening and the size of the impact they would have on your charity. Plot them on a grid as follows:

This is a great warm-up exercise to get your staff and trustees thinking more clearly about things and prioritising what requires further attention, because trying to react to everything as a small team is impossible. In the graphic above, the issues in the top right quadrant are likely to be the things to discuss further, as they're most likely to happen and will have the biggest impact on your charity.
 
2. Play to your strengths and win back trust
 
With public opinion in charities at an all-time low, there's a clear need for charities to win back trust and engage with their supporters as positively as possible. Many small charities have a natural advantage here, so it's important to think about how you can make the most of this.
 
While larger charities are currently re-evaluating how they fundraise, most smaller charities that we know are in a better position because they:

• Have never sold or bought supporter data to/from third parties
• Don't work with external fundraising agencies
• Naturally have a personalised approach to communicating with their supporters, driven by a small team of passionate fundraisers.

This distinction isn't very well understood by the general public, so there's a risk that smaller charities get associated with the bad news stories affecting some bigger charities. So what can you do to play to your strengths and communicate them more confidently to your supporters?
 
Developing a public supporter promise is a great way to set out your fundraising values and demonstrate how you're different from the 'bad' charities that your supporters may have read about. This is a chance to explain how you treat donors, how you use their data and how you ensure that any other organisations that you work with uphold your high standards. Here’s a great supporter promise developed by Mind.
 
By all means look at supporter promises developed by other charities for inspiration but it's important to avoid just copying them. You need to decide what values are important to you and how you're going to work behind the scenes to honour your promise. This may require you to review your training, induction and administrative processes.
 
When your promise is finished, publish it prominently on your website and make all your supporters aware of it by shouting about it in your newsletter, emails and on social media.
 
3. Review your organisational culture and governance
 
The Board of Trustees plays such an important role in defining a charity’s approach to fundraising, especially in smaller charities. The Board must collectively understand fundraising, engage with it and care about how it's done. Together with your senior management team, trustees should now:

• Review the new guidance on fundraising responsibilities for trustees and make sure that you understand and can comply with them. This may include evaluating what skills or experience are missing and considering whether to recruit new trustees to cover the gaps.
• Ensure that the Board makes time to periodically take a step back and review your fundraising efforts. When the Board only has time to deal with urgent governance duties and be reactive, fundraising often suffers.
• Develop a whole-organisational approach towards fundraising where every staff member and trustee supports fundraising where they can, even just by sharing key campaigns and making use of their contacts. So many smaller charities are limited by the size of their supporter base and this can put real pressure on fundraisers. Sharing responsibility can help you to reduce your reliance on 'the same old donors' and grow a healthier fundraising portfolio.
• Develop a culture of compliance and transparency in fundraising. Make sure that everyone respects the importance of good fundraising and understands legal requirements and sector best practice. Create an environment where staff feel comfortable raising concerns and queries if needed.

4. Review your fundraising strategy
 
We don't know exactly what the future of fundraising will look like, but we do know that now is as good a time as any to do a proper review of your fundraising strategy and evaluate whether you're setting yourself up to succeed in a changing climate.
 
An initial horizon scanning exercise will have helped you to explore the possible impact of various issues on your fundraising activity. A strategy review will now enable you to identify where you are over-reliant on certain fundraising activities, such as individual giving, and what you can do to diversify your fundraising and reduce your vulnerability over time.
 
Diversifying your fundraising and investing in new areas isn't easy because fundraising growth takes time. However, a strong fundraising strategy will allow you to decide where to invest resources, forecast how long it will take to achieve results and justify the business case for investing now.
 
If you need some help with your fundraising strategy, join our mailing list to access our strategy helpsheets and look out for our upcoming workshops and webinars.
 
We explore all these tools for change and many more in our “Fundraising in a changing climate” workshops. We're planning another one this autumn, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to find out more or provisionally reserve a place.

On 4 February 2016, the Small Charities Coalition and the Institute of Fundraising jointly organised a public forum to discuss proposals for the new fundraising regulator and Fundraising Preference Service (FPS).

The forum was a response to criticism that small charities had not been consulted in the development of the new proposals. It was the first public consultation of any kind and the first opportunity for charities to engage directly with Stephen Dunmore, Chief Executive of the new regulator, and George Kidd, the Chair of the Fundraising Preference Service working group.

Big changes are coming and they will affect all charities, large and small. As a fundraising consultant and small charity trustee, I’ve felt the need to keep abreast of developments and air my own views. I'd recommend that you do the same.

I've written this blog to help anyone who needs to get up to speed. Below you'll find links to key documents, a quick summary of the headline news and our recommendations for what to do next.

​1. Meet as a Board or Senior Management Team to discuss the implications

While small charities may yet be exempted from the FPS, the forthcoming changes could well have a real impact on your charity. You may be forced to pay a levy towards the new regulator, dedicate additional resources to preparing your fundraising campaigns, and face sanctions for inadvertently breaching new rules. Your supporters could sign up to the FPS because of aggressive marketing by a larger charity without realising that they won't be able to hear from you again.

We'd recommend reviewing the key documents and making sure that you're up to speed now. Even if you can't take direct action until more details are revealed, you can discuss how to monitor developments, whether you want to have a voice in the consultation process, and how you can stay flexible in order to make any necessary changes later.
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2. Review your fundraising strategy and assess your vulnerability

Are you over-reliant on individual giving? What would happen if a percentage of your supporter base suddenly became uncontactable tomorrow? Are there any fundraising opportunities open to you that you could start to develop now in order to be less susceptible to the changes? Do your existing trustees have the confidence and knowledge about fundraising to navigate the changes effectively?

Periodically reviewing your fundraising strategy and testing how it would stand up to possible external changes is always important. Doing so now is strongly advisable. Find out more about how we can help you with your strategic planning.

3. Assess your supporter communication to stay ahead of the curve

It's easy to kick and scream about the forthcoming regulation changes or blame it all on the big charities. However, we're undoubtedly in this position because public trust in charities has plummeted, and many of the reasons are justified. Now is a good time to evaluate how well you communicate with supporters. Do your staff and volunteers have everything they need to do this properly? Is there guidance for communicating with vulnerable donors or evaluating potential corporate donations?

If the answer is 'no', be proactive and change now. If you're doing this well already, make sure your supporters are aware of it. Media and public scrutiny of charities is likely to keep escalating, so stay ahead of the curve and inspire trust by saying "these are the steps that we've voluntarily taken" rather than appearing to only react to enforced changes.

4. Make your voice heard

The forum on 4 February was a very positive first step, but charities must keep engaging with the process and keep the pressure up by highlighting which issues and unanswered questions are important to them.

There are still too many grey areas. How will the new regulator and the FPS be funded without jeopardising the viability of small charities? Will potential FPS subscribers realise that they may be blocking all future fundraising communication from their local charity, school or hospital? Will the FPS truly remain "a last resort for vulnerable donors" and not an easy button that everyone can press when, for instance, the Daily Mail or the One Show run their first feature about it?

I believe that we all have a responsibility to the sector - and also to the public - as well as ourselves. Some of the criticism of charities is justified and many of the proposed changes are needed. However, it's so sad that the first ever communication preference service to target a specific industry is aimed at charities. We have a proud tradition of charitable giving in the UK but, if new fundraising regulation goes wrong, we could decimate this. Can you really afford to stay silent?

Keep in touch with the Small Charities Coalition and the Institute of Fundraising to stay abreast of developments and further opportunities to have your say. Contact them to actively voice your support. Share this blog post and spread the word to colleagues and friends.

​Recent events have proved that your voice can make a difference. Please keep using it.

You don't need us to tell you that charities are having a tough time of it.

It seems a long time ago that the tragic death of Olive Cooke was first reported. Rightly or wrongly, this was quickly linked with charities and triggered unprecedented scrutiny and criticism of fundraising methods, particularly towards vulnerable supporters.

As a result, we've all had to face difficult questions, many of them justified. Sir Stuart Etherington led a review of fundraising regulation in consultation with the UK's 50 largest charities based on fundraising income.

This decision to only seek the views of the largest charities has been heavily criticised. The changing public perception of charities and potential new regulation will undoubtedly affect us all, and small charities have their own views and challenges. To maintain a healthy sector, it's vital that everybody's voice is heard.

Fortunately, the Small Charities Coalition and the Institute of Fundraising have given every small charity the opportunity to complete a 10-minute survey to share their views, and will be holding an open forum on fundraising regulation on 4 February.

We can't emphasise enough how important it is to make your voice heard. Fundraising reform will be fairer and more effective if it's done with smaller charities in mind too. The survey closes on Friday (15 January) so please take a look before then.