kevin baughen's blog

Does the end always justify the means?  Does innovation always lead to an improvement?  Today’s blog is an open question around a service I’m sure many of you have come across this year – as I have recently.  Here’s the story...

All the training I’ve been on and blogs I’ve read suggest that you shouldn’t start using tools like Twitter for your organisations if you can’t keep it up.  Little and often is the key according to those who know far more than me.

I was delivering workshops for most of last week and didn’t use Twitter at all for three days.  Once I got to this point, I decided to hold out for the rest of the week as an experiment to see what would actually happen for me personally and for our organisation.  Here’s what we noticed...

I followed the Institute of Fundraising National Convention’s twitter stream with interest last week and was, like many of my friends and colleagues in the sector, amazed at just how many times certain words, phrases or ideas came to the fore.

Lucy Gowar’s latest blog sums it up nicely around the use of the word innovation every other sentence!

Last week Third Sector reported that Help for Heroes had received over £600,000 in donations following the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich.  This adds to the impressive sum of over £150m the charity has raised and allocated in just a handful of years since its creation in 2007.

How come they are so successful when many other established charities are finding it tougher right now?

In the last week there have been lots of conversations around why branding is potentially pointless for charities and can be a total waste of hard-earned money.

Well, I’m here to (loosely) use maths and logic, the core tools of good fundraisers, to suggest why this need not be the case.

Firstly, here’s a truism I think we can all agree on:

• Unfocused, generic brand advertising ≠ guaranteed success for a charity’s specific activities

Forget Nike and Lance Armstrong; that was and continues to be just about the huge sums of money involved.  What about when ethical or charity brands align themselves with causes for perhaps the best of intentions but circumstances evolve in an undesirable way?

I was inspired to think about this blog by receiving an email from the Harvard Business Review collating several key works on the topics of leadership and management.  They note in weighty tomes that there is a difference between the two which is something most of us already understand, I suspect.

Backed up by no academic research whatsoever but fed by experience, anecdote and the thoughts of several, very experienced, close colleagues and friends, here are my common sense thoughts on leadership and management in the not for profit world:

I didn’t make this term up, honest.  It was shared with me by my cousin as he was describing what it felt like when senior managers just spew forth ideas that those a bit closer to the coal face suspect haven’t really been thought through... Here’s the Wikipedia definition.

We all know the importance of effective marketing in advance of our events; setting objectives, targeting our audiences, raising awareness of the event and whetting potential attendees’ appetites with sneak previews and relevant information.

But what about during the event itself?

A quick follow-up on the Great Charity Shake Off from Kirsty Marrins

The #CharityShakeOff.

Loved the idea behind the campaign and think something interesting has come out of the initial numbers...