kevin baughen's blog

This week’s blog is dedicated to a small group of charities who are trying different things to raise awareness and money.  We’ve talked a lot on these pages about the lack of a ‘success guarantee’ when trying something new but I find myself appreciating these three initiatives for the same reasons:

Nell Edgington shared an interesting perspective on how to get Boards better engaged and working more effectively in her blog at Social Velocity.  The premise was around five questions to ask the Board which made them think about what they were doing to actively support the charity.

I agree with her suggestions but want to add some more as I believe we need to be a bit more specific with our Board members and try to align their thinking with what it feels like everyday to try and deliver the strategies they come up with.

Here's the final instalment of the 12 tips of Christmas series we've been doing with Craig Linton the Fundraising Detective - click on the links for part 1, part 2 and part 3. I hope the tips have given you some food for thought. We'd love to hear your feedback...

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Tip 10: Personalise as much as possible – though make sure it’s cost effective!

One of my colleagues asked me the other day why I bothered writing a personal message in each of the Christmas cards I was sending to donors. She wanted to know “Why don’t you just sign them?”

Here’s the third instalment of our 12 tips of Christmas for fundraisers and charity marketing folks.  Lovingly deliberated over and shared by Kevin Baughen of Bottom Line Ideas and the Fundraising Detective, Craig Linton.

7.  Brands don’t belong to the marketing or communications teams!

Put together by Craig Linton, the Fundraising Detective, here are the next few tips in our 12 Tips of christmas feature (you can read the first three tips here, in case you missed them):

 4. Review your processes to make sure they are donor focussed

Kevin Baughen and Craig Linton

In the run up to Christmas, we’ve decided to put our heads together with Craig Linton, The Fundraising Detective to work through some of the examples of various charity and fundraising communications we’ve seen recently and try to share the 12 tips we think they’ve taught us.

This should be a basic tenet of all our communications activity but I've seen a belting example this week of doing just that, and with the author still expecting the audience to support them!

A recent Third Sector article reported that

In the words of Ant watching Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent;

You didn't expect that did you, no?

I'm loving the St John's Ambulance First Aid campaign for exactly that reason.  Using shock tactics for the sake of it or being controversial just to get a reaction aren't the most successful ways to endear audiences to our cause but confounding expectations is something different altogether.

There’s been some debate recently around the subject of TOIL in the charity sector and during my recent holiday, it got me to thinking about the other benefits of working in the sector. The old chestnut of lower salaries than commercial equivalents is a debate we can’t really advance in one blog but, having asked around, I was surprised at just how many other tangible benefits there are.