Events

The serious stuff about Alan Clayton’s session on events fundraising was in my previous post. This is the lighter stuff.

Speaking at the event we hosted, Al’s colleague Alex Brooks-Johnson, suggest a couple of new event ideas.

First was the ‘Real Three Peaks’ challenge, because Scotland has the three largest mountains in the UK so what currently passes for the three peaks challenges – taking in Snowdon and whatever that hill in the Pennines is called – is a bit of a poor substitute.

You’re almost guaranteed to discover something new when you attend one of Alan Clayton’s presentations.

Alan’s speciality is donor motivations and at a seminar tis week hosted by Relationship Marketing, he presented for the first time his thoughts on what drives people to take part in challenge events. He detailed a psychographic segmentation of challenge eventers, listed into eight categories – including ‘life changers’, ‘fun seekers’ and ‘excuse needers’ – and spoke about how to communicate with each type of eventer.

Shouldn’t really use the blog for a plug, but when you’ve got Alan Clayton delivering a seminar in your offices to Scottish fundraisers it’s hard to resist the temptation.

Alan has just launched a new events company and will presenting his new ideas on how to read the motivations of challenge events to Scottish fundraisers at a seminar next week (Tuesday 20 April).

As you may know the Institute of Fundraising has a Consultant’s Group that meets 3 times a year.

Tomorrow is Twestival Day, a world-wide fundraising festival made possible by Twitter.

It's good to see charities working with each other, so I was pleased to come across the National Trust and Coeliac UK announcing a partnership.

In this era of online quotes and price comparison web sites, it is easy to assume that one insurance is much the same as another, so the only difference is the price.

How do you make your sponsored marathon run stand out from the thousands of other people's efforts?

I don't normally use this blog to mention particular causes or events but hopefully I will be forgiven for mentioning an individual whose story, I will freely admit, brought a tear to my eye.

This week's climate change protest at Stansted airport generated a lot of media coverage across most channels. It could be argued that the organisation responsible, Plane Stupid, were anything but responsible in their direct action and I, for one, sympathise with the people stuck at the airport with no flight home.