Training

The number of mentoring schemes available to fundraisers is growing, a most encouraging development.

This week the annual CHASE event and exhibition took place in London.

It’s a simple enough premise. If your customers, supporters or volunteers ‘speak’ with you about their needs, wants or a complaint, pay attention! It’s about having good internal communications and this means putting in place both the means for your people to communicate as well as nurturing the will for your colleagues to communicate with each other for everyone’s benefit.

Here are some fundraising books that are due for release in 2012. You can pre-order them via Amazon.co.uk or just wait for them to come out.

With Third Sector’s announcement last week that it is to start charging for acc

There aren't too many fundraising books that deserve the accolade of 'classic' but I'd say Marion Allford's guide to one-off capital appeals "Charity Appeals: the Complete Guide to Success" qualifies.

I interviewed a lot of people during my two days at this year's Institute of Fundraising National Convention in July in London. Here are the videos all in one place.

There is a Little Britain TV sketch showing the funny side of what passes as customer/supporter service in modern Britain.  Basically, it parodies the fact that many front line staff appear to have been totally disempowered when it comes to dealing with the public. 'I can't do anything as it's a system-generated decision...' is heard from call -centres all too frequently. This provokes two questions:

1. Do organisations think that supporters and customers care in any way shape or form that THEIR system is the problem?
2. Do the same organisations think customers and supporters can be placated by hearing that it's the computer's fault?!?

Harvard Business Review's Management Tips of the day on 21st July included '3 Ways to Convince a Skeptic'.  Overall I agreed with two out of three but I honestly don't think that stroking egos works more than the first time you try it (unless your sceptic is unperceptive and stupid). That's because 'convincing' is about more than persuading. 

In the worlds of marketing, fundraising, communications, sales and lots of other organisational affairs, it's about engaging with the sceptics sufficiently so that they will act in the way you need them to.

Last week, I came across an interesting article written by Suzanne Lucas on the BNET site entitled "9 signs your HR manager is terrible". In a nutshell, it's about how a commercial HR function doesn't always help the business achieve it's goals.

If you take a look you will immediately notice that it's fairly commercial and yes, a little USA-centric but there's a lot here other sectors and cultures can learn from. I'm no HR expert but like many, I've led and managed plenty of people and worked in lots of teams across commercial and non-profit sectors.

Consequently, the article got me to thinking about how some of the organisations I've been exposed to over the last 20 years have maybe missed the 'people' point. Here's my top five tangible things we don't always seem to do to focus on our people as the best way of helping us to meet our bottom line objectives, whatever they are. (Incidentally, by "HR", I mean the people in your organisation who are responsible for HR-type tasks - I know we don't all have a dedicated HR department)