The magical ingredients of great charity people – what you said
Howard Lake | 28 June 2012 | Blogs
Following my recent blog on the ‘magic ingredient’ qualities that make great charity people great, plenty of other people have added to the list via twitter, email and – would you believe it – the good old-fashioned phone.
I promised that we would share the collective in another blog so here goes. By the way, several folks suggested the same qualities so clearly they are important to us but I’ve aggregated here to keep this short and sweet.
To recap, the original idea was that the passion charity people inherently have could be more than just raw ‘passion’… that it probably had constituent elements or at least slightly different ‘slants’ to make it useful as well as motivating. Consequently, I suggested that energy and empathy were key and this is what other folks added:
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- Ambition – not in the cold commercial sense but to be able to do amazing things
- A drive to right injustice – we recognise there are some things wrong with this world we live in and feel motivated to do something about it
- A desire to be successful – I think this underpins so much of what we do in the charity world because success means helping causes we feel strongly about and it’s all about action. Perhaps the difference between feeling strongly about a cause and actually doing something about it?
- Sharing – knowledge, time, funds, beliefs; all to help others feel just as passionate and motivated to act
- Caring – sounds trite but it’s still true. Charity folks tend to care about what they do at a level beyond delivering their objectives and collecting their pay packet
- Clarity of vision – knowing where you want to be and what you want to achieve is key to the right kind of action ie; the right channelling of our passion and energy
- Listening – goes hand in hand with sharing I believe
- Flexible – in thinking, attitudes to work, problem-solving
- Optimistic – the underpinning state of mind which allows us all to believe that things can be made better by our actions
And my personal favourite…
- Being creative – being able to think around problems or barriers, being able to do more with less, making the impossible actually happen.
Thanks to all who contributed (too many to name) to this excellent perspective on what qualities great charity people possess. If I possessed and could harness half of them as well as some of the folks who shared their ideas, I’d be a very capable, driven and successful charity chap indeed!
Inspired by these responses, I’m thinking about pulling together views on what qualities we think the charity world doesn’t possess enough of that we could seek from perhaps other sectors… opening bids anyone?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.