I was out buying a giant map today and saw this display in a nearby clothes shop. Each bag cost £45 pounds. For each purchase, the World Food Programme receives a donation that will pay for 50 school meals for a child in Haiti. Apparently…

Most fundraisers work with tight budgets and to tough targets. It’s part of the territory of fundraising. Creative thinking, a focus on the needs of the donor and great database management can only take you so far. Sometimes you need help. But who do you…

This one's very left field. It's the weekend, so forgive me. It's a thirty minute presentation by Jesse Schell, at DICE 2010, on the future of games. Maybe you should stop now. You're a fundraiser for a charity. There's nothing you can learn about fundraising…

There’s a great video on Social Hallucinations produced by David Gauntlet from Making is Connecting. David looks at everyday creativity and writes about seeing a cultural shift – from a sit back and be told one to a making and doing one. So what’s this…

What part of communication actually matters? I’d suggest, What you’ve achieved by giving to us, might fit in the overlap quite neatly. Thanks to Social Hallucinations, MisEntropy, fffound.

Adrian Sargeant found back in 2000 that about half of all cash donors give just once to a charity. Even those people who do give again, fall off the donor file at the alarming rate of 30% a year. The figures look even worse in…

This is a very short talk (3 minutes) from Alexis Ohanian (one of the people who set up Reddit) about a Greenpeace campaign aiming to stop humpback whales being hunted by Japanese fishermen. To engage people, Greenpeace put a tracking device on a whale and…

Featuring huge numbers of people in need in fundraising materials serves to make the reader feel helpless. Research shows that people who feel helpless give less money. The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) didn't follow the standard route of focusing on the magnitude of the recent…

I've just seen a piece of research undertaken by nfpSynergy that looks at the impact of using different ways to describe charitable expenditure. The study compared spending on fundraising and service provision, asking donors how impressive they found a range of descriptive options… Our charity…

When it comes to creating appeals, there is a natural assumption that high numbers generate high levels of income. If many thousands of people are at risk or in danger, logic would dictate that donors will give more money than if just one person is…