Very, very few charities train their fundraising staff in how to work with an agency. One that does is Barnardo's. And I count myself very lucky to have them as a client. Gill McLellan, who put the training sessions together, has experience working both sides…

I was asked to write a few paragraphs for The Guardian Voluntary Sector Network on my hopes and fears for 2011. I've been meaning to write something on this for the last few weeks and as I've been a little busy, I thought it worth…

Santa Claus has been around for a fair few years now and there can't be many of us who don't understand what he's all about. But what would happen if Santa turned up at an advertising agency looking for some advice on how he could…

One thing that fundraising isn’t short of are rules and regulations (OK, I know that’s two, but I’m sure you get the picture). There are taxation regulations that define what fundraising materials must contain in order to be exempt from VAT. There are the industry…

Strategy is a complicated beast at the best of times. Try developing one for a charity and you really start to understand the meaning of the phrase ‘a little tricky’. Most organisational strategies tend to concentrate on how the charity is going to tackle the…

There’s a handy mnemonic that’s taught to trainee journalists to help them identify a good story. Journalists, just like fundraisers, can’t just write about what interests them, they have to focus on what will interest their readers. As a result, the mnemonic works for us…

One of the problems of using face-to-face techniques to recruit donors has been the high cancellation rates. It’s not unusual to see more than 50% of all supporters recruited in this way cancel their regular gift in the first year. The fundraising industry has always…

There was a cracking post from Jeff Brooks on Future Fundraising Now last week. It tells the story of how two senior marketing people at General Motors came up with the almost unbelievable idea (now reversed) of banning the word Chevy when talking about Chevrolet…

I gave my first gift via See The Difference on Monday. If you haven’t heard of them, let me explain who they are. The people who run the organisation see themselves as being at the forefront of a revolution in charity giving.  Dominic Vallely, one…

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