Donations from individuals are the backbone of core or unrestricted funding in successful fundraising charities. For those charities which do not yet have fully developed individual giving fundraising programmes, gaining increased donations from individuals offers the greatest opportunity for creating a secure platform of funding to cover all general running costs. This section of “Blueprint” provide the knowledge and tools needed to set up a comprehensive individual giving programme.
Individual giving in the UK
Individual giving in the UK has failed, as yet, to achieve its true potential. This is because, as a matter of fundraising strategy, individual donors are not widely seen as the prime source of general, unrestricted donations. One result of this is the immense challenge facing many thousands of charities in raising core or unrestricted funds. Furthermore, core funding is and will remain a headache for all who have responsibility for raising funds until the positive decision is taken to organise fundraising efforts around this simple proposition: the role of individual donors at all levels of giving is to help the charities they support to meet ongoing general revenue costs. As a special effort they may also contribute to meeting project needs and capital expenditure requirements, but their main ‘job’ is to fund general costs.
So, in a nutshell, the strategy we are advancing for individual giving is that it is geared and organised so that it meets the core funding needs of the charity. Since core funding is an annual budget item, it makes sense to mount an annual appeal to meet this element of the budget.
Once this proposition is accepted, the task becomes much simpler and quickly turns to one of specifically how individual giving is to be organised so that it delivers this result.
Here are the key elements of organising individual giving to meet the core funding needs of a charity:
An annual appeal for major gifts towards the charity’s core costs.
An annual appeal by direct mail for smaller gifts towards the charity’s core costs.
Recruitment of direct debit or standing order donors using general messages about supporting the charity’s long term objectives.
Legacy fundraising the main message of which revolves around the charity’s ‘need to keep going at all costs’, i.e. the central message is that the founding aims and aspirations of the charity need to be upheld and perpetuated.
Most community fundraising is, by definition, unrestricted as the amounts raised from each donor are too small to buy any identifiable component of the charity’s service delivery, so this can be included as part of the overall plan without needing to be tailored in any way.
See later in this manual for detailed coverage of”
- Major Gifts Fundraising
- Direct Mail Fundraising
- Legacy Fundraising
Now let us examine each of these elements in turn.
An annual appeal for major gifts towards the charity’s core costs. In the UK we seem to have little curiosity about how fundraising colleagues in the rest of the English speaking world of fundraising go about meeting the challenges they face. This is all the more curious as the challenges are, by and large, the same as we face in the UK. They have the same need for core funding. They need to raise funds for specific projects and larger capital developments. And they need to raise funds in order to develop the long term organisational strength of their institutions. The challenges are the same, but the solutions they have developed are often very different to those developed here. And one of the most striking differences is the emphasis on major gifts.
For reasons which are difficult to understand, in the UK we seem to have developed a “bottom up” approach to fundraising from individuals, meaning that the concept is deeply embedded that we build general income on the foundation of thousands of tiny gifts given as cash – from raffle ticket sales, coffee mornings, coin collections in the street or at the supermarket. Move slightly further up the pecking order and we come to cheque donations of small amounts ranging from £1 to, say, £10, usually solicited by direct mail. A step further up takes us to direct debit and standing order donations ranging upwards of £2 a month, often these days solicited over the phone or face to face with a canvasser in the street or on the doorstep. Finally we start moving into the territory of what are called by some fundraisers “higher level” gifts – cheque donations of £100 or more as a single gift. Amongst the few charities which actively try to solicit even this level of gift, they most often do so from within an existing database of their own previous donors, rather than seek to recruit them directly at that level. Finally, sitting on top of this edifice are so-called “major donors”, often inappropriately categorised as any who gives more than £250 as a single gift, usually by cheque. Again, these are most often identified and cultivated from within an existing donor database rather than recruited externally. Indeed, there are businesses devoted to helping charities to “find” these donors from within such databases.
Perhaps it is fruitless any more to ponder why this model of fundraising from individuals took root so strongly in the UK when every other English speaking fundraising nation – the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand – developed a model that is totally the reverse, ie “top down”, beginning with the major donors on whose shoulders is placed the greatest responsibility for meeting the charity’s general revenue needs. And, of course, with whom the charity allocates priority when it comes to directing its fundraising resources. While it may be fruitless to ask how we developed the model we now have while surrounded with so much experience of a more successful model, it is time to ask whether the UK model as described any longer above serves us well and whether it is time for change.
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