Running a charity in evenings and one day a week doesn’t leave much time for stepping back and reflecting on what you do and having being offered a bursary by conference sponsor TPP it was fantastic to be able to have time and space to be able to spend time with other fundraisers and consider what we need to be doing as an organization.
Attendees at the conference, held in a beautiful hotel in Grange over Sands, came from a wide variety of organisations, mainly hospices and cancer charities but also carers organisations, arts charities and community groups. I was particularly enthused to meet a trustee from a small community group supporting their local park who had raised a spectacular £4 milllion for the cause.
At a workshop on ‘Getting your brand across’ by Joe Saxton from NPF Synergy it was reassuring that other fundraisers felt like they struggled getting their key messages across. What we do at the Refugee Welcome Trust is very simple but fits within a really complex reasoning and context. It’s also not the most popular cause and during the discussion that formed part of the session others were shocked that we’d actually get people treating us with disgust whilst collecting on the street. There were some really helpful things to think about however around making the message clear and using that one key case study to describe the work we do. So here’s our brand message:
‘At the Refugee Welcome Trust we reunite families who have been separated by persecution.
A mother we worked with had not seen her young children in two years and we were able to support her in bringing them to the UK to be with her.’
As other fundraisers talked about their lack of control over the brand and being unable to shape it to help their work I realized there might be some benefits to being so small and flexibly run. The name change we’ve been discussing at trustee meetings also moved up to the top of my list of things to think about in planning the next year.
In his Plenary talk Joe Saxton produced a fascinating array of statistics on the bewildering array of distractions and choice people have available to them; one that particularly stands out is the 87,000+ combinations of drink you could make at the average Starbucks. That’s a different drink every weekday for 334 years.
This really drove home the importance of succinct messaging and appeals and how grabbing people’s attention in a multi screen, advertising saturated environment is the real challenge.
Thankyou again to TPP Not for Profit for the opportunity to go to this event. It’s so difficult working the way we do to find time to meet others in the sector and to find enough leave to attend daytime workshops and events. And although I don't think I'll ever be able to prioritise this work over helping clients it's also highlighted how much time we'll need to invest in this to make our fundraising strategy a success.
In the report we send back to TPP on how this has helped us I think we’ll be able to show real development in what we do following this event.
Mostly but not all hard work...
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