Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well, one of the first things that the fundraising think tank might do is
to think about a fundraisers' bill of rights.
You know, for half a century we've had a donor bill of rights from the US, one
of the first countries to think about those issues, but we haven't had a fundraisers'
bill of rights. And maybe fundraisers have the right to be considered to be a profession.
Maybe they have the right to be, to
have an access to a professional education?
Maybe they have the right to expect that they'll
have a significant amount of board involvement in the fundraising that they're doing?
And maybe, just maybe, they should have the right to
expect that the organisation that they succeed in that will be proud of the fundraising that they've accomplished.
Well, that's not an exhaustive list and you can imagine
how a brains trust of people can come up with something that you can be proud of and
equally you can imagine that how impactful that might be in kind of
changing the perception of fundraising within the
sector. There's almost too much apology taking place for fundraising right now. And
actually we can get boards to understand what fundraising is about, and the contribution that we can make,
then we can shift that a little bit. What else?
Well, we'd like to consider putting together a longer term study of philanthropists
so, in other words, what's the journey that people go on
when they decide that they've had enough of business and they want to apply
the knowledge and expertise that they've just gained to something a bit different and
they decide that they want to try and solve some of the world's big problems. Well, what is the
kind of process that they go through when they do that? What are the
big challenges that they're going to encounter when they do that and how do they begin
to overcome some of those challenges? So you begin to capture some of the
body of knowledge that you can then expose other philanthropists to
when they begin that process, when they start that journey.
So they don't have to do all the trial and error stuff that other people have done they can
learn from what's gone on before, an academic perspective on what's gone on before
to help them deal with some of the decisions they'll have to take.
We're also going to put together a panel study looking at different behaviour so
tracking how individual giving
changes over time, to begin to answer some of those questions about, you know, so
do people always give through that channel or they kind of grow into
some of the more traditional channels over time? And if that's the case what does that mean for fundraising practice?
And then finally here, the other thing that we've always been known for in Plymouth is putting together a panel of field experiments from the new domain philanthropic psychology. The early
work we've done on that has increased giving by between 10 and 35% simply by playing with words in the solicitation
and the significant thing about that is that we've
increased giving by 10-35% depending on
what it is that we're playing with but when we do that we increase how good
people feel about their giving. So that in
the long term that increase in giving becomes
sustainable. That's what's distinctive about this work. And there's a lot of other work that can go on in that domain to
add value to the relationships that we have
with supporters. It comes back to what I said earlier, you know, we've been hung up on delivering impact and communicating that.
We need to think a little bit more about when we fundraise, what are we actually doing to the people that we're communicating.