Bite-sized big ideas for you!

Here are my top 8 takeaways from this year’s F&P Fundraising Forum. I’ve taken the best brainshots (as opposed to mere screenshots) and put them into this article for you.

1. Supercharge your fundraising with AI?

I have three words for you: Virtual Engagement Officer.

VEOs are now doing donor relationships. It’s JoanSmithAI in real life—I wrote about her/ it in my article Can Machines Love Your Neighbour? Christian Ethics, AI and Donor Relationships. VEOs are even getting donations from prospects.

Curious about what that might look like? I’d like to introduce you to Ava. This was one example shared with the masterclass.

And apparently (and even more shockingly!) older donor prospects are happier to use VEOs than younger donors, who more often want to speak to a human.

As for the rest of the masterclass, I came away with a bunch of highly useful tips and suggested tools. One I’m keen for my charities to try out is Handwrytten, which uses robots to handwrite cards at scale. You can customise with your own handwriting… personalised donor thank yous anyone??!!! Say goodbye to hand cramps forever.

2. Investing for impact: where fundraisers should spend their energy now

Fiona McPhee shared various insights on behalf of The Benchmarking Project during her session. The standout message:

Great fundraising organisations understand they have two businesses with two sets of customers: service users AND donors. The needs of both must be met and neither should be compromised.

The business of making money is not the same as the business of development/ conservation/ research. But many of us forget this, putting all our time and resources into collecting lag (past snapshot) metrics, rather than lead (predictive) metrics.

We need to measure:

• Migration rates (or movement upwards, downwards and sideways on the donor pyramid) as well as your retention rates
• Projected lifetime value over first-year income from acquisition
• Income through the lens of donor tenure. Your income might be even growing, but is your donor base doing the same? Or is that growth in income hiding the fact that your number of active donors is shrinking? WARNING: many organisations are heading for a cliff because stable income is hiding a shrinking donor pool… and they don’t even know it. So they are doing nothing to future proof their income through the acquisition of younger (40 to 60-year-old) donors.

Download (thanks to The Benchmarking Project): Five fundraising metrics that connect your activity today with your sustainability tomorrow.

3. Putting supporters at the heart of fundraising: lessons from the Leukaemia Foundation

Maybe your charity has a similar problem to the Leukaemia Foundation—they had tons of data, but they weren’t using any of it well. It was the usual stuff that we all measure, like web traffic and inbound feedback… but what does it look like when you start collecting your data more proactively?

Here’s a slide that shows all the reactive data they collected… but I loved the proactive data they’re now gathering.

Data collection and analysis (especially when it’s qualitative!) can seem overwhelming, but with AI it’s no longer the headache that it used to be. You could use AI to help you collect donor words AND analyse them to give you brilliant insights for use in your future direct mail development.

And what about your Annual Supporter Survey? So many charities have painstakingly collected data sitting in their CRMs gathering dust… because no one had the time to look at it again once the campaign was over. Now with AI, you could export it into a spreadsheet and ask AI to analyse it for insights that can help you hone your ongoing donor communications. And we’ve been doing that for a while now as part of our appeal development process.

4. Implementing a new CRM – from the fundraisers point of view

First, thanks to the awesome fundraisers from Plan International Australia, Médecins Sans Frontières Australia and Médecins Sans Frontières New Zealand, Cancer Council Victoria, and Australia for UNHCR, for sharing their hard-earned CRM experience!

Question for you: Is your organisation thinking about investing in a new CRM? Then make sure you avoid this one mistake charities commonly make when implementing a new CRM (that sounds clickbaity, doesn’t it, but stick with me).

They fail to design a CRM for the future.

The point of introducing a new CRM isn’t just to accommodate what you already do—it’s to transform the way you work. That means starting with the outcomes you want to achieve and designing the system around them, rather than simply replicating your current processes. And because a new CRM often reshapes how people do their jobs, change management has to reach right across the organisation.

It sounds simple but the fundraisers on this panel highlighted how often charities design a CRM to replicate what they’re doing now instead of what they want to do in future.

Similarly, don’t skimp on the training! Ideally, tailor training to each team’s unique needs. If you fail to provide adequate training, people will likely avoid using the new system entirely and revert back to the old way of doing things. Or cobble together an ineffective solve of their own made from a spreadsheet and a dream.

And make sure you set clear time for all of the above so fixes and frustrations don’t pile up. Remember, when systems don’t work, staff rarely blame the implementation partner. They blame leadership — that may well be you!

5. Finding, developing, using and making the most of compelling case studies and the right voices

As expected, this session was a great reminder on how to identify and collect a strong fundraising story — need, emotion, solution, connection, detail, authenticity, and that extra something special which leaves you with GOOSEBUMPS and a TINGLE down your spine. (Thank you Dominique Antarakis!)

Still, the real highlight for me was hearing from Lucy Quinn who works for LifeFlight.

I know better than anyone that story collection presents a BIG challenge. Every hurdle covered in the session, I face on a regular basis—

• The struggle of motivating non-fundraising people to do extra work that’s not a priority for them in a timely fashion? Check.
• Gaining the trust needed to interview vulnerable people (over and over again)? Check.
• The difficultly of interviewing young children who aren’t super comfortable speaking with adults? Check.
• The impossibility of finding a suitable or willing case study? Check… x1 million!
• Accounting for general privacy issues and concerns. Check.
• Not to mention case studies pulling out— before the interview, after it’s taken place, and yes… even after whole packs have been written. Check.

That’s why I was so interested in what Lucy had to share. LifeFlight’s challenge is that the organisation works in urgent pre-hospital care, so patient outcomes are often unknown. And because of privacy laws, they have no way of getting in touch. In other words, they lose contact with the patient once they hand them over to the hospital.

The other consideration is that LifeFlight is only required when things are really dire. So the story around the need can often be really traumatic. It can take years for a patient to feel ready to talk about their experience.

So LifeFlight developed a patient-led approach to finding stories. They encourage crew members to share treatment and transport stories, and there is an open invitation (on their website, etc.) for past patients to contact LifeFlight and share about their experience.

When this happens, they have a dedicated Story Manager whose job is to be the sole point of contact for anyone who is thinking about sharing their story. She cultivates the relationship and builds rapport so that when they’re ready to tell it, it’s not so overwhelming. Because they already know the interviewer.

This approach also has the added benefit of allowing the Story Manager to screen stories and  identify which ones will be suitable for which appeals, so no one’s time is ever wasted.

I think this approach is BRILLIANT. It solves so many of the challenges you’re likely to meet when collecting stories for your next appeal. Especially at the last minute!

If you’ve even experienced the stress of not being able to find a story… or the disappointment of the perfect story falling through… I encourage you to follow this example. It’s definitely an approach I’ll recommend for my clients facing similar struggles going forward!

6. What I learned in higher education fundraising that I’ve taken with me into the charity sector

Heather Little’s background is in the university fundraising space. She talked a lot about the fact that universities have a long-term strategy. So when they fundraise, it’s not about raising money for the next year, it’s to fund multi-year projects.

One of her campaign highlights was for Monash University where she helped raise a billion dollars over 10 years. Universities are in a unique position, unlike many charities, where they don’t need fundraising dollars to keep the lights on. But this fact allows them the freedom and the space to think, plan and fundraise for the long-term… a perspective that other charities could learn from.

Here’s a second point from Heather about getting donors invested in a BIG vision. Not everybody can give a million dollars, but everybody DOES want to be part of something bigger than themselves. So she asked, “Would you prefer to raise $10 million from one donor for a $10 million idea? Or get lots of people involved over longer periods, and ask them to contribute $100K each to fund a $100 million idea?”

Transformational giving needs vision. And Heather encourages you as fundraisers and storytellers to be the ones who define transformational giving (and set vision!) for your organisations.

7. Designing for donors who want more: The power of campaigns that combine brand, advocacy and fundraising

You might find this slide from ntegrity’s presentation helpful if you’ve ever found yourself wondering how to reconcile the relationship between brand and fundraising…

Your fundraising is likely focused on the people who are brand and cause aligned. They’re already your donors!

Your charity’s brand, however, is about reaching people who are cause curious and cause aligned. Prospects who are now in the pipeline and (hopefully) can become future donors. The question is: are you building communications that can reach them?

8. Diversifying donor acquisition: how Australia for UNHCR is rethinking regular giving.

Nicola Norris from Australia for UNHCR shared a bunch of important and interesting things about RG experimentation and product development.

But who knew you could turn RG headaches into a game… Regular Giving Bingo!

Thanks to the team at Australia for UNHCR for giving me a giggle to end the conference!