A series of events that will challenge our most cherished fundraising ideas
We’re launching a new series of early evening lectures that will change your thinking about some of our beautiful fundraising theories. In each presentation the facts will be lined up before the established wisdom. If our theories lose, we will explore new thinking based upon the evidence.
Session One: Arguing with the Wind. Can fundraising get better year-on-year?
The first of this series ran as a webinar – from 3-4.30pm on 4th June 2020. From the original event planned for 24th March, we changed the focus of the presentation to include an analysis of the current situation facing trusts, based upon current wisdom and the lessons from the past.
- The nature of charitable trust giving, the research was based upon our study into 100 donors, from 2004 to 2019, including in-depth investigations of 41 examples of exceptional grantmaking. One of the big questions was whether trust fundraisers can anticipate donors who are going to transform their giving. Also, from the 41 investigations, can we tried to extract any patterns.
- What’s going on now, what’s likely to happen? We drew our conclusions from an analysis of how our 100 trusts reacted to the 2008-9 financial crisis and their financial condition in 2019. We also drew conclusions from the experience of grantmakers and a literature review of recent articles, research and statements.
Bill Bruty was the host for this event, sharing the results of his extensive research into trust fundraising. He was joined by David Carrington who has been involved in the world of grantmaking since 1992. We will be making the webinar available as a recording from 21st June. You’ll be able access this and the full report from our website. There will be a small charge but it will be free for people who booked for the event on 4th June. We apologise for the delay in completing the report and making the recording available. This has been done to the additional work associated with converting our courses to online webinars, it has been exciting, but has eaten into valuable report writing time.
The next session in this Brutal Facts series will take place as another webinar in September and will be an investigation into the nature of charitable trust fundraising, based upon an analysis of the 10 year income for 24 national charities (from the same 2004-2019 timeframe). We will attempt to answer these questions:
- How often do donors increase giving?
- What is a realistic rate of new donor recruitment?
- How often do charities experience sustained growth in their income?
- What is the Pareto calculation: 80:20 or 90:10/?
- How can the data improve our ability to set realistic targets?
We will announce the details and dates shortly.