The newest buzzword in fundraising is ‘nudging’. A nudge is a small change in our environment that points us in an alternative direction to change our behaviour, hopefully for the better. They focus on the tiny unconscious decisions we make every day. For a decade, some face-to-face fundraisers have been using a mix of passion and sales techniques often referred to by the more salesy companies as Neurolinguistics or NLP. This is the belief that certain language and actions ma

When I write “I don’t give to animal charities” I don’t mean that I won’t give to animal charities, I mean that I haven’t yet. Six years ago, I was told by a now prominent wildlife fundraiser that a personal connection to a cause makes you 70% more likely to donate to it. This makes perfect sense to me, except in my case it isn’t true. Over the last ten years I have had around ten regular donations leaving my account at different times, and all of them have been humanitarian

Good news, Christmas is coming! With that, your fundraising, marketing, supporter care, donation processing and volunteer teams are working like beavers to be ready for the Christmas Appeal and all the donations that will flood in with it. But spare a thought and a couple of actions for your F2F teams. Our shopping centres have just got a whole lot more expensive to fundraise in with no measurable improvement in results. Your fundraisers are feeling the pressure and are facin

The use of virtual reality (VR) technology has not blown away our donors, but it is at least an attempt to reinvigorate a channel that, on the whole, makes little effort to innovate. Agency after agency start up with a basic understanding of pitch construction, a grasp of the law of averages and little regard for the sustainability of the industry as they are focussed solely on surviving in a tough sector. A lot of F2F agencies stick rigidly to a fundraising/sales structure t