Your definition of success – define and reinforce what success looks like in terms of your supporter’s experience.

Susan Foster, Fundraising Director at National Trust, suggested that leadership is largely about having ‘a clear vision of where you want to get to and inspiring others to work towards achieving that vision’. Fundamentally, the leader must make clear to everybody what we are all trying to accomplish. Martin Edwards, CEO, Julia’s House Charity agreed, saying that all leaders, including the chief executive, need to make clear what success looks like, what standards are expected in terms of how donors are listened to and respected. Importantly, we need to help people understand that the pursuit of this standard is ongoing, rather than a one-off target that will come and go.

What does success look like for the supporter relationship with your charity?

Joe Jenkins explained that while at Friends of the Earth, he and his colleagues decided they needed to put their supporters at the heart of everything they were doing. Rather than focus their energy primarily on strategy or processes, the way to achieve this was to work on culture and mindset. He views his role of leader as encouraging and promoting a mindset and culture that was focussed on supporters at the heart of everything.

‘We were obsessed with the question ‘how do we change the experience that our supporters have of Friends of the Earth, so that we can have more of an impact on the environmental problems people are concerned about?’

Joe advised that you should ‘be clear what that direction of travel is. Not all the detail, not all planned out, and not presenting yourself as having all the answers…it’s about being clear which way you’re trying to head, rooting that in the values of the organisation, and then empowering others to make it happen.’ 

Giles Pegram, former Director of Fundraising at NSPCC, helped his colleagues to focus their attention on the vision of Donor +, which was for supporters to have an experience which was ‘different, better, more rewarding’ than they would receive at any other organisation. This did not languish in a strategy document somewhere; it was used again and again as people discussed their work.

Richard Turner, former Director of Fundraising at Solar Aid, helped his organisation clarify that the means to generate sufficient resources to achieve their Big Hairy Audacious Goal was to ‘inspire people to spread our stories’.

Help your colleagues embrace the vision in terms that make sense to them

Although Dr Feinberg took great care to make his organisation’s goal real in the day-to-day with the tangible, emotive question ‘how would I treat this patient if they were my own mother?’, he understood that this was not enough. He had to first help everyone become truly vested in wanting to make this shift. He helped them feel the uncomfortable truth that the status quo was unacceptable.

Joe Jenkins advised, ‘Firstly, be clear at all times why carrying on with what your organisation has been doing is not going to get the results you need…you have got to have that reference of why we need to do something else, otherwise its human nature that everyone will default to doing the same things’.

Richard Spencer, who led the Growing Support Programme at RSPB, recognised that achieving change in a complex organisation is rarely easy unless there is a sense of urgency. According to Spencer, you have to focus people’s attention on what is absolutely unacceptable, ‘the burning platform’.

He needed to reach consensus on investing in technology that would provide a single view of all the information about each supporter, and like Dr Feinberg, an important tactic was to share stories.

One example he shared was the case of a couple who had cancelled their membership because the husband was no longer physically able to visit RSPB sites. Without the single supporter view, the individual giving team was unaware that the couple were still very generous, active supporters, holding a garden party every year and raising significant income. Given that the couple were still dedicated supporters of RSPB, they had been understandably upset to be approached by the charity and invited to reactivate their membership.