The main areas of fundraising

Forcing or forging a relationship? Part 5: what’s your real message? Or, how to be relevant

by Charlie Hulme

Do you really know your donors? Do you know why they give you money? Does it matter? Yes, says Charlie Hulme. If we want to keep our donors so expensively recruited we have to make sure our messages are relevant to what they want. We can’t do that if we don’t know what that is.

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Why I support 12 different charities

by Laura Croudace

How can you learn and improve if your training budget is titchy? Get out and donate says Laura Croudace, who wants a steady stream of fundraising pouring through her letterbox because she learns so much from it. And all those donations are still cheaper than most seminars and workshops.

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Bitcoin for fundraisers

by SOFII

Is Bitcoin the next ‘BIG THING’ for fundraisers? Could it work wonders for your organisation?

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Children’s Medical Research Institute: the video that broke the Internet’s heart

by SOFII

Click here to see the video from Australia’s Children’s Medical Research Institute that ‘broke the Internet’s heart’.

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Humber River Hospital Foundation: Direct mail appeal featuring Humbert

by John Lepp

It's amazing how many capital campaigns bewilder donors with architect’s drawings, graphs and complicated giving levels. But Humber River Hospital Foundation turned their backs on stuffy institutional instincts and introduced Humbert – their storyteller supreme. Meet him here and see the fabulous appeals that achieved 33 per cent growth in giving in less than a year.

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Concern Worldwide Ireland's direct dialogue fundraising campaign: ‘Help a child grow up’

by Craig Linton

Is your face-to-facing fundraising no longer as successful as it was? Is it giving you cause for concern? If the answers are yes, please click here to see how Concern Worldwide Ireland tackled the problem and came up with some brilliant solutions.

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Cancer Research UK’s ‘no-make-up selfie’ campaign

by SOFII

An 18 year old from Stoke in the UK is credited with dreaming up the no-make-up selfie craze that raised an amazing £1 million in the first 24 hours, mainly through text messages and social media. The craze went on to raise £8 million in a week. Cancer Research UK can now report back to their hundreds of thousands of new donors that 10 clinical trials are now in place that otherwise wouldn't exist.

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The UNICEF partnership with the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games

by Joe Jenkins

UNICEF's partnership with the Glasgow Commonwealth Games was the first time the opening ceremony of a global major sporting event was used by a charity to raise money: £3.7 million during that evening alone, much of it by texts from people in the audience.

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Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) end-of-year campaign

by SOFII

Please click here to see the award-winning video – full of emotion, powerful images and evocative language – that helped Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation smash its $40,000 target.

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Forcing or forging a relationship? Part 4: how to manage a relationship

by Charlie Hulme

Everything you do has an influence on your donors' connections with you. This in turn helps or harms their commitment to you. Charlie Hulme has already shown how to measure this, now he shows you how to take it a step further and actually manage the relationship.

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Legacy of Hope newsletter and reply form, from Bread for the World, USA

by SOFII

This direct mail package enclosed a newsletter for the Bread for the World ‘Legacy of Hope’ giving society, which has raised millions of dollars in bequests to support the organisation’s work.

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Unbound: the reinvention of an idea that flourished 200 years ago

by Aline Reed

This is a strange one. It the reinvention of an idea that was flourishing two hundred years ago, yet has left the notion of 'traditional' charities behind. Maybe even the sponsors don't see themselves as donors, but it's clear that this scheme contains all the ingredients of good fundraising – tangible need, a target, donor reward, donor recognition and the chance to support again.

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