Fundraising Reviews

What is the right fundraising strategy for you? How do you know if an area of fundraising or a particular campaign is performing well or could do better? What fundraising activity should you stop?

I can review your fundraising programme as a whole or specific income streams or activities. I can assess performance and benchmark against best practice. Working with each client in with a tailored, bespoke approach, I can understand your organisational strategy and funding needs and ensure your fundraising strategy produces the right type and amount of funding at the right time.

I will then develop practical recommendations to ensure that you are making every pound and hour of time you invest in fundraising work as hard as possible for your charity. My recommendations will give you the confidence to start, grow or stop fundraising activities to ensure you are maximising your potential.

If you have areas of your fundraising which you feel are not performing as well they should or need to grow income, contact me to discuss how I can undertake a review for you and help you put the recommendations into practice.

I can help you with:

· Analysis of the current performance of your fundraising programme or specific areas of it

· Identifying where and how you can grow; and where you can redirect time and money to deliver a better return

· Practical steps to implement recommendations

· Advice, mentoring and coaching to enable your team to put recommendations into practice

You can contact me on cmilesconsulting@outlook.com for an initial discussion on how I can help.

Undertaking a Fundraising Review and putting the results into practice

The key to success for any fundraising programme is to ensure every pound and staff and volunteer hour your organisation invests in fundraising is producing the best return possible. But it can be a challenge to assess how an overall fundraising programme, income streams or individual activities are performing. This can lead to charities continuing with the same fundraising they have always done and missing out on the potential growth that a different strategy would bring; or being unaware that returns are dropping from certain areas until it is too late to take corrective action.

With the demands of stretching in-year budget targets, and the pressure of day to day work, many charities find it difficult to make the time and space to review how their fundraising is performing. Or they suspect better performance may be possible but lack the expertise or experience to know how to benchmark their performance and work out what needs to change and how.

In order to get the best value from its fundraising team the fundraising strategy needs to be in sync with the organisational strategy and goals. Fundraising needs to produce the right amount of money for the charity of the right type at the right time. This sounds simple in theory but takes careful planning in practice.

Fundraising Review case study: Battersea Dogs and Cats Home

On taking over as Fundraising Director at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home I inherited a well-built, successful fundraising programme. Driven by long-term strategic investment in Individual Giving, Battersea had grown voluntary Fundraising ten-fold to over £24m. Whilst regular giving had been the bedrock of growth, the charity had recognised the need to diversify income streams and had started to invest in challenge events, corporates, major donors and an Innovation team.

To develop a fundraising strategy which would deliver the best return on investment and deliver the funding the organisation needed I led a full review of the fundraising programme.

Fundraising review process

The review had 5 key elements:

· Context of the overall fundraising market in the UK – who gives to charity, how much and why, and where the key trends in charitable giving were going

· Review of the organisational strategy and mapping of the charity’s future funding needs to identify how much money we needed to raise by when

· Financial analysis by income stream and key activities, including staff time to identify what was performing well and what less well against sector benchmarks

· Boston Matrix analysis to identify which activities were performing strongly (cash cows), which could grow (Rising Stars), which a decision needed to be made on whether their potential was good enough to warrant further development (Problem Children) and which low return, low growth activities should end (Dogs)

· Key supporter analysis to identify who our best performing audiences were; where we had space to grow our top audiences; and which audiences we were doing unusually well with

Outcome of the review and how we implemented it

From this work we identified that, whilst the fundraising income was currently meeting the organisation’s needs, the charity’s exciting new strategy meant that further significant growth was needed over the next five years.

The financial analysis and Boston Matrix analysis identified some areas which were not producing a benchmark return on investment. We found we had a number of Problem Children and Rising Stars as a number of new initiatives had been started at the same time, making it difficult for the team to focus on the ones that were showing good potential, and scale them up at speed.

As a result of the review we made 3 key decisions:

1. To develop a business case for further investment in our top performing area (Individual Giving) where we had the greatest potential to grow at the best available return in the fundraising market

2. To adopt a Fewer, Bigger, Better approach and identify which activities should Stop, Start or Grow- so we could transition away from lower return activities and reallocate time and money to the higher return ones

3. To reshape the fundraising staff team, through natural turnover where possible, to ensure we had the right number and seniority of staff posts in the growth areas and reduce headcount in the areas we were disinvesting it.

Outcomes and learnings

We successfully secured significant increased investment from the Trustees to drive future growth. We stopped some activities and redeployed resource into other areas. We were able to make the majority of staff changes by re-purposing vacant posts but did have to undertake limited restructures in two teams.

Our key learnings were the importance of engaging the Trustees and Senior Management at an early stage and continually explaining why we needed to grow income and the process we were going through. This was vital. We were fortunate that the charity had a clear five year strategy which had associated outline costings, which enabled us to map how Fundraising income needed to grow alongside it. This avoided the common issue of fundraising teams being told to grow income without a clear rationale for why or what the charity would spend it on.

Critically, we involved the Fundraising teams at each stage. The Fundraising team was briefed on the overall review plan and why we needed to do it at an awayday and kept updated at team meetings. Senior Managers led the Boston Matrix analysis in their teams. We then came together as a Fundraising Senior Management group to review the outcomes of the Boston Matrix and next steps. Once we had decided to focus on fewer, bigger, better activities the Senior Managers led an exercise with their teams to identify what would stop, start and grow in their areas. This was obviously sensitive as it impacted on people’s roles and staff had worked hard on areas which we identified needed to stop. It was crucial to handle those discussions sensitively and work with teams on insight and evidence to enable them to reach the decision that certain activities needed to cease.

The fundraising programme is now well positioned to deliver the growth the charity needs to make its vision for the next 5 years a reality. The team have the knowledge and skills to benchmark activities and continually evaluate performance to ensure they are focused on the best opportunities for growth.

If you have areas of your fundraising which you feel are not performing as well they should or need to grow income, contact us to discuss how I can undertake a review for you and help you put the recommendations into practice.