FICO talk - 17th May 2017
My name is Alastair McIver and, perhaps like many of us in this room today, I am not quite sure how I ended up as Head of Fundraising for an international Christian mission charity from a background of tennis journalism.
My life in the 1990s used to be Wimbledon, Henman, Agassi and Graf (now both happily married to each other) so how I ended up as Head of Communications for Interserve I really don’t know.
I either got out of bed the wrong side one wet Tuesday morning or the Lord had a plan for me which I wasn’t expecting…..
I suspect the latter, because the route into fundraising was actually very smooth, and my work as a communicator, advocate and editor of a tennis magazine over 15 years turned out to be simply a really good training ground for what I do now.
So in 2001 I began my unbaggaged life in Interserve as Head of Communications.
Interserve has been around since 1852 and began as a women’s only mission in London and India. It was birthed out of money…I like saying that because as you will know in this room, Christian mission and the church have for decades, exhibited a poverty mentality when it comes to money.
Is that right? Is that Godly? Could it even be sinful when we know that it’s God’s Bank, His Money, His Mission and we are His people??
Interserve was born out of money…through Lady Kinnaird, whose husband was a banker. God didn’t look at her bank balance when he called her, he looked at her heart.
Is there a lesson in there for us as we seek to love our donors. And what did He see in her heart way back I the mid 1800’s?
I think that He saw in her heart a compassion for dying women thousands of miles away in another continent. In those days that was a big deal. There was no Instagram in those days, no social media and no globalisation. It was simply God working with a privileged woman in order to help underprivileged women.
And so Interserve began, as a woman to women mission and stayed that way for 100 years until in 1952, when men were introduced into the Fellowship…..
Today, Interserve has 900 or so workers – men and women - sent by 14 different international offices to 40 countries in Asia and the Arabised world. That includes 40 workers in this country also. So Interserve began as a pioneering organisation, as so many organsiations in this room today, I suspect.
My question for Interserve and charities in general today, is, what’s changed? Why can’t we be pioneers again, in the areas where we need to be pioneers. And if that is the funding challenge, so be it.
So back in 2001, when I joined this ancient but established and respected charity to head up its communications, fundraising was a small part of that brief.
And naturally, as a tennis communicator, I erred towards the comms bit over the money bit, but I wasn’t going to get away with sidestepping the Lord’s plan that easily, and about 7 or 8 years ago, Interserve, in its wisdom, separated the Communications function from its Fundraising function and I was obviously standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, because as you see today, I ended up as Head of Fundraising.
On such divine moments are careers built. Needless to say, it was the best thing that could have happened to me, and these days, I absolutely love all things fundraising.
Perhaps like you, one of the reasons that I love it relates to that sense of making a difference…being an important cog in the missional wheel that sees God joining the missionary dots between funders and the front line. For me, they are one and the same…different roles, of course…but both need each other and we shouldn’t forget that. My last blog over there is entitled Donor Missionaries who, in my view, are as much missionaries as those to whom they give and we send.
Anyway, because I came into mission from tennis, ie with no mission baggage to speak of, I was able to place the benchmarks of tennis publishing, which were high, against the existing benchmarks of mission communication, which, forgive me, were, in my view, low.
Tennis was loud and lively, and colourful and big and in your face, whereas mission communication, in those days, I discovered, was dull and grey and defensive and tame.
Anyway, the contrast between the communications within Eastern Counties Newspapers Group and Interserve, and missions in general, was so great that, to my shame, instead of asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ I would repeatedly ask the question, ‘What would Eastern Counties Newspapers do?’
But we’ve been trying to answer that question at Interserve for around 15 years now, trying to drag Interserve communications and fundraising into the 21st century and I guess, Love your Donors, could be said to be one of the ways that we’ve been trying to do it.
This Love your Donors phrase is only three years old, but has become a kind of unwritten or unspoken part of our fundraising strategy and has gained some traction with all sorts of charity people, including Fundraising magazine, FICO here, and quite a lot of online interest.
I want to say from the outset that I don’t come to this conference with any sense of joy in my heart for the origins of this phrase, Love your Donors because the initiative, as you are probably aware, was born out of tragedy.
The wider charity world, as we have subsequently found out, was mired in complacency and malpractice for a number of years, and needed a wake-up call.
The late Olive Cook, through her tragic suicide, was the person to give it that call. You could also say that the activities of the Kids Company charity were also complicit among many other examples, probably. Olive Cook, instead of being loved as a donor, was hounded, apparently to death, by the very charities she sought to support.
I don’t necessarily blame the 99 charities whose literature was found in her home for her final actions, of course not, but I do blame the industry for the culture it allowed itself to be seduced by, a culture arguably of greed and self-interest.What would Eastern Counties Newspapers do to counter such a context?
Well, knowing them as I did – even as a non-Christian organisation - I think that they might have asked the same question that Jesus Himself might have asked:
Can we really hope to solve the world’s poverty and need through the exploitation of our donors? I don’t think so.
The whole sorry exposure of the time in the media demanded that charities, and their Trustees, needed to sort themselves out and unfortunately, today, we have that outcome of the sorting out process, the sledgehammer of a Data or Information Commissioner to crack the nut of occasional but serious malpractice within the industry. Perhaps the sector is reaping today what it has sowed for decades.
Christian charities are part of the wider charity scene, of course, and therefore, in my view, and perhaps the view that Eastern Counties Newspapers would endorse, it is us whoneeds to lead the way, pioneer a new approach.
And I am sure that in the aftermath of heavy handed regulation that is being imposed upon the sector, many, if not all, charities, are rethinking their donor relations strategies even as we speak and for some here, maybe Love your Donors – while it is not rocket science nor will it change your immediate income streams dramatically, it may, I hope, prompt a cultural shift in our thinking, a door perhaps into intentional better practice than we may already be engaged in.
From Interserve’s perspectives, we re-wrote our policies and adopted Love Your Donors as a kind of unwritten, unspoken policy, changing the culture if you like to one of intention rather than one of simple aspiration.
As representatives of Christian charities here in this room, I would hope that we would all be loving our donors and doing it well.
Or are we so wedded to the text book and technical that we can sometimes forget that we are dealing with donors and not data?
What does loving your donors look like in your charity currently?
My mentor, the amazing Myles Wilson, who I met with in Belfast just a few weeks ago, said to me early on in my fundraising career, you can’t make money sitting behind a desk?
Do we believe that? Do we agree with it?
I certainly did. It freed me up to get out into people’s homes, their offices, their workplaces, not to mention the Costas and Café Neros of this country. And I discovered something.
I found out that people actually enjoyed being informed, thanked and visited. They didn’t feel threatened. Some were surprised that a charity would even bother to get out of bed to speak with them personally.
I have met with supporters, eaten with donors in their homes, walked round their gardens, heard their family stories, seen photographs of their grandchildren, and even cried with them. Some of them are lonely. A rare charity visit might well be the only time that they see someone in a week, or a month.
I can understand that some of you may well have lots of questions at this point, such as, ‘how can we possibly get round to see all of our donors?’ and ‘how do we fund this?’ and ‘what funding difference will it really make if we visit our donors?’ and so on, and all of those are valid questions.
We had to ask those same questions of ourselves when we embarked on this strategy. And don’t get me wrong, none of what I am about today replaces Legacy strategies, Appeal letters, Trust applications or Online Giving, Events and so on.
But our geographically led donor visit strategy actually enhances all of the above, all of those traditional, Institute of Fundraising endorsed, activities.
OK, so let’s deal with those three questions one by one if I may.
Let’s take the database one first. If you have a database of 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 or even 200,000 plus, it’s not easy to know where to start.
But breaking down a database is actually quite easy to do and once you do it simply and without fuss, you will find all sorts of ways of visiting people to thank them for their ongoing support.
Interserve in Great Britain and Ireland has around 11,000 supporters. Not all are donors but they all sit somewhere on the pyramid. And at some stage they all opted in to receive something from us, maybe our magazine, newsletter, prayer information; maybe they signed up at an event. These are all opt-in, onside people who are interested in what we do. They are people.
So we first broke our data down by donations, ie those people who give to the organisation on a regular or significant basis. You will all have your own definitions of significant, or major, but ours was simple – anyone who has given in excess of £1,000 to General Funds (ie not projects or people) for three consecutive years.
They were the first report we would run and that would immediately categorise the financial givers who give to the organisation’s general funding as opposed to those who gave to projects or people – and Interserve has a lot of people being funded by individuals. And then– probably against best text book practice – we categorised geographically.
Where is the funding congestion on our database?
If you look up the Orkneys on your database, the likelihood is that any charity does not have a congestion of donors in that group of islands. But if you look up Oxshott, or Ongar, or Oldham and surrounding areas, it is more likely that you will.
How is your data congestion? Do you know where your best areas of the country ‘regionally’ are?
So for example, you might want to create a region, the M4 corridor for example. You know that wherever you travel along that road, you have fans, supporters, people you can visit.
We want to be cost and time effective so it is important that we know the answer to such questions.
And thirdly, we categorised our donors by their mission interest…ie what moved them enough for them to give to our cause?
So we would do a little research on each one and find out where their donations were being allocated. Again, this is a database issue. Who is giving to what.
Sowhat we ended up with was the how much, the where from and the why and who to?
Once you have that information it’s easy to prioritise towns, cities and regions and approach groups of donors through personalised emails, telling them that you will be in their town or city on a certain set of dates, and inviting them to have a coffee with you so that you can update and inform them about the charity and what it is spending their money on.
And you can hear from them, about their first involvement and how long they have been involved with the charity.
If you take an informal approach to this I find that I get an 80% success rate…people in 2017 are genuinely appreciative of the invitation for you to visit them, and they usually say yes.
So how do you prepare for a visit?
It is imperative, I have found, to make sure that you know the giving history of the donor, how long they have been giving; whether their investment in the charity has increased, stayed the same or decreased over the years, and also to have a good narrative ie what are the things that the donor can relate to that are current; where are the good, contemporary stories.
For Interserve, that may involve the refugee highway in Europe, immigration, or the persecuted church. What are the big contemporary issues in your charity?
The outcome of loving your donors in this way is that you secure not only an opportunity to find out about them, their motivation, their family circumstances, their profile, but you get a chance to share with them about the issues of the day that concern your charity, stories from the mission field if you like. It’s a win win situation. You share, they listen and then they share, and you listen.
And finally, by the way, when you go to see them, don’t forget to thank them. Easily said but over a cup of Earl Grey, Easily forgotten too. Outcome? They feel valued, and loved. And as a result, their response to feeling loved is the same as anyone would respond to feeling loved….loyalty.
Loyalty is a key but understated outcome of loving your donors. When Christmas comes around and they are reviewing their giving for the following year, and they need to drop one of the five charities that they support, who are they going to drop? Not yours.
Other key added value outcomes of getting through the front door and into the living room are their contacts – Tunbridge Wells story…and increased financial giving…walking away with a cheque or cash as a result of your visit.
Donor visits, loving your donors, are win win situations. There are no negatives, both in the short term, or in the long term. It’s worth doing.
Another way of managing donors in congested areas is to bring them together in groups in a hotel or a church building to update them on something to do with the charity, an invitation that would make them feel special. Create a good contemporary narrative and deliver it, leaving plenty of time for discussion and questions and some up to date literature distribution.
For the sake of an overnight hotel room, a bit of petrol, a few pastries and some coffee, you can hit a large number of donors and secure their loyalty for years to come.
Did I use the word legacies? Perhaps I should have done…but maybe that’s for another day. So that’s the external.
What about the internal, persuading your Trustees, your boss, your colleagues that this is a worthwhile investment of time and money.
In this new era of Trustees needing to engage with the charity’s fundraising, it is imperative that we make a compelling case for a bold and innovative strategy.
But more than that, this is a process of education. Most Trustees in Christian organisations that I am aware of have little or no interest in fundraising.
Indeed, Trustees, Directors and managers who aren’t fundraisers don’t really get the added value message of something like Loving our Donors. They have historically believed that a fundraising action should achieve an immediate and visible result, without recognising that longer term thinking and investment in people, as opposed to exploitation of data, can bring the long term rewards that can secure a more beneficial and prosperous future for our charities.
Put simply, short termism in fundraising thinking restricts long term beneficial outcomes for our charities.
To make a new initiative work, to introduce cultural change, takes courage and intention. It doesn’t come easy.You have to work at it a little.
So, what to do. If there is a Trustee who is nominated to support the fundraising brief – and these days, there should be - make sure that you make friends with that person.