Action for Children has launched an "ambitious plan" to double its annual fundraising income to £40m in the next few years, following a rebrand earlier this year.
The charity used agency Johnson Banks to launch a new brand in January, including a logo and marketing materials, which cost it about £100,000.
It then hired former Save the Children fundraising director Nick Jones the following month.
Speaking to Civil Society News, Action for Children’s chief executive Tony Hawkhead said that with the brand and restructured team in place, the charity is now working towards doubling its fundraising income.
Action for Children’s current fundraising activities account for just £20m of its £150-160m overall income, much of which comes from local government contracts.
Hawkhead said the charity had neglected investment in fundraising and its brand in the five or six years preceding his arrival in 2014 but he is now keen to boost the amount of unrestricted funds the organisation receives.
He said: “What we know is the more money we have as voluntary income, the £20m, that allows us the luxury of innovating and doing things without commissioners, and taking things to commissioners that we know work and asking them to put money into it.
“There are charities in the sustainable development field that have precisely that model. Save the Children does it for example. They test ideas using their income, they take them to national governments and say ‘this works and it’s cost effective’.
“So it’s great that we recruited Nick Jones from Save the Children as our new fundraising director. He’s got a lot of brilliant ideas. He started in April and he is certainly already making good progress with an ambitious plan.”
Neet Feet
Action for Children said it had learned some lessons from its previous use of fundraising agency Neet Feet, which owed the charity £99,000 when it entered liquidation last year.
Neet Feet, which employed young people who were “not in education, employment, or training”, closed two weeks after it featured in a damning news story by the Sun.
The article made a number of serious accusations of poor fundraising practice against certain members of the agency’s staff, including using aggressive tactics; deliberately targeting vulnerable people and drug-taking while at work.
Hawkhead said Action for Children had served notice on Neet Feet by the time the tabloid article had appeared after raising concerns about the agency’s performance.
He said his charity had not received the money it was owed by the agency and he could not absolutely guarantee a similar situation would not happen in future.
“At the core of the Neet Feet thing was somebody who went completely rogue and who breached all of his terms of employment conditions and instructions from his own employer.
“We have to recognise that although it was incredibly valuable for us to learn the lessons of how we could improve, you absolutely cannot 100 per cent guarantee that you won’t have something like that potentially happening again.”
The Fundraising Regulator recommended areas Action for Children could improve following the situation with Neet Feet, such as more regular anonymous calls to the agency, all of which the charity has adopted.
Hawkhead said he found working with the regulator a positive experience, although he recognises that is not a “universal view” across the sector.
He added: “We are not happy at what happened with Neet Feet but we are proud of the way we dealt with it.”
4Children
Action for Children took over 70 per cent of fellow charity 4Children’s services when it ceased operations last August.
While all 4Children’s senior team were made redundant - about 50 to 60 people - more than 700 transferred to Action for Children.
Of the services that weren’t transferred to the charity, many were taken in-house by the contracting councils partly due to the charity’s refusal to take on local authority pension liabilities.
Hawkhead said: “We had to take quite a financial risk in taking this on because the amount of reliable financial data we had to go on was quite limited.”
He describes rapid negotiations between the two charities which allowed services to continue undisrupted during the changeover as a “Herculean effort” including some staff working 80 hour weeks to ensure workers could be transferred.
“People got paid, people got their pension contributions paid, people got their expenses sorted,” he said.
Among the services Action for Children has taken over are a set of RAF nurseries, which are a commercial operation, and a central government contract as the Department for Education’s early years adviser.
These are new areas for the charity to operate in but it says taking on 4Children’s experienced staff, including head of early years Sue Robb, has helped the transition run smoothly.
In Fundraising Magazine
Local authority contracts
Reduced local authorities budgets over the past seven years has meant fewer contracts, for things such as children’s services, with a duration of more than five years, Hawhead said.
He said shorter contracts are favoured by some councils due to uncertainty of their long-term income, but warned that these were less cost-effective due to the increased resources spent on transferring services from one provider to another.
“If you have a three-year contract, you spend the first year bringing that service in-house and making sure it does not fall over, you spend the middle year delivering the contract, and you spend the final year delivering the contract and getting ready to leave.
“I am not blaming [councils], it is very hard when you are under pressure to be able to step back and say let’s be strategic about this.”
But he said more conversations were needed with local authorities about the benefits of longer contracts as well as joint lobbying of central government to provide more funding for children’s services.
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The full interview with Tony Hawkhead will be published in Fundraising Magazine in September. |
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