Marian Nicholson
Director
Herpes Viruses Association
30 Sep 2011

Babies, donkeys, cathedrals, masterpieces - you can ask the public to help you with any of these. The really difficult fundraising is for charities offering help and advice to people with incontinence or genital herpes. Only people who have been helped by us will donate - and they will not participate in or undertake any fundraising activity as then people will know their secret. (You may think this is paranoia, but this is how people think.)

I have challenged fundraisers to come up with ideas, but they agree that 'charitable trusts and your beneficiaries' own pockets' is the only source for us.

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Ceris Morris
Head of Fundraising & Partnerships
Museums Sheffield
27 Sep 2011

The corridors of Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery funding are indeed tortuous and one has to be a decoder of the highest calibre to work out what it is that they want and then translate it back into their language. Once the code is cracked however, the rewards can be high. I look forward to my MBE :)

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Adrian Beney
Partner
More Partnership
27 Sep 2011

David gets half way to telling this tale here, but he's missed its moral. For cathedrals, heritage buildings, museums and universities it is harder to write the Case for Support. There is no question about this, since they can not usually pull the emotional heart-strings in the way that saving babies, donkeys etc can.

But when these organisations get it right, and particularly in the university sector they are getting it right in a very big way now, the money comes rolling in. The University of Kent's very own Beth Breeze found in her latest "million pound donor" report that universities had raised more such gifts than the whole of the rest of the charity sector combined (excepting gifts to establish grant making trusts.)

So why is this? Maybe because cathedrals, universities, art galleries, museums and theatres represent permanence and longevity, and solutions rather than problems. I think that's part of it. But I also think there's something deeper. Here it is:

Think about this: If you are asked to give, how do you make the decision? Your head and your heart play a part, in varying proportions for different people. But if it's £2 that's being asked for, and the cause seems good, then there's probably not a great deal of intellectual input needed into making the decision.

But what if the amount was bigger? Here I think the balance of emotional and intellectual changes. To give away £20 might still be an emotionally led decision. But if it's £200, or £2,000? Your analytical brain begins to get seriously engaged with the question of the good that your money will do when translated into action, and the balance of that against the cost to you. This is not the argument about %age spent on admin; this is much more to do with the effectiveness of the charity. Is it any good at what it does? What will be the lasting impact of the organisation and what it represents?

So the "head" is getting involved as well as the heart. And where an organisation has been forced to think about how it connects with the heads of its supporters as well as their hearts because of the less emotional nature of the Case for Support, then the big gifts flow.

Maybe the moral of this Canterbury Tale is that all organisations need to think really critically about the intellectual case for giving to their organisations. When, and only when, that's sorted, it's time to put the emotion in. But the emotion has to stand up to cold hard scrutiny.

Would it be worth, in the cold light of day, giving a large gift to David's fictitious air ambulance service for injured and abandoned donkeys with leukaemia? I don't think so.

On the other hand, the Cathedral presents an emotional and intellectual proposition to give to the preservation of a building which brings joy and wonder to the hearts of hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, which incarnates the history of our country, which represents the best of mediaeval architecture and stonemasonry, which stood for over 900 years, which contains extraordinary early stained glass, and which continues a musical tradition that celebrates on a daily basis a choral tradition dating back almost as long as the building itself.

Add to this that if you are a Christian you are likely to believe that it has an important role in proclaiming the Christian tradition of our country and in continuing to tell of the inclusive and liberating nature of the claims of the God in whose honour it is built, and you have a Case for Support which is pretty comprehensive.

It appeals to the heart, the head, and maybe together, the soul. It is this comprehensive approach which marks out the successful large gift fundraising campaign, since it attempts to engage with the whole of the donor, not just their emotions.

Air ambulances for donkeys with leukaemia? You can keep them.

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