Hugh Radojev bids a fond farewell to the International Fundraising Congress 2015 by looking at some of the key things he learnt.

With more than 1,100 fundraisers from 62 countries around the world, the 2015 International Fundraising Congress held in Holland last week was a hotbed of fundraising ideas, concepts, inspiration and, of course, a little bit of gossip.

From the 100 sessions, held by over 90 speakers spread across three days here are the five key lessons that we took away from this year’s IFC.

Impossible ambitions will futureproof your fundraising campaigns

Speaking to standing-room only audiences all week, the presentation from Alan Clayton, creative director of Revolutionise, on big ideas was one of the hottest tickets in town.

Drawing on over 25 years’ worth of experience working on fundraising campaigns across the world, Clayton urged fundraisers to think big with their ideas: “Don’t make your organisation ‘credible’, make it incredible.”

Clayton highlighted the work in particular of the NSPCC and of Macmillan, who were both able to revolutionise their organisation’s fundraising by communicating “new ambitions” as being unifying, emotional propositions.

NSPCC’s ‘Cruelty to children must stop. Full stop’ and Macmillan’s ‘No one should face cancer alone’ campaigns not only perfectly synthesised what both organisations stand for, but also effectively “futureproofed” their fundraising, as both goals are technically “impossible”.

Beware of burning out

“Nobody said that love for humanity means that you can’t love yourself,” said Prof. Jen Shang, director of research at the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy at Plymouth University.

Shang told gathered fundraisers that because they are always told to focus on the worries and concerns of both their donors and their beneficiaries, they can often “burn out” as they don’t look after themselves.

“Betterment of the self,” she said, “is a means to the desired end of being able to help better others. It sounds evil, if not wrong, but it shouldn’t be.”

Sheng also said that there are no simple choices in fundraising, repeating the phrase: “Simple choices gone! If you take only one thing away from this whole presentation, I want it to be that simple choices are gone.”

Sometimes innovation is as much about the negatives as it is the positives

In the opening plenary of the IFC, the entrepreneur, author and activist Dan Pallotta said that often, the greatest innovations will actually come from negative places.

“People resign themselves to mediocrity. That is true of the history of human innovation. People resigning themselves to mediocrity and then the innovator comes along with all of their frustration and says: ‘no’.

“If you can be frustrated you can innovate, but you can’t take that frustration and whine. You need to take that frustration and powerful energy and use it to fuel a new creation. A new future.”

Donor loyalty is not ‘woolly baloney’ – it can be measured

The loyalty of donors is something that can be measured and, after surveying over 13,000 existing donors from some of the UK’s biggest charities, donors are overwhelmingly happy.

Roger Lawson, an independent fundraising consultant, who has been working with Prof Adrian Sargent from the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, said that a new survey on donor satisfaction gave the sector the metrics to prove that loyalty can be measured and that the driving factors for loyalty can be clearly seen.

Lawson said that the average length of time - based on data gathered from existing donors of the BHF, Cats Protection, WWF and others – that a donor will stay with a charity after they are recruited is: “Four years, ten months and two days, if you want to be really accurate about things.”

Fundraisers quite like a party

Thursday night was gala night and we definitely learnt one thing from that: if you put over 1,000 fundraisers from all over the world into one room, you’re going to need to make sure there are plenty of beverages.

The gala night was fairytale-themed and the vast majority of the thronging, fundraising hordes definitely got into the swing of things. Some of the best costumes we saw included two Irish fundraisers in full peacock outfits (complete with colourful tails), a Napoleon Bonaparte (fairytale?) and all manner of sprites, angels, princesses - even a Daenerys from Game of Thrones.

Thanks very much to the Resource Alliance for having us and we can’t wait for IFC 2016.