Some causes are more, shall we say, engaging than others. David Philpott considers how to counter the 'heart-string effect' to recognise the efforts of fundraisers working on less emotive plights.
"Any ideas on where I can get hold of forty million quid?" asked the man to my right - rather nonchalantly I thought - as we both tucked into the main course.
"I usually charge for that kind of information," said I, not looking up from my plate, "but since you ask, no."
As I sipped Chapel Down English wine, I also drank in the ambience of the ancient shrine that was just across the courtyard from where we were dining.
He was of course not surprised. It was the answer he would have got at least a hundred times before, in his quest to secure philanthropic donations for the restoration of Canterbury Cathedral. It had not helped, I am sure, that almost contemporaneously with the launch of his appeal, a massive fundraising initiative to build the new Marlowe Theatre just around the corner had been thrust upon the good people of the city. One could be forgiven for wondering if he thought that the £4.2m the Marlowe had raised, had been sucked up from right under his nose.
But Andrew Edwards, the recently-appointed chief executive of the Canterbury Gift, is a far more gracious man than that and his past experience at the National Churches Trust means that he is better placed than perhaps anyone else to save the birthplace of Christianity on this sceptred isle.
As I drove home along the winding A28 in the bubble that is my Fiat 500, cocooned from the world and possibly touched by the mystic glories of Canterbury – you know, St Augustine, Thomas A Becket, the smell of incense and all that – I spoke out loud to the angels (or was it the dashboard?), "Verily, verily, I say unto you David, there is no way on God’s green earth that you would be able to raise even a tenner for either a cathedral or a theatre." And I was of course right.
Give me a hospice, an international crisis or development project or an air ambulance, throw in a modest marketing budget and a couple of good ex-journalists and I’ll make you a million pounds without breaking a sweat. Ask me to get people to part with their hard-earned cash for a historic building, a theatre or - god forbid – an art gallery and I would probably suggest that you would have more chance of success if you put your fundraising budget on the 3.30 at Chester Races.
I am genuinely in awe of those who have the skill-set to navigate the tortuous corridors of Arts Council funding. Even more so of those who know how to wine and dine venture capitalists, asset managers and so-call ‘high net worth individuals’ – whatever that might mean. I am a lazy fundraiser. I go only for the low-hanging fruit - appealing straight over the heads of politicians and grantmaking trusts and local authority commissioners, so that people dig deep and support causes that they can emotionally connect to.
It was Jeremy Clarkson in one of his rants who once said that a society should not measure everything according to a scale which determines how many baby incubators the costs of a statue or piece of art could have bought. It is not often that I agree with a man who once had a fighter jet parked on the lawn outside his Oxfordshire home, but on this point he is right. Likewise, we should not measure the worth of a charitable endeavour by virtue alone of the amounts of money that the public are prepared to give to it.
Witness the recent launch of NETS UK – the Newborn and Paediatric Emergency Transport Service. The charity has secured the patronage of Dame Judi Dench no less and will doubtless raise millions of pounds in the years to come - even though industry insiders do not believe that there is a proven need for such a service.
Call me a cynic – please do, I like it - but if I really wanted to run a successful fundraising campaign, I might have to launch an air ambulance service for injured and abandoned donkeys – better still if we could find a way of working the word 'leukaemia' into the charity’s title.
Forgive the flippancy, but my point is a serious one. It is not their fault that the public want to - and in some cases need to - give to causes that touch their hearts; the so-called psychological transaction. There is little that we in this sector can do about that. But perhaps what we should be doing is recognising more in our awards ceremonies, those who mine at the coalface of heritage fundraising and big-up in our New Year’s honours list, the unsung heroes who secure arts funding.
Having said that – I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
