The International Fundraising Congress 2016 is over for another year. Hugh Radojev writes that the week was a tale of two plenaries - both of which suggest that a fundamental shift in fundraising culture may well be happening.
The theme of this year’s International Fundraising Congress was all about ‘asking the right questions’. Keeping that theme in mind, both the opening and closing plenaries raised plenty of interesting questions, even without taking into account the rest of the congress.
The announcement that Amanda Palmer – noted musician and performer – would be delivering the opening plenary this year did raise one or two eyebrows in the preceding weeks. As she herself said, she’s never worked as a fundraiser per se, nor indeed with a charity in any official capacity.
While I did hear one or two dissenting voices, even after she had said her piece, she offered an incredibly interesting and even refreshing perspective. Having raised over £200,000 for her last album through her dedicated fan base using digital crowdfunding, she offered a unique perspective (albeit in a roundabout way) into how fundraisers in the UK can go about rebuilding public trust and confidence in the future.
“You can’t go about crowdfunding if you don’t already have a crowd to raise funds from. People asked me what my trick was? The answer is, there was no trick. A relationship is never a trick, that’s why it’s a real relationship and real relationships can withstand an incredible amount of asking”.
It sounds simple, but organisations up and down the country ask members of the UK for money every day, without knowing anything more about them than their email address or mobile phone number. Obviously, building a relationship – to dredge up the old Burnett adage – with your donors is going to improve the frequency and size of donations as well as dampening attrition rates. The big question to take away from this is how the sector as a whole (and not just those who can afford it) can do this?
Finding the answer to that question is never going to be easy, but at least it's a question that's now being asked.
Charity in modern society
In his closing plenary, Anshu Gupta, founder of Indian organisation Goonj, picked up on a theme that was hovering around the entire week: the changing ideas of what a charity is in modern society. Gupta said that the time had come to move on from the idea of ‘charity’, saying that while it offered “instant support” it was almost impossible to sustain.
He also spoke of people his particular organisation work with every day – children in particular – as being “victims of charity”, and questioned why, if every child is told not to take sweets from strangers, than why would anyone want their child accepting any sort of charity from a stranger?
Gupta was quick to say that the problems that he sees – both in wider society and in the voluntary sector in his homeland – are not just “Indian problems”. Problems like poverty, illiteracy and health issues are worldwide, and are no closer to being completely solved in the UK than they are in so-called developing economies.
Among all the usual talk of inspiration and of innovation, the IFC 2016 touched heavily on the idea of change and of changing: changing public perceptions; changing the way organisations are run internally, and changing the way they interact and collaborate with one another. In other words, about more useful topics than the standard, fairly broad one of: ‘changing the world’.
The ‘cultural’ and ‘organisational’ shifts that have been spoken of for months really do actually seem to be taking place. It remains to be seen what effect this will have had by the time IFC 2017 rolls around.
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