And all along Raizer was…

Howard Lake | 27 April 2006 | Blogs

After 17 years and six months I’m no longer a journalist, which until now had been the only career I’d ever had – if you discount being a student, a City of London messenger and a not very successful freelance photographer (though I did have one pretty decent splash in The Guardian in September 1988 that paid me £365.85 – which was a lot of money in 1988).
I am now account director at TurnerPR, which specialises in PR for fundraising and marketing. BTW, when Howard Lake asked me to do this blog, the first thing he said to me was that it can’t be an overt sell for TurnerPR. TurnerPR’s recognition (three mentions in the second paragraph – not bad) would come from having my name and company at the foot of the blog, he said. I couldn’t help chuckle at this because it’s exactly what I had been telling people when I commissioned them to write articles for Professional Fundraising.
And so of course, now that I am a PR consultant (for TurnerPR, did I mention that?), that means I am no longer editor of Professional Fundraising, a job I had done, and loved, for four years, 10 months and one week.
Professional Fundraising was a real landmark job for me. I’d even go so far as to say it was a life changing job: it brought me into the voluntary sector, and more specifically, into fundraising. I had never before worked in a sector where the people were so committed, so passionate, so dynamic and so friendly – I’ve made more friends in the last five years than all my other jobs put together.
Before PF, I was a journalist who took his trade from sector to sector. During my time at PF I came to think of myself more and more like the people I was writing about – passionate and committed to fundraising. That’s why am still in fundraising in a PR role and still writing about it on UK Fundraising, rather than editing something like Parking Review or Water Effluent Treatment News (yes, they both really do exist).
So with this blog, which I’ll aim to do about every two weeks or so or whenever something really interesting happens that gets me thinking, I’ll try to continue with some of the thoughts that have really hooked me over the past five years.
I’ll be writing about self-regulation (I will make it interesting, honestly), face-to-face (of course) and the thing that is my biggest soap box issue at the moment, media relations, not just because I’m a PR consultant, but because for the last three years I have seen fundraisers all over the country going about it by and large completely the wrong way.
But before I get on to these debating points, there is one really hot controversy I want to clear up – the identity of PF’s back page diarist Raizer.
Raizer, I can reveal, was:me.
OK she wasn’t entirely me, she was about 70 per cent me, 28 per cent Penny Stephens, PF’s former dep ed, and two per cent other random people. In fact, one complete Raizer column a couple of years ago was contributed entirely by a fundraising consultant.
Loads of people however, thought Raizer was 100 per cent Penny, including the owner of this website. I remember Whitewater head honcho Steve Andrews going through a Raizer column pointing out the things that were “so obviously written by Penny” and getting them all wrong.
What seemed to fool people was that Raizer was female and used to write quite a lot about girlie things like designer clothes, losing weight and her bust size. However, I’ve never really had much trouble getting in touch with my feminine side. PF used to run a Bridget Jones-style diary by a fundraiser called Sally Schofield. Once when Sally was indisposed, I wrote the column for her, complete with bitchy comments about the head of major donor fundraising. No-one noticed.
So glad that’s cleared up, and of course I must wish good luck to the ‘new’ Raizer. But of course I can’t reveal who she – or he – really is.
Next time – self-regulation.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.