Perfect Pitch presentations available for download
Howard Lake | 4 June 2006 | News
UK Fundraising last week held its third Perfect Pitch at London’s Inmarsat Conference Centre. Delegates from a range of charity, voluntary and trade organisations heard presentations on donor retention and management from Everyclick.com, Future Fundraising, and Fundraising UK.
Polly Gower, Managing Director of Everyclick.com, began the event explaining how the service was, even before its first anniversary, generating income from a range of individual and corporate users. The top five beneficiary charities have now received an average of £16 per user since launch, up from £13.16 just last month.
Growth this year has been considerable: moments before the conference began Everyclick staff watched with pleasure as the site handled its five millionth search.
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The site now has over 16,000 registered users, and 1,100 charities have signed up to benefit from it.
Polly reported that the search engine had successfully recruited over 150 corporate supporters including Cadbury Trebor Bassett.
She also announced that the company was offering a new keyword advertising programme together with a toolbar.
The delegates asked her several questions, including a straight enquiry about how the company was funded. Polly explained that, following initial private investment, the company was already well on its way to achieving its next fundraising target.
Everyclick.com kindly sponsored this Perfect Pitch.
Everyclick’s presentation was followed by one from Howard Lake, Director of Fundraising UK Ltd. Howard explained how the web and email can prove useful low-cost tools to help charities manage and retain donors.
Rupert Tappin then introduced Future Fundraising, and offered ten tips on how to retain donors. Top of the list was the issue of quality. Rupert explained how his company put this aim into practice, including calling new donors to thank them and check details such as the spelling of their name, together with chasing up any donations made without a Gift Aid declaration.
Quality extended to the people recruited to conduct face to face fundraising. All of them are given feedback from the donors they have recruited, to help them improve their technique.
Future Fundraising works with large and small charities, including some that employ just one fundraiser. One client was even embarking on its first face to face campaign with a budget of just £5,000.
Attrition is one of the key issues to address in successful face to face fundraising and Rupert explained how and when to tackle it. He mentioned how some charities don’t realise that by not following up non-payment they become cancelled donors. Yet quite often this can be due to a transcription error rather than because the donor had changed their mind.
Rupert then demonstrated Future Fundraising’s face to face fundraising management software. The tool, available to clients, helps them manage the essential aspects of a face to face campaign. As well as tracking income and attrition rates, it also helps charities identify the performance of individual fundraisers and locations, and retain a record of the donor’s feedback. The data can then be imported into any fundraising database.
Questions from the audience included how the software compared to Raiser’s Edge, the costs of running a face to face campaign, and other functions of the software.
After Rupert’s presentation the delegates enjoyed a free drinks reception with the speakers.
Last minute problems resulted in a shorter line-up of companies at the event than was planned, but delegates have shared positive feedback. Gemma Leary, Direct Marketing Assistant at Deafness Research UK, said: “I just wanted to say a very quick thank you to yourself and all involved in organising yesterday’s event. I came away with some useful ideas and it really is great that you can run these at no cost to the charities. I’m looking forward to the Gift Aid event later on this month.”
Copies of the speaker’s presentations in PDF/Adobe Acrobat format can be downloaded from the relevant company section on the timetable page. The Future Fundraising presentation is expected to be available later today.
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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.