Fundraising Ireland conference €˜great success'
Howard Lake | 5 October 2006 | News
Fundraising Ireland 2006 – the conference organised by Back Page Books – was a ‘great success’ when it took place in Dublin last week.
The event, held at the Guinness Storehouse, had sold out and 180 fundraisers attended the series of plenaries and sessions centred around the techniques and theories of individual giving.
The opening plenary by Deirdre Garvey took an overview of the fundraising sector in Ireland, explaining how it had reached its present position and what the future held. The sector is coming together as a cohesive entity far more than it has in the past, although there are still many disparate organisations and groups. In the future, training needs to be improved and fundraisers need to make more efforts to understand their donors and their motivations better. More research on the sector would help to develop the necessary infrastructure to bring this about.
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Individual sessions included Damian O’Broin of Ask Direct talking about the way we communicate with our donors. He took online giving as a great example of how to communicate well and how to do it badly and alienate your donors.
The event was supported by Fundraising Initiatives as principal sponsor, with Forward Emphasis and The Wheel providing additional support. UK Fundraising acted as media partner throughout the build-up and the event itself.
Organiser Penny Stephens said she hoped to be able to run a similar event in the future. The feedback has been fantastic, she said. This is the first time such an event has been run in Ireland and we were delighted to get so many Irish fundraisers in one place.
We have a solid base to build on and some invaluable comments to feed into the thinking process to make the next event bigger and better and more relevant to Irish fundraisers’ needs.
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.