New special interest group to support PR in fundraising
Howard Lake | 10 April 2007 | News
A new Fundraising PR special interest group is being set up to help support people who are engaged in promoting and publicising fundraising.
The Institute of Fundraising SIG is being organised by Ian MacQuillin, account director at Turner PR, who first mooted the idea on his UK Fundraising blog last year, pointing out that there are currently no networking groups for people who actually do the job of promoting and publicising fundraising. What initiatives there are, such as the ImpACT coalition, are aimed more at a stretegic level.
Most of the really controversial communications issues that charities face are about fundraising, he explained. Chuggers, junk mail, fundraisers’ salaries, shock advertising images, fundraising costs, transparency, challenge events etc.
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People say that fundraising is a lonely profession as many fundraisers work as sole fundraisers; well PR for fundraising is even lonelier. Many fundraisers at small charities also get handed a PR or communications brief and have to get on with it with little or no peer support. I hope the Fundraising PR SIG will be able to provide that peer support.
Some of MacQuillin’s original ideas for the group were to:
*Identify which areas of fundraising are likely to/actually do attract the most media criticism
*See whether there is any difference in how fundraising as opposed to charity in general, is portrayed in the press
*Unpick fundraisers’ attitudes and expectations of the media
*Develop standard arguments in defence of various methods of fundraising
*Examine how fundraising dovetails with charities’ PR
*Compile a compendium of best practice case studies.
MacQuillin also hopes that there will be a drive from members to conduct some original research and/or thinking around PR and fundraising.
This is not directly about improving fundraising’s public image, he said. It’s about helping PRs and fundraisers understand and practice PR better in a fundraising context.
The meeting will be held at a central London venue to be announced. Expressions of interest can be registered with Susie Blundell at the Institute of Fundraising.
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.