Live report from Institute of Fundraising North East Conference
Howard Lake | 6 May 2009 | News
Today I’ve been at the Institute of Fundraising North East regional group’s conference at the Castlegate Centre in Newcastle. I gave two presentations on online fundraising.
While I was there I tried reporting live on the event using www.scribblelive.com, together with twitter.com. Here is the result. It’s a little rough and ready, and only covers the afternoon sessions I attended.
If I’d had time I’d have embedded the live report into this page, enabling viewers on this site to get live updates on this page. In the end I’m simply pasting the full report after the reporting and event had finished.
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You can see the report looking a little better designed on scribblelive.com at
www.scribblelive.com/Event/Institute_of_Fundraising_North_East_Conference_2009
[Scribblelive is no longer available].
- 7:04 PM: howardlake We’re in the impressive Turbine Room at The Castlegate Centre in Newcastle for the Institute of Fundraising North East region’s conference.
- 7:06 PM: howardlake Over 100 delegates are here for a day of sessions on a range of fundraising skills and issues such as corporate and trust fundraising, regional fundraising networks, how to look after your donors, payroll giving, leadership and governance.
The event started with a plenary from Paul Amadi, Head of Fundraising at RNIB and Chair of the Institute of Fundraising.
- 7:08 PM: howardlake Finally reporting from #iofne. Two speaker sessions and lending (gladly) Paul Amadi my laptop meant no live updates.
- 7:08 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher now speaking #iofne on using your annual report as a flagship marketing tool.
- 7:08 PM: howardlake 300 trillion pages in US filing cabinets, says Mark Butcher at #iofne. How to stop your docs ending with same fate?
- 7:08 PM: howardlake Trying live blogging for the firsts time #iofne using Scribblelive.com – you can join in/comment and view it at bit.ly
- 7:10 PM: howardlake
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- 7:15 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher encouraging us to focus on our audiences when writing an annual report. Don’t try and please everyone e.g. user groups, trusts, central government, rich individuals, corporates, legators. Think of which groups are most useful to you.
He asks: “if you had to choose just one group to focus on who would it be?” Only a minority of us thought it was obvious who this would be. I thought the key audience would be trusts and/or institutional funders. They have the money and have a major impact on the charity.
- 7:23 PM: howardlake
- 7:25 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher gives good example of focus. Teachers Benevolent Fund’s target audience was teachers, and the purpose of the annual report was to boost membership. The key message was ‘we are here for you’.
NSPCC’s report was targeted at individual donors, and the purpose was to sustain their loyalty, and the key message was ‘thank you’. Story after story in the report gave examples of people and groups who had raised funds and donated – all of them saying thank you.
The Natural History Museum used an annual report to focus on trusts in order to secure research grants. Their message was “we are serious!”. - 7:36 PM: howardlake Mark has just shared some examples of poor annual reports, albeit from organisations he respects and thinks do a very good job. Pictures of the chairman, pictures of staff, first page headed ‘chairman’s statement’, and not enough white space. He showed one from a housing charity showing pictures of decaying houses when its success consisted of helping people.
There was another photo of a woman looking very unhappy. It was a ‘before’ image when they should also have included an ‘after’ image to show what the charity had achieved.
- 7:39 PM: howardlake
- 7:45 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher is now featuring good examples of annual reports. They all have strikingly positive images on the front. Save the Children, Percy Headley Trust, and British Red Cross have been featured, together with Hope for Children. “If you work with kids, use that to your advantage” – they are naturally photogenic.
Don’t say how good you are, get someone else significant to say it about you. Even better, get your beneficiaries to say it about you.
- 7:46 PM: howardlake The closing thought is “people buy emotionally first – and then justify their feeling with rationality”. It’s true, he added – think about what you felt when you bought your house.
- 7:48 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher Associates are at
- 7:56 PM: howardlake Final session now – the closing plenary from Mark Butcher.
- 8:03 PM: howardlake Mark Butcher is telling us about information overload, long hours, the small proportion of staff that work on mission critical activity. Quoting Henry Longfellow, he said: “In the long run, we tend to hit what we aim for.”
“Sometimes I feel like a backseat passenger in the car of my life’s journey” – Chris Hansen, MBA course delegate
- 8:11 PM: howardlake First rule of goal setting is “have some”. He’s asked us all to tell the person next to us what our main goal for this time next year is. Goals like “to get fit” and “to earn more money” are just too vague to be useful.
Failure is good! He mentions Thomas Edison, Charles Babbage, David Beckham, Sir Isaac Newton and others as examples of succesful people who failed a lot of times.
- 8:30 PM: howardlake
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.