First global fundraising award winners announced
Howard Lake | 27 October 2010 | News
The winners of the Resource Alliance Global Awards for fundraising, the world’s first global awards for fundraising, were unveiled last week at the International Fundraising Congress (IFC) in the Netherlands.
The Awards are designed to recognise creative work that demonstrates best practice in fundraising. There are four categories including Big Idea, Small Budget and Outstanding Volunteer and they are open to both organisations and individuals.
The entrants are those who have already won a national fundraising award in their own country, so these awards are designed to highlight the best of the best.
The winner of the Big Idea, Small Budget category was The Royal Flying Doctor Service – Victorian Section, Australia, which provides emergency evacuation for patients requiring care in specialist hospitals. It won for its AUS$1 million to acquire a jet that would reduce the flying time for patients by half.
Action Aid UK, which aims to harness and enable local people to secure their rights to food, water, education and safety from conflicts and disasters, won the award for Innovative Fundraising Campaign. It focused on one particular part of Yorkshire within a national campaign in October 2009: in the first week, the campaign took up 20% of prime airtime of the main regional TV news programme and response rates to inserts were 192% higher than its national campaign.
Per Stenbeck, Executive Director, WaterAid Sweden and one of the judges said: “These inaugural Awards had entries submitted from around the world. The winners demonstrated a level of work that the judges found particularly impressive.”
The Fundraiser of the Year was Arundhati Ghosh, deputy director of India Foundation for the Arts, and Michael Cowan of Australia won the Outstanding Volunteer award:aAs a volunteer for Asthma Foundation NSW, he rode a Penny Farthing continuously for nine days covering distances of up to 170km a day. He raised AUS$75,000, double the previous year’s income form volunteer fundraisers.
The panel of judges consisted of Dame Stephanie Shirley, The British Government’s Founding Ambassador for Philanthropy; Paulette V. Maehara, CFRE, CAE , CEO of Association of Fundraising Professionals; Ashvin Dayal, Managing Director, Rockefeller Foundation, Asia; and Kumi Naidoo, International Executive Director, Greenpeace International, Netherlands.
www.resource-alliance.org/ifc
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.