Most innovative fundraising campaign
Howard Lake | 30 June 2011 | Blogs
For the campaign that shows significant innovation in fundraising.
The shortlisted entries in alphabetical order are:
Breakthrough Breast Cancer – Too Many Women
Scope – Grangewood Venture Philanthropy Project
WaterAid – Dig Toilets, Not Graves
Breakthrough Breast Cancer
Too Many Women is an innovative fundraising campaign because of the simplicity of its concept and because it has embraced the digital and social networking world to capture the imagination of a new generation of fundraisers. It has its own website, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube sites and links up directly with Justgiving. It has maximised personal networks and free online channels to encourage fast and efficient awareness raising and very effective giving. This campaign was the idea of two of Breakthrough’s supporters, and this could have posed a significant risk to Breakthrough because the charity was entirely dependent on them to deliver the campaign on target and on time. So far it has worked brilliantly and has raised a huge amount of funds and awareness for Breakthrough at little cost. It could be easily replicated by other charities regardless of size or beneficiaries.
Scope
The Grangewood Venture Philanthropy Project was a campaign to raise £1.8m to fund the transformation of one of Scope’s services for disabled adults. Scope based the campaign around a new approach to fundraising that could acquire high value donors not necessarily sympathetic to disability issues. Central to this was an innovative financial product that was designed to appeal to venture philanthropists and grantmaking trusts. It combined a relatively small, tax-effective donation with a zero interest loan from a donor to leverage an additional commercial loan. Robust financial planning and the scrutiny of the board mitigated risk and gates were built into the development to ensure the support of trustees and the executive board. The target was reached three months early and the model is now an established way of fundraising for Scope.
WaterAid
Dig Toilets, not graves saw WaterAid undertake cold recruitment of new donors on the back of a sanitation message, timed to coincide with the Millennium Development Goals summit and the generation of campaigning noise to apply pressure on the UK government to take a lead on the issue. Creative included a remote control replica faeces chasing the unsuspecting public around the streets of London, achieving over 250,000 views on YouTube. 167 spades sprung from the ground in Trafalgar square and the core DRTV ad contrasted jovial UK school children singing ‘The diarrhoea song’ with a grieving Zambian boy, his own sister a victim of diarrhoea, completing the rhyme. It showed how difficult issues can be made to work in different but successful ways.
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.