UNICEF highlights the future – hopefully
Howard Lake | 25 July 2014 | Blogs
Congratulations to UNICEF on capturing the Commonwealth Games. Let’s hope that this becomes a trend across major televised events that they contain a charity message to remind us of our humanity and enable us to help, rather like the person in the Roman Emperor’s chariot, when they rode in great triumphs through the streets of Rome with the crowds cheering, who had the job of whispering in their ear “Remember you are a mortal”.
This was a class operation with constant reminders throughout the event, which did not intrude despite its three hour duration and the call to action (in this case to txt) coming towards the end.
Psychologically this came for some of us after watching the news on Channel 4 which had shown strong moving images from Gaza of the suffering of children and talking about the large number of children killed by the Israeli bombardment. It will be hard to tell what effect this had on the amount of funds raised.
UNICEF’s follow-up came promptly the next morning with txt asking if people would like to Gift Aid the donation, and this should help not only to increase the money raised but also to bring these people to become long term supporters of UNICEF as they will have extended their commitment and will hopefully be prepared to give again.
This is a further shift in the way we recruit new supporters, with Oxfam’s Chief Executive, Mark Goldring, recently commenting that most of their new supporters came from street fundraising and hard copies of anything from direct mail to newsletters becoming prohibitively expensive to print and post the switch to online and mobile fundraising is not that far from being complete.
Of course, Mark Goldring’s time as an undercover boss was, I hope, not just a one off; but a sign that the third sector is just as interesting, if not more so, than politics and business to audiences. It will be disappointing if these two events are merely one-off aberrations and not the tip of an incoming social iceberg.
John Baguley
CEO IFC
www.groupifc.com
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.