Ken Burnett announces retirement from SOFII board
Melanie May | 27 May 2022 | News
SOFII co-founder and managing trustee Ken Burnett has announced his retirement from The SOFII Foundation board, after 15 years.
Burnett co-founded SOFII with his wife Marie, and is also an author and lecturer on campaigning, fundraising and communication for nonprofit organisations worldwide.
Outside of SOFII, Burnett founded the Burnett Associates agency in the early 80s, and was a trustee of ActionAid for 13 years, including five years as international board chair. He’s also a trustee of the World Land Trust, former independent trustee of the UK Disasters Emergency Committee, and was co-founder of the Commission on the Donor Experience.
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Meredith Niles, a SOFII trustee since 2017 and trustee of both Trust for London and Plan International UK, has been elected as the new chair of SOFII’s board.
Commenting on his retirement, Burnett said:
“We all need to recognise when it’s time to go, so we can exit on a high just before that moment arrives. SOFII now has a splendidly experienced, dedicated staff, a richly talented, diverse and enthusiastic board led by a superbly experienced and smart new chair, matched by a wise, perceptive, uniquely knowledgeable honorary treasurer… so I couldn’t be leaving SOFII in better hands. And after 15 years the concept is proving ever more useful, the organisation is in good shape and the site is getting better all the time thanks to its legions of supporters, donors and enthusiastic users around the world.”
About SOFII
SOFII gives access to some of the best fundraising campaigns in history, the oldest going back more than 3,500 years.
In the years since its launch, SOFII has built up some 700 case studies and 1000 articles, all of which are available to read for free. Many of these are translated by volunteers into at least one of six languages: Chinese, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and SOFII currently has a partnership with ASSIF in Italy, which is seeing much more get translated into Italian at a regular pace, as well as the addition of new case studies from Italy in both English and Italian.
The SOFII archive has now also been added to the digital UK Web Archive which is a collaboration between the UK Legal Deposit Libraries (British Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, Cambridge University Libraries, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and Trinity College, Dublin).
With Open Creates, SOFII is also behind the hugely popular I Wish I’d Thought of That (IWITOT) events, which see fundraisers present in a few short minutes the fundraising campaign or concept they wish they’d thought of themselves. As well as the UK edition, which last year also opened up to European speakers, there is now an Americas event.
SOFII survey
SOFII is currently running a short survey to help it improve its website and events in the future. SOFII users have until 17 July to complete it.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.