Make people uncomfortable by presenting them with the simple truth, urges Clayton
Howard Lake | 13 July 2014 | News
Fundraisers should make people feel “uncomfortable” to stir them into action, fundraising thought leader Alan Clayton told delegates at the Institute of Fundraising national convention this week.
Delivering the opening plenary on the theme of the Proud Fundraiser campaign, Clayton said the secret of being a great fundraiser was to make things “astonishingly simple”. But he said the “simple skill of telling the truth very well” – the hallmark of a great fundraising organisation – can make people feel uncomfortable.
“When people say you’re making me uncomfortable, I take a long pause and I politely say: that’s the point,” Clayton, managing director of Revolutionise said.
“Because what do comfortable people do? Nothing.”
Clayton also said that a charity’s mission was the same as raising the money needed to achieve it. Citing the great fundraising report commissioned by Revolutionise and
research by professors Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant at Plymouth University, reports Clayton pointed out that great fundraising charities were aiming to double, treble or quadruple their income, not merely increase it by a few per cent.
“In average organisations, the mission was seen as high up and the fundraising was seen as something subservient that just gave us the money at the end of the year,” Clayton said. “Great organisations realized there was a massive problem to solve and they were not going to solve a problem by having policy papers and nice people, we are going to solve it by having a vast amounts of money and therefore they need to make a vast amount of money. Money is the mission.”
He also said that for any organisation that aspired to impartiality and independence, fundraising was vital: “No organisation can be impartial or independent without fundraising. We want the freedom to achieve our missions in the best way possible but without fundraising we are someone else’s bitch.”
View the entire opening plenary with Alan Clayton and Jayne George of Guide Dogs:
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.