SIG up and listen

Howard Lake | 15 November 2006 | Blogs

:Which brings me on to this.
The Institute of Fundraising has a new member:me.
It took a while though, thanks to the Royal Mail. OK so I put SW18 instead of SW8 on the envelope and it came back to me marked no such addressee. But even so, you’d have thought the rest of the address would have been a bit of a clue as to its destination. After all, there can only be one Institute of Fundraising at Freepost LON589 whether it’s in SW8 or SW18. Anyhow, I digress.
So I am now a member of the IoF:bugger, have to stop calling it that:I mean the Institute of Fundraising and, as I said I wanted to do when I announced my intention to join earlier this year, I want to see if there is any support for a PR in fundraising special interest group.
I see this SIG as a working party as well as talking shop and networking sphere. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done around fundraising PR and I believe the IoF (oops) is the natural home for this work.
This is the kind of thing I envisage the group doing:
â• Identify which areas of fundraising are likely to/actually do attract the most media critiscism (three guesses, eh?)
â• See whether there is any difference in how fundraising, as opposed to charity in general, is portrayed in the press
â• Unpick fundraisers’ to attitudes and expectations of the media
â• Unpick the media’s attitudes to fundraising
â• Develop standard arguments in defence of various methods of fundraising
â• Examine how fundraising dovetails with charities’ PR strategies
â• Compile a compendium of best practice case studies
It would be open to PRs especially but really anyone who has a stake in how fundraisers and fundraising present themselves and itself to the public through the media.
And we’d have a bloody good Christmas party as well. Goes without saying.
Any takers? Anyone who is interested in supporting or helping setting up such a group can email me at

ia*@tu******.uk











putting PR SIG in the subject box. If I get enough names, the Institute of Fundraising may let us have one. And anyone who would like make arguments for and against the need for a PR in fundraising SIG please append to this blog. Who knows, we might even make this more controversial than face-to-face.

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.