Death from the sky…
Howard Lake | 11 February 2008 | Blogs
My son Sam is currently travelling in Sri Lanka with his girlfriend, and suddenly that balmy island, where tea used to come from, appears a death trap as I scan the media anxious for news of anything affecting his survival. It’s not good: bombs explode in public places and death rains from the sky…
http://news.google.co.uk/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GZHY_enGB251GB251&q=Sri+Lanka&um=1&hl=en&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title
The personal becomes the public, and you can bet were anything to happen it would be my money winging its way to an appropriate charity.
That set me thinking about the number of times I had talked to donors and discovered that they had personal experiences which gave them a unique insight into the cause and steeled their motivation to give. It may be their relative who has suffered or a personal experience which has convinced them that giving is something they must do; but it is so often personal and deeply felt that I feel we have only to scratch a donor to find a beneficiary.
So, why don’t we do more to search for these stories in our demographic surveys, talk specifically to our major and minor donors about their lives and research those who the shock waves of our problem have hit hard?
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.