One-hour guide to fundraising published for trustees
Howard Lake | 21 March 2019 | News
Most fundraising guides are written for practising fundraisers. Stuart Armstrong’s new book, however, is a guide for all those in a charity who are not fundraisers but who need to understand fundraising. He has even manage to distil his advice into a one-hour read.
Armstrong’s guide, Fundraising: the essentials for success revealed in one hour”, is designed for the “much larger constituency” of people involved with charities and committed to their financial success, but who are not themselves professional fundraisers. These could include trustees, board members, campaign chairs, and senior executives.
He describes these people as “that element of the fundraising market that is largely ignored when it comes to education and skills improvement”.
Despite the breadth and depth of fundraising skills and tactics, the 86-page book, subtitled “the essentials for success revealed in one hour’, gives them the core information that Armstrong feels they need. It details the key elements of a fundraising campaign, highlights where problems can occur, and explains how to overcome them.
The guide is divided into three sections:
- Are you ready?
- Get set
- Go
Following a career in sales and marketing and corporate communications, Stuart Armstrong has for 25 years created and delivered successful fundraising campaigns for organisations such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, The UK Stem Cell Foundation, the Edinburgh International Festival, and St Giles Cathedral.
He is also the grants administrator for a charitable trust which he says gives him “a privileged insight into the good and the bad of how organisations present their case”.
Given its conciseness and the evident experience that underpins it, the book is of course a tool for fundraisers themselves.
Iain More, founder of the More Partnership, says that until now, following 40 years of fundraising experience, he had “never seen a cogent, easy to read explanation of the elements of the profession I have practised until The Essentials of Success“.
Armstrong concludes with two quotations from two Carnegies, Dale and Andrew. He quotes the former: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you”.
You can find Fundraising: the essentials for success revealed in one hour in UK Fundraising’s bookshop.
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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.