I share Liz Hill’s surprise (AP256, p4) at Jeremy Hunt’s endorsement of the new National Funding Scheme, as I am challenged at this stage to understand what is new about this offering. From what we read the company behind this idea needs to raise £600,000 to develop a system which appears to emulate systems which are already in the market (and I declare an interest as one of those solutions is provided by my company). These are available to arts organisations today, importantly without the need to pay for the data collected by the platform about the people who have made donations.
The key to successful fundraising using technology of any kind is to ensure that it is multi-channel – so that there is a link between mobile fundraising, social media, online fundraising and the back office solutions. Donors want to have a conversation with their chosen charities in a way that suits them at the time of communication. That may be by mobile at one time of the day, by social media at another time and by email at another, and of course there will be times when donors still prefer to receive snail mail or to proactively log on to the charities website or indeed pick up the telephone.
All of this is already available today in existing software packages, and importantly in a way which ensures that the charity’s brand is the only one which the donor sees. One of the concerns expressed by many charities about channels such as JustGiving is that their brand is lost and the donor remembers the channel rather than the charity message and brand.
There does seem to be an argument for a better due diligence process from both the government and from funders to ensure that they are not paying to reinvent the wheel.