Beyond Digital Fundraising

Was an absolute honour to be asked by Asociación Española de Fundraising to open their conference this year. And last week they sent me some pics from the event that I don't hate.

I increasingly find my inspo outside of the UK bubble, so it was a real treat to go to Madrid and meet people with different experiences and points of view.

In the last couple of years I've spent IRL or virtual time with campaigners, fundraisers, troublemakers and badasses all over Europe and I love it.

Particularly eastern and central Europe - I wanna do loads more over the next couple of years - so if you want someone to turn up in box fresh air force ones and tell you that fundraising alone can't change the world - hit me up.

On that.

I’m not saying it to be controversial or to suggest that fundraising isn’t a massively important profession. It is. I'm not an idiot.

I say it because I passionately believe that the public, individual citizens, can play a much bigger role in your organisations vision than simply funding it.

I say it because the times we are in demand active participation.

Inspiring people to share their time, money and voice is a route to your org achieving its goals and vision more quickly and more efficiently.

That organisations that only seek to extract money from the public are missing out on the potential of people power to drive them towards success.

So I frame all that Rally does under the label of Mobilisation. And I really don't like labels - so you can call it whatever you want.

I like this definition tho. MOBILISATION: ‘The action of organizing & encouraging a group of people to take collective action in pursuit of a particular objective’

We do this because it accurately sums up the approaches to public engagement that we think charities and campaign groups should be taking.

The mobilisation models we advocate fuse fundraising, communications, brand activation, campaigning and advocacy offers and create opportunities for the public to engage at a level that suits their own circumstances and energy at the time we reach them.

This is not an approach that’s about campaigning over fundraising or fundraising over anything else.

It’s about realising that people can support an organisation in a variety of ways.

And realising the power that lies in that.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.