Podcast Ep 5 – How to raise funds and campaign – with Tim Walker

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In the new episode of my podcast ‘Making the world better’ – out today – I speak to Tim Walker. Tim is a direct response copy writer and campaigner.

Tim’s been a colleague and friend of mine for many years, and is the founder of the fundraising agency TWCAT, now On agency, and is a member of my team at ChangeStar. He has had decades of success in helping charities and other good causes to raise more funds and build stronger campaigns by communicating better with the public and their supporters.

This is an aspect of the work of charities and political causes that is often not seen by the public yet it can be critical to how well they are able to achieve the change they are seeking. A lot of people work in the social change sector simply to help charities get their message across to people, and Tim is one of the most knowledgeable people doing this.

In this chat, I talk to Tim about the work he does, why it matters and some of his biggest successes.

The new episode is here – I hope you enjoy it! Please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and share it with everyone!

New podcast launching 20th Jan 2020!

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I’m very excited to announce that my new #podcast ‘Making the world better’ will be launching on 20th January 2020!

In the podcast, I talk to people who are making the world better – not just those tackling big issues at a global scale but also those working at a local level or in less obvious areas too. I want to find out more about what these people do, the issues they’re working on and why they matter. In the end, I want to pay tribute to everyone who’s trying to make things better.

Each fortnightly episode has a different guest – and we’ve got some brilliant people lined up in the first few shows including CEOs of leading charities, political advisors, academics, fundraisers – and people who are working to help others in their local communities.

The podcast will be available from all the usual providers, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcast, as well as hosted here on docwra.sladedesign.co.uk/.

More details to come on the 20th January!

No means no

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At ChangeStar, we’ve recently been doing a bit of ‘secret shopping’ with some charities – making donations to them and seeing how they communicate with us as a result.  It’s a real eye-opener and shows that lots of organisations have work to do on their communication plans – one charity has already sent us 3 identical emails since we donated just over a week ago!

Our secret shopping experience led us to a conversation in the office about emails from organisations (not just charities) and how counterproductive their efforts to gather names and email us can be.  Two main points came up in our conversation:

1. Some organisations still seem unable to take ‘no’ for an answer when sending their communications, and also fail to see the negative effects this is having on people’s participation.   By saying ‘no’ I mean failing to take people off mailing or email lists when asked to do so.  Not only does this annoy people, it may well also make them (I speak from personal experience) less likely to use the media concerned,  deal with the organisation concerned or sign up for any similar transactions in the future.

2. Some organisations seem to be seeking quantity over quality of email addresses – and this can be counter-productive for them.  For example, we signed a petition on a campaigning site and gave our email address. When we left our email address there was no opportunity to unsubscribe from future communications – which is very annoying.  Once we’d completed the petition, we got the inevitable emails from the organisation, which annoyed us further.  This has put us off taking such action with this organisation in the future – and reduces our motivation to participate with others, as we see the likelihood of this happening again.

One of the key principles of online fundraising and campaigning is to make it as easy as possible for people to undertake the transaction.  By failing to include opt outs, or just not listening to our contacts, we actually place another obstacle in front of people to responding to our cause.  Let’s make sure we remove it.

Why should we use an agency?

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A short while ago, I was asked by a fundraiser at a small-to-medium sized charity to draft them some notes about the benefits of using a fundraising agency, in order to help them convince their board to test it out.

When working with small-to-medium sized charities, we’ve often had to go through this process of ‘building the case for using an agency’ to non-fundraisers in the organisation before we can work with them (and are happy to do so, as it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask). I therefore thought it would be useful to post the notes on here – so whether you are a fundraiser looking to convince your board or a non-fundraiser seeking to understand the benefits of using an agency – I hope these notes are useful. Check them, and other papers, out at the ‘papers’ section of the ChangeStar site here, or via this direct link.