Top tips to working successfully with third parties on your fundraising campaigns

Experience shows that the more that you invest in a relationship, the more you will get out. By spending more time with your agency and their staff, and understanding shared challenges, a more successful way of working can be developed, benefiting everyone.

Samuel Butler, Director of Fundraising and Communications for the Tibet Relief Fund shares some top tips and gives a sneak peek of his masterclass:

Embedding your values in the campaign

…and creating safeguarding policies and processes that bring your agencies staff in line with your charity’s. Enthusing a passion for your cause over the salary and bonuses that they will get paid, is going to encourage applicants that identify with your work. Improved recruitment should lead to happier donors, as many of the negative connotations that the public have towards agency fundraising are reduced by an improved experience. Reducing the ‘sale’ and emphasising the ‘experience’ through inspiration should remove the stigma that is attached to it as a sales culture.

Creating succinct fundraising propositions and gathering data including supporter’s feedback is vital

Simon Sinek’s famous TED talk sights the importance of the “why”. If we do not know why a supporter is donating to us, how are we meant to know what it is that we should be telling them in their ongoing supporter journey? By improving the gathering of information on why the donor is supporting you at the point they first engage, you can shape the way that you communicate with them moving forward.

Taking that insight, listening, learning and building better communications

This will increase donor retention and can lead to a change in culture across your entire organisation, not just the fundraising team, but your charity and the partners it has too. Changes to internal processes at Unicef, Amnesty and St John Ambulance have seen an improved level of income growth aligned with improved retention figures as a result. This session is all about engaging your third party with the wider organisation, from the history you have down to the successes in lobbying and campaigns that have raised awareness. The more they understand your work, the more they can help you to inspire and educate new supporters. Tangible examples will be shown in the session.

Many agencies struggle to recruit the staff that sit at the coalface of telephone and face-to-face fundraising agencies

With your third party agencies, create processes that help those you want to keep with a clear career pathway. Fundraisers do not grow on trees, and they need a sense of the fundraising profession being a place that they can develop and progress. Many of today’s fundraisers, and employees within charities, started their careers as telephone, street or door-to-door fundraisers.

HR departments within charities are currently employing recruitment teams internally, as the money they have to pay recruitment agencies continues to grow. Skill-sets of the agency workforce will vary widely. Many a face-to-face or telephone fundraiser has started off in the profession using it as a stop-gap whilst finding other employment. Making sure that they are aware of the opportunities within the charity they work for, or the one that they are representing through the agency they are employed by, will only help to improve the sector. Internships can be used as incentive’s for staff, and again bring them closer to the cause that they represent.