Building a Fundraising Communications Team

Sarah Naismith - Head of Charities

8th February 2017

Who we are

Our lead brand

In house team

Marketing & Communications

Manager

Press OfficerCommunications

OfficerMarketing

Officer

In the beginning…

• £20m three year capital appeal

• Small fundraising team with F/T equivalent of one member of staff dedicated to Comms

• High profile appeal with benefit of widespread regional support and good will

• Media partnerships with local press

How did we persuade the Trust?

• Stretched, reactive, Trust Communications Team versus

• Benefit of pro active, good news, Charity-led comms strategy

• Ability to demonstrate measurable impact of capital appeal comms strategy

The importance of building and managing your brand

• Establishing the brand – getting yourself out there

• Building and maintaining brand awareness

• Identifying your key messages

• Clear brand guidelines

• Tone of voice

• House style

• Implement an approval process and don’t deviate – even when working with fundraisers

Ensuring your budget has impact

• Invest wisely – focus only on those channels and activities that will yield measurable results

• Less is sometimes more

• Learn from past mistakes

• Maximise pro bono support through corporate partners and board connections

Effective use of case studies

• The ‘why’ effect

• Emotive and engaging content

• Connection with audience

• Bring appeals and campaigns to life (humanise/empathise)

• Cross spread of age, gender, ethnicity, geography and condition

• Importance of stewardship

Effective use of celebrities

• Endorsement

• Profile

• Connections/opening doors

• Importance of effective stewardship

The importance of social media

• Not just about likes/follows – engagement is key

• Effective management requires allocation of resource – in house or out sourced

• Importance of content generation

• Establish tone of voice & style guide

• Community management

Working with media partners

• Develop strong working relationships with key journalists

• Regular meetings

• Invite them in!

Internal communications

• Celebrating success internally

• Demonstrating impact

• Trust staff can be the charity’s biggest advocates

• Recruiting from within

• Making connections and sourcing content

Working in Partnership

• Importance of regular communication with Trust Comms team

• Good working relationship can expedite approvals through Trust hierarchy

• Support for each other’s campaigns

• Piggy back on Trust messaging/campaigns

Where are we now

• Retained design agency

• Moving towards project-based retained social media agency

• Website that is integrated with Raiser’s Edge

• Strong relationship with Manchester Evening News

• Established brand

Impact measurement

• Shout about what you do!

• Media monitoring and reporting EAV

• Web traffic analysis

• Social media analysis

• E- newsletter measurement

Pitfalls – what to avoid

• Avoid the scatter gun approach

• Focus on activity that will yield best results

• Avoid competing with yourself

• Prioritise campaigns

Thank you