What we learnt at our Summer Breakfast Club

What did we learn at our Breakfast Club for Fundraising Leaders this week? In case you weren’t able to join us (and the hundreds of fundraising leaders who attended), here is a short summary of some key insights from the sessions. 

Rob kicked off the session by covering some powerful tactics for using the amazing power of metaphor in your fundraising, sharing various examples from Bright Spot’s popular Major Gifts Mastery and Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programmes.

Who moved my cheese?

If your organisation has gone through any difficult change process, you may have been shown the Change Curve graph. And if you’re anything like Rob, being shown the change curve may have done little to help you process the challenging emotions you were feeling.

Whereas when Rob read the book ‘Who moved my cheese?’ by Dr Spencer Johnson – a story about a group of mice whose cheese supply runs out – he found it surprisingly helpful in dealing with his change situation. But why would a silly story about cheese be more useful than facts and logic? 

At their best, metaphors and analogies work with the grain of how our brains are wired. They help us bring helpful meaning from something that’s familiar, to an idea that feels alien or difficult to understand.

Why do they work?

One reason they can be so powerful is that they ‘change the frame’. We all have (often unconscious) frames for what we do and don’t pay attention to, and for how we interpret our environment. This is why two people can react so differently to the same information. For instance, one might see an invitation to do a presentation as a threat and another might experience this same event as an opportunity. 

Using metaphor can help people reframe how they view things. For instance how a colleague experiences their role as a fundraiser, or how a supporter understands and responds to your cause. So how can we proactively use figures of speech in our leadership and fundraising?

Leadership and reinforcing culture

One fundraising leader who has inspired Rob over the years is Joe Jenkins. He was recently a guest on the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast and shared his shrewd approach to smashing silos. One important issue for any leader is ‘what does great leadership look like?’, and ‘what should I spend my time trying to do?’.

The environment we are now operating in is so fast-paced and chaotic, and so people need to be empowered to respond rather than wait for decisions and strategies from further up the chain of command. In this context, Rob has found a metaphor Joe once shared really helpful. He said that as a leader, “we now need to be less the chessmaster, more the gardener”, creating an environment where people can grow and use their initiative. We have a whole blog about this approach on our website, or you can listen to Joe’s podcast episode here.

On another Fundraising Bright Spots episode, the fantastic Clio Gressani joined Rob to talk about how she increased their income to 7 figures for the first time. Rob was keen to talk about the specific strategies and techniques that helped her achieve this. But Clio shared that the foundation for all their successful tactics was the clear identity she and the team created.

What was their ‘north star’ idea for how they should be striving to do a great job? She came up with ‘we are going to be like Netflix for Good’. That would mean doing two things especially well – “creating insightful and personalised journeys” for their supporters and “brilliant storytelling”. 

One of today’s other panellists, Lucy Squance, came on the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast in the early days, and Rob noticed that she uses a really interesting metaphor to describe her organisation. Several times she referred to her team as  ‘wavemakers’. If you believe at some level that you are not only a scientist / a campaigner / or a fundraiser… but you are also ‘a wavemaker’, that ‘frame’ means you’ll approach your job differently.  And if a whole group of people is approaching their mission in this way, your culture feels stronger and your collective impact can be magnified.

So over to you! As a leader…

1. What helpful metaphors or analogies do you currently use in your team/charity?
2. How could you make more deliberate use of the most useful and empowering ones?
3. What new metaphors could you experiment with to help your team make an even bigger difference?

Helping people understand the problem

In Rob’s book, The Fundraiser Who Wanted More, he explains that the most persuasive people work hard to understand the world of those they are trying to influence. For example, one of Lucy’s colleagues, a smart fundraiser named Holly, once used this approach when pitching to win a corporate partnership with a bookmaker. She presented the accumulator odds of anyone getting dementia on a piece of paper that looked like a betting slip. 

Some of you may remember watching the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing featuring Rose Ayling-Ellis, the programme’s first deaf contestant. During one dance, Rose and her partner Giovanni helped the audience gain insight into what it’s like for her to dance without hearing the music, by having the music cut out half way through. Continuing their beautiful dance through the silence proved very powerful to the judges and viewers. So how can we bring our charities’ important messages to life through demonstrations of our own?

One fundraiser who attended our training course liked this idea and created a really effective demonstration. She worked at a charity that supports survivors of stroke, and she used a packet of Starburst sweets as a prop. In a corporate networking event or a pitch, she invites people to open the sweet wrapper with their non-preferred hand. This turns out to be much more frustrating than you might think! She explains this is one way to bring to life the importance of empathy for the frustration experienced by some stroke survivors who have lost the ability to do very basic motor skills, such as doing up their own buttons. 

Helping people understand your charity’s solution

In episode 138 of the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast, Rob was joined by Ben Akers. After losing his best friend to suicide, he started ‘Talk Club’, a charity which exists to save men’s lives by improving their mental fitness, in particular by helping them to talk to each other.

He used ‘Talk Club’ as a deliberate reference to the book/film ‘Fight Club’ (which of course encourages you not to talk about it), as it’s very well known amongst his target audience.

If you ever get a chance to speak to colleagues who work on the front line with the communities your charity serves, look out for the metaphors they use. A particularly powerful example came from a charity who helped those with a long term illness – one of their helpline workers shared that a woman with this condition had said “it was like looking through a mirror at my future self. That was the moment I started to believe I was going to be ok.”

For our keynote session, we were joined by Rebecca Shackell, Corporate Partnerships Manager at Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) and Lucy Squance, Director of Fundraising and Partnerships, Made by Dyslexia (formerly of ARUK). They shared some tactics for how their team has achieved huge growth in corporate partnerships income over the last few years. (This year they more than doubled their income from the previous year). 

Purpose and focus

It all starts with knowing what you want to achieve and how you best use your resources to get there.

Four years ago, ARUK’s income had remained steady for several years. They were facing several challenges including their cause being seen as less important than some others, especially during the pandemic. They felt their pipeline was much too big, meaning many of their approaches were not focused enough.

As Lucy pointed out ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got!’ So they decided to change their approach.

So what did they do?

1. They started with honest conversions – acknowledging what they weren’t getting right (which isn’t easy to hear or to do).
2. Look up and out – they looked at trends, what was going on in the sector, and did benchmarking exercises.
3. Once they’d acknowledged problem areas, they identified their focus areas and made a plan to get where they needed to be. This included merging multiple partnership teams, introducing a new corporate strategy with four pillars that fed into the organisation strategy, and working with a brand agency to create a ‘corporate playbook’. 
4. They then talked to their key stakeholders to help them buy into the new plan.
5. At the time, ARUK was going through a brand refresh and 10 year strategy plan. This allowed them the opportunity for fresh thinking – bold strategy and tone of voice as ‘wavemakers’.

Pitching to win framework

Identifying the right corporate partnership opportunities was crucial. To help, they developed a framework with three pillars – FBI. When they look at a prospect, they ask ‘do they have FBI’? Here is the framework:

Fit

Is there a fit? How can we authentically fit with their organisation? For example, Cadbury had a connection with memory and nostalgia, and John West had a connection with brain health.

Benefit

What can we help that organisation achieve? What can we give to them? Most organisations won’t want to support us without receiving a benefit in return. We consider commercial objectives, internal engagement, external reputation, and operational changes.

Impact

What can our partnership achieve? Why us? Why now? For example – we’re at an urgent tipping point of research, with more wavemakers like you we can find a cure sooner (or prevent more people dying from dementia).

This approach has been a great success. It enables them to focus on quality over quantity. Are we talking and trying to talk to only the right companies? This focus has allowed them to build a robust stewardship journey and build relationships with those partners.

Resilience in partnership fundraising

No matter what level you are in an organisation, working in a charity challenges your resilience. It is especially difficult to keep going when potential partners appear to be uninterested. Experience has repeatedly shown, a partnership may yet work out. So ARUK’s approach is to always keep going, seeking to get conversations and explore opportunities until you’re given a clear ‘No’. 

One pertinent example is ARUK’s new partnership with Warburtons, which launched earlier this year. Becky’s colleague Paul had his first conversation with the company six years ago! Over the years, the team has engaged Warburtons employees through activities such as lunch and learn sessions, in-house training and more, to develop the relationship. This long-term resilience paid off! 

Creativity

To stand out from the crowd, you sometimes have to be creative. One benefit of their FBI model was that the team had time to step back and create some different ways of inspiring potential partners.

For example, Becky reached out to Cadbury with the idea of helping them celebrate all of the memories associated with their iconic chocolate bars. A partnership would make sense because ARUK wants to keep those memories alive and safe from dementia. In order to start a conversation, one thing Becky did was to send the company a mock-up of a chocolate bar in retro packaging to spark their imagination. Many conversations later, they have built a brilliant partnership to celebrate Cadbury’s 200 year anniversary.

Another technique Becky’s colleague has had success with is to send bespoke film messages to potential partners using a software called Loom.  

A huge thank you to everyone who attended the Breakfast Club and to our fantastic speakers. We hope you found it helpful and if you want to be the first to hear about more events like this, sign up to our email newsletter here: https://bit.ly/30xxADU 

If you’re a Corporate Partnerships or Major Donor fundraiser, and you need to grow income this year, our long-standing training programmes will help. Find out more here: Corporate Partnerships Mastery and Major Gifts Mastery Programme.