A few thoughts on community fundraising

In my ‘spare’ time I chair a small charity based in Alnwick which exists to improve life chances and remove barriers for learning for young people who attend the Duchess’s Community High School. Read more here.

Last night we held our annual celebration event and the young people were spectacular as always – sharing their experiences and helping us to demonstrate how our charity makes a difference. We also launched our Christmas fundraiser and we were blown away with the response (pledges totalling £850). This got me thinking about how much BOOST has contributed to my own professional development.

Chairing BOOST has taught me so much about community fundraising. I work in fundraising professionally but my focus is grant fundraising – I write bids, fill in forms, share stories in a way that makes a grant funder want to support a cause.

Professionally I stay in my lane!

But, through BOOST I have dabbled in community fundraising and what I have learned is:
💡Relationships really matter – you need to be seen to be making a difference and you need to put time into making all your supporters feel valued.
💡Social media is important – but you can’t just shout into your own echo chamber – you need to share your posts into community groups, that is where we get the biggest traction.
💡There are no quick wins but the wins might come where you least expect it (we have had several donations that I know are because of the profile we have built in our community).
💡People talk to each other and one conversation leads to another and another and maybe that will eventually lead to someone stepping forward as a volunteer or a donor.
💡Celebrating success and sharing achievements is important but so does shouting about the issues that matter. We try to show how our money is spent and give people a reason to connect.

In five years BOOST has gone from a charity that nobody had ever heard of to one that we hear people talking about. And one that can generate £850 in donations in one evening (that is more than our annual income in 2019!).

It is a privilege to chair this charity and to see it making a difference for young people growing up in the most rural part of England.