Firm Foundations - Helping Strengthen AAW’s Philanthropy Offer

28th June 2021 by Jo Hastie

Earlier this month, Jennie Gillions joined the AAW Group as an Associate Senior Consultant.

Jennie is a highly experienced philanthropic funding and partnerships expert with 14 years’ private and institutional fundraising, strategy development and relationship management experience within international and UK non-profit organisations. Jennie was Global Philanthropy Lead for ActionAid International and has had senior trusts and institutional fundraising roles with Médecins du Monde, British Heart Foundation and British Red Cross amongst other charities. She has secured major grants from a wide range of trust and institutional funders including the National Lottery, EU, NORAD, Elton John Aids Foundation, Zochonis and a variety of family/ corporate trusts, and we are delighted she is joining the AAW family to share her expertise with our clients. Below she tells us more about her background and some of the key issues that are relevant to charities’ philanthropic fundraising right now.

Can you tell us about a few of your achievements in funding.

I accidentally fell into the voluntary sector after getting my degree in history, working in my first Trusts and Foundations fundraising job at the Refugee Council, after five years as a volunteer manager, mainly because I love writing! I achieved my first grant of £5,000 for interpreting services for women fleeing Sri Lanka and the DRC.

My most significant bids have been in a sector I love – international development. I spent two years at the Red Cross and secured grants totalling £1.4 million from the Big Lottery Fund for refugee services in England and Scotland and an additional £600,000 from the EU for anti-trafficking projects in Europe, as well as funding for post Ebola work in Sierra Leone.

One of the most challenging bids I worked on was for the French-headquartered charity Médecins du Monde to the Elton John Aids Foundation for funding for counselling and HIV services for sex workers in Moscow. It was particularly difficult given President Putin made changes to the law twice during the grant application period, making it even harder for people to access healthcare and meaning we had to change our approach to avoid frontline delivery staff breaching new legislation. Satisfyingly, the bid was successful though, raising £650,000 over a two year period for the project.

I also spent 2.5 years at ActionAid International as the Philanthropy and corporate partnerships lead, which was like an internal consultant role in the Global Secretariat, supporting colleagues in Africa, Asia and Brazil to understand how to access grant funding from corporate sources, individual major givers, and trust and foundations. I carried out training, helping them to create strategies, reviewed their cases for support and provided guidance on what donors are looking for. I enjoyed exploring and understanding how to put their stories across to philanthropists, so that they would want to invest.

Tell us about your new involvement with AAW

I was contacted by AAW after being made redundant from ActionAid, along with many other staff members, partly as a result of the pandemic. Being an associate and freelancing appealed to me to give me more variety and freedom to solve problems – something I particularly like to do, but which can be more difficult in an organisation with heavy bureaucracy and layers of permissions to get anything done.

I want to help people solve their problems and overcome barriers to fundraising, working out the reasons why you are not raising money, which aren’t always obvious – perhaps your fundraising policies are wrong, your back-end support isn’t right or your board isn’t supportive of fundraising.

I also love helping others with grant writing. The trafficking grant I worked on was drafted by a colleague using English as a second language. I loved editing that down, making the story-telling stronger and making the project more appealing to the donor. I could write bids for the rest of my life!

Story-telling and language come across as key interests in your background, tell us why.

What I love about grant writing is getting the perfect word and language to communicate clearly. My parents were both journalists and I am very keen on the use of inclusive language in international development; so many UK, EU and US funders write in very formal English and there is no attempt to translate for other audiences. For countries where British or American English is not their first language, they are already at a disadvantage. If people are serious about decolonising funding, they need to make their language more accessible.

I recently completed a certificate in Philanthropic Psychology from the Institution of Sustainable Philanthropy founded by Professor Jen Shang and Professor Adrian Sargeant. The course explored the psychology of how people respond to being spoken to in different ways and getting into the mindset of donors in the way you talk – what language you use and how people respond to that language and specific words, bringing them with you on the fundraising journey.

What do you think the key issues are currently around trusts and foundations and institutional fundraising?

One huge issue right now is the decolonisation of Aid, which is key within the international development sector. Some trusts and foundations may be quite conservative and this is not an issue for them (though it should be), but many younger and/or more progressive donors who are interested in Black Lives Matter, Pride and #CharitySoWhite, for example, will increasingly be looking at donating to causes where they can see charities actually doing something on these issues, not just talking about them. And charities need to do their part to influence an institutional shift; if you are serious about having African nationals running African NGOs you need to be having conversations with your funders about transferring funding directly to those organisations.

In the UK context, ‘decolonisation’ feeds into how organisations manage diversity and inclusion.

Another interesting issue in the UK is grant-makers’ investments. In May, two of the Sainsbury family trusts won a case against the Charity Commission that means funders in England and Wales can exclude companies not adhering to the Paris Agreement from their investment portfolios, if investing in those companies would run contrary to funders’ charitable objectives. They haven’t been allowed to do that before, because English and Welsh law emphasised high financial return; the ruling means funders can invest ethically, even if that means they’ll have less money to give away.

Finally, we still don’t know what the impact will be post-pandemic for trusts and foundations (including corporate foundations and trusts that are vehicles for individual philanthropy) after the last couple of years – I think it will take a while to see the impact on levels of funding to the sector.

Jennie is available to offer strategic and hands-on support with all your trusts & foundations requirements. If you’d like to find out more contact her at jennie@aawpartnership.com.

The CRM Dilemma

20th June 2021 by Tobin Aldrich

Yes folks we are deep into the age of the big CRM switch. Here our Principal Partner (and database guru) Tobin Aldrich offers a few words of advice (and warning) if you have the task of leading a big switcheroo in 2022.

One of the real joys of being a strategic consultant is the variety of clients you work with. In the past year or so, we've worked with organisations from across the UK and Ireland and countries as varied as the US, Bangladesh, Egypt and Uruguay. We've worked with non-profits of pretty much every description and cause area from local and regional charities to massive UN organisations. The projects we've done have been incredibly varied, including market entry studies, auditing and reviewing fundraising and marketing functions, developing major appeals and campaigns, creating change strategies and supporting restructures as well as lots of recruiting.

Despite this diversity, there are some common themes in all of our projects and clients. Fundraising only works when it is fully embedded in everything that a non-profit does. Everything in the end comes back to strategy and people, and one can't work without the other.

Another common thread is that everyone understands they need to make their organisations digitally enabled and data driven but hardly anyone has the systems they need to make this happen.

At the moment it feels like every one of our clients either is in the middle of or about to embark upon replacing their CRM database. These are very significant projects involving major investment and which take up very large amounts of organisational time and attention.

As may have been mentioned, I've been around for a bit. But I did have a life before fundraising and a big chunk of that was spent in the IT sector. I've been involved in major business systems projects since the days when the computer was a big box the size of a room with less memory than today's pocket calculators. I've spent quite a lot of time specifying and implementing CRM systems and while the technology has moved on, the basics of successful systems implementation are exactly the same now as they were thirty years ago.

It's extremely frustrating to see CRM projects go wrong today for the same reasons as they have for decades.

There are I think, five key ways your new systems implementation doesn't give you the answer you wanted:

Unrealistic expectations. The tech industry has been over-hyping what it can deliver since the first Colossus was turned on at Bletchley Park and is still merrily selling blue sky solutions to this day. We are constantly told that the latest whizzy thing (marketing automation anyone?) will magically solve all previous problems. You know what? If you put the same crappy data into a system with the old structure that the intern came up with a decade ago, you get the same rubbish results in a shinier box.

Mission creep. Out of unrealistic expectations comes an overly ambitious project. It's a great idea to put all of your data into one database, right? So combine all information about everyone the organisation deals with into one place. Makes sense. The problem is that you have committed yourselves to replacing not only the fundraising system but the services database and potentially other business systems across the organisation. All with own processes and needs. Oh and systems able to handle all of these functions together are much more expensive. When actually you could have got the integration that is actually essential by taking feeds from all of these systems and putting them into a data warehouse. Someone needs to make a properly informed decision about what information is actually needed when, where and by whom before you buy a Rolls Royce when a Nissan Micra would have done.

Too much focus on the brand, not enough on the people. There's lots of focus on which system a charity should adopt. Salesforce, Dynamics, Raiser's Edge? Usually it doesn't matter all that much which particular system is selected as most popular CRMs do basically the same things in pretty similar ways. It is all about how the solution is specified and implemented. And crucially who by and how good they are.

Knowledge gaps. A fundamental problem is the gap between the people who know how the system works and those who understand the business processes. This is definitely an issue in fundraising where there is a combination of some quite quirky processes and activities, and a workforce that isn't particularly digitally literate. The lack of digital understanding often seems to increase in proportion to the seniority of the individual. There are not many people who both thoroughly understand how fundraising works at a granular level and who can transfer that into a proper specification and architecture for a business system. If someone like that is not at the heart of a new implementation (on the client side), you are in trouble.

Ownership. Senior ownership of the project is crucial. This is not just oversight of a project board, it is active engagement in making sure not only that the project has priority for time and resources but that it keeps to its scope and vision. Unless the new system is bringing significant improvements in business processes, the investment is being wasted. All the way through the project, there will be pushback against change and unless this is challenged, existing inefficiencies will be replicated in the new environment.

Planning and timescales

Just as the IT industry over-promises on the technology, it consistently underestimates how long it takes to implement systems properly. Or vendors promise to hit unrealistic deadlines to win contracts.

The reality is that everything will take longer than you think. And cost more. But the more time you spend upfront on the preparation, the more time and money overall you will save. Getting the specification right is both absolutely essential and really hard. There will always be the temptation to rush to the solution, but if key issues aren't identified and dealt with up front they will come back and bite. These are often nothing to do with the technology itself. How can you know what reports you want out of the system if the charity hasn't completely clarified what its key fundraising KPIs are, how they are defined and how they should be measured? And if your overall fundraising objectives aren't clearly set, how can you come up with these KPIs?

The key point is that technology doesn't solve organisational problems. Non-profits need to answer the important questions about why they need information, who needs it, in what form and when before they embark on major technology projects. Then the right skills and experience need to be brought together to come up with the most practical answer and that project has to be given real organisational support and priority.

Embarking on a new CRM project isn't something to be attempted lightly. But the pitfalls can be avoided with a combination of strategy, planning and resources. Oh and time, lots of time.

If any of the above sounds familiar or resonates, drop Tobin a line. We won’t be able to solve all your problems, but we can help you with the structure around planning, process and measurements. Tobin can be reached at tobin@aawpartnership.com.