I remember my first role in fundraising as community fundraising assistant. I would spend hours each week sending out collection tins to fundraisers who were coordinating events, or to offices who wanted to display a collection tin at their reception. Fundraising has moved on a lot since then and I can't recall the last time I saw a traditional fundraising tin sat neatly on a reception desk. Raising vital funds for charity and engaging with different causes now takes place in the digital space.
The change to the fundraising environment over the last few years, least of all during the pandemic, has meant we need to constantly review how we engage with our supporters. As the account management lead in the Crisis Partnerships team, it is important to understand what motivates both companies and their employees to raise money. When it comes to fundraising, we want to ensure that we are flexible and tailor our fundraising tools make participation as easy as possible, and that we collaborate with our members to share their stories and journeys out of homelessness authentically.
With this in mind, we have recently developed a new partnerships fundraising product, 'Cook for Crisis'. We worked with our existing corporate partners to understand how they communicate with their staff, what they wanted to achieve through working with Crisis in the long term, their objectives regarding employee wellbeing and their concerns coming out of the pandemic and planning for office working again. We used this insight to develop a product that allowed absolute flexibility for people to raise funds, engage with the work we do at Crisis and highlight the importance of wellbeing.
Developing partnerships with companies is part of the foundation of fundraising. Companies are integral to the delivery of the aims and objectives of charity strategies and employees should feel like part of this journey.
I am not too sure collection tins will cut the mustard anymore.
Ali Roberts is the account management lead in the Crisis Partnerships team. Cook for Crisis will launch in October. If you want to find out more, please speak to your Crisis contact or email corporatepartnerships@crisis.org.uk