New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year everyone. Well, here we go into 2009. Woolworths has gone, so has Wedgwood. Adams is going to the wall and Zavvi is in real trouble. Debenhams has almost £1BN of debt to service. I hope they did well in the sales.

On my first day back after the holidays I read reports suggesting medium sized charities are going to the worst affected by the recession. I’ve filed it with the other reports stating large and small charities will bear the brunt of the downturn.

Charitable income will fall by 5%, no 10%. Was that 15% I heard?

Everyone has an opinion. And that’s just great.

The economic firestorm started a long way back, but went stratospheric three months ago. That gives us a full quarters fundraising results to look at to assess the initial impact. That’s a lot of data. Well, here’s a thing. Whilst Lehman Brothers was going to the wall and the stock market shrinking by almost 25%; whilst the number of people unemployed rose to almost two million; whilst house prices fell by 10% and savers saw interest rates halve, most of our clients posted strong results from their autumn appeals. Three clients had record appeals in the autumn. You know who you are. Early indications are that Christmas has gone pretty well too.

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to be unaffected, of course we are. However, lets be informed by fact, not opinion. Let’s look at our fundraising empirically. Let’s make decisions based on a firm understanding of the figures, and of our knowledge of the marketplace. Let’s understand year-on-year performance, yield per donor and the real net first year position from recruitment activity. Let’s have a grip on attrition figures (monthly at least), let’s make sure we’re on top of ROI by media channel. To maximise the chances of hitting income figures this year fundraisers are going to need to move quickly to take advantage of tactical opportunities whilst continuing to focus on implementing longer term fundraising strategies. We can only make successful tactical decisions when we have the facts to back us up. Otherwise we’re going to be guessing. Guessing isn’t going to please trustees or Finance Directors. And it won’t deliver results.

My resolution for 2009 is to be informed by fact, not opinion. We won’t always have all the data we want available, but we should be able to make best use of what we have. We’re in for a challenging year, but let’s tackle those challenges with evidence, and not speculation.

Perfect presents? Never.

Every year the same thing. What to get our charity partners, what to get the team?

The former are tricky – no one-size-fits-all case of wine when you’re working with charities, one of whose creeds is temperance … and is it appropriate to be sending hampers of fine foods to development organisations whose beneficiaries are happy to have any food at all?

Then there are the environmental issues – all that packaging, the fuel for deliveries, the sheer consumerism (I write this as Zavvi goes into administration).

And it’s a Christian festival isn’t it? The corporate cards hedge our bets around issues of religious inclusion and atheism with ‘Season’s Greetings’ (anyhow, Merry Christmas implies alcohol-related indulgence – see temperance above) but should we be delivering gifts at all? Then there’s the personalities – the charity may disapprove, but Callum has to have his single malt …

And it’s the same with the internal agency team. I think I know them well enough but everybody has their own favourite beverage – we used to buy them Champagne but many bottles lingered on their desks into Spring as some hankered for nothing more sophisticated than a case of Stella.

Last year I went out with colleague Robin and we guessed between us. Hopeless. A frenzy of swapping followed but nobody was entirely happy.

This year I thought I’d cracked it. I emailed the team to tell them I’d be blogging on the subject and asked outright what their favourite tipple was. The majority replied with an Out of Office message because I’d left it so late. Hey ho ho ho.

But I think I may have found the ideal solution. Make it an SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem). Between them, Nick and Diane and Rich sorted out the Christmas cards, the corporate gifts and the latter organised the booze. So blame them/him/anybody but me.

Happy New Year to one and all.