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.