Events Fundraising

So I've started out fairly quietly blogwise but I think I may be about to step into the controversial with this one.  I wanted to talk about Challenge Event fundraising in the UK and the more I thought about it the more I thought...we could do this better....

 So we do a lot of it....it was well over a £200 million industry in 2008 alone...but are we getting the most from this?  Are we building the pages asking our friends to donate and then...kinda hoping it'll work?  Hoping that the person at the other end who is going to run the marathon or climb the mountain will put in enough effort to make their targets more or less alone.  Other than giving out a generic page with which they can put a picture up on and then a way of taking donations online what else can the charity do.  I know lots of charities offer great help when it comes to fundraising activities etc but are we missing a trick with the technology behind this?  How much more can we do with the technology?

Well I'd say a lot (and don't stone me I know some folks are putting a lot of effort into this but ...overall?)

I'm currently working on a big project in the UK (don't tell anyone it's a secret ) to bring Blackbaud Kintera products over here.  For those of you who haven't seen this Blackbaud acquired Kintera in July of last year.  We started almost straight away on a project to bring the fantastic products that Kintera were offering and the current Blackbaud products into line with each other.  This project is still ongoing all over the world and we started late last year to look at the UK market.  Kintera didn't have a UK offering when Blackbaud acquired them so we're not only integrating with existing products we're starting again on getting it ready for the market...and it's a big job (but we've done it many times before so if we didn't have a good plan then someone needs fired ;-)).

So as I said a big job...and daunting...yep...scary...yep...but when I started looking at the products I started to see...also...very cool.  The stuff we can do using Blackbaud's Sphere and the Friends asking Friends offerings is fantastic.  Kintera have been in the challenge event game long before it was big here in the UK and long before most of the big providers over here even existed so they know how to do it and do it well.

So what can we do...well I intend talking about this more later but firstly - give people the ability to build their own teams, some products offer this already but lots of folks are not doing this.  Let me give you a real world example.

Last year myself and four others at Blackbaud took part in an event for Capability Scotland and Scope where we were led by a wheelchair user up Ben Nevis.  The idea was the brainchild of a chap called Ken Hames, who some of you will know from lots of TV work he has done not least of which the excellent Beyond Boundaries series.  It was probably the hardest 14 hours of my entire life but a fantastic life changing experience.  Anyway when we were fundraising for this the guys over at Scope and Capability gave us loads of fantastic tips on how to fundraise (all greatly appreciated guys) but at the time and more so afterwards I couldn't help thinking that we could have been doing this easier if the technology was there to help us do it (hey I work for a tech company of course I was thinking that!).  BBNC already had it's team fundraising functionality which was excellent but at the time there were only one or two charities using this in any real way and even they were just testing the water.  So we set up pages with Just Giving - 7 in total, 5 of us, our leader (Dave), and then an overall team one so that the folks at Blackbaud didn't need to pick who to donate to!  Just Giving have a nice Facebook application where we could aggregate our giving but it had it's drawbacks too - Not least of which was the fact we couldn't total the amount with gift aid etc.

After the challenge (and we raised over £13,500) once my aching limbs had stopped hurting and my broken foot had stopped making me walk in a funny way (yep broke it on the way down - nothing serious and made it off the mountain unaided,,,just about) I was looking at the stuff we could provide out of the box such as Team fundraising in BBNC.  We've started implementing some fairly big charity orgs lately so we're starting to see more and more folks offer this stuff in the UK through their own sites.  Anyway I think being able to aggregate a team total so that we can see totals, league tables, top donors across the teams etc would help not least of which in a competitive environment where my friends may want to out do the other guys friends or at a higher level - the Blackbaud team and the other orgs that were taking part...never underestimate the donating power of an MD who wants his org to come top of the heap!

Secondly direct debits...I'd like to see if this was something that would takie off here.  There is a comments area below for this blog so I'd like to get peoples thoughts on getting d/d sign ups for challenge events fundraising?  So with the chugger system slowing down for various reasons - why not try something new to encourage those much needed (especially at this time) direct debits? 

Third - What about campaign based fundraising microsites?  Sites where we can give our challenge eventers the ability to control their own content through blogging, discussion boards etc.  Encourage folk to start using these more - especially if we can get high profile people to run these (look at Brittany Spears, Richard Branson, Stephen Fry or Barack Obama on Twitter).  Then we take all this great stuff and roll it up onto our website and show who is raising what for whom and when.  In short - build much more competition into the events and even it just raises a little more it's still a start.

So that's three straight off the bat and if we maybe add things like optimised content, polls, quizzes, FAQ sections and maybe to watch over it all we give our CEO's nice widgets to sit on their desktops or phones so that they can monitor in real time what is coming in and when -  we can start to really make a bigger impact and we could double that £200 Million figure in a short space of time.

So what are you thoughts on this?  Are we doing this enough?  Can we do more technologically?  Have you seen something that I've missed in my list?  I'd love to hear your opinions.