richard.piper's blog

The Institute of Fundraising has published a not very useful guide to managing fundraisers. Apparently, it follows feedback from IoF members that the fundraising function is often misunderstood at organisational level, and the guide is aimed at both managers and individual fundraisers to help implement best practice.

You could download it here 'Managing Fundraisers' (pdf, 2MB) but I don't think you should bother.

As readers of my previous posts will know, I believe that charities, social enterprises, community groups and voluntary organisations need to focus on impact leadership, not just impact measurement.  This means organisations totally focused on achieving the most impact they can and it means changes at every level of an organisation, especially planning, improvement, and communication.

Anti New Year?

“Happy New Year!” feels pretty stale to me by now (I’m posting this on 12 Jan). Am I cynical or does everyone feel the same?

And what about those resolutions?  I’ve never heard so many people say “I’m not going to bother this year; I never keep them”. I respect that view.  It shows good self-reflection and an interesting backlash against a tradition that always felt a bit odd.  Improving ourselves is a continuous life process; a once a year ‘shot in the arm’ arguably does more harm than good.

I am very proud today to unveil on behalf of NCVO the ultimate impact evaluation tool. After fifteen years of work on impact evaluation, NCVO is launching this tool today – and making it available for free to the entire sector.

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting a group of inspiring voluntary sector leaders, all doing a brilliant job of dealing with massively complex issues.  The Making the Transition event is exclusively for recipients of the Transition Fund, the fund set up to provide some support to those charities heavily involved in delivering public sector services and which have experienced very significant cuts.

If you listen to some accounts of trusteeship and governance in the charity sector, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing is adherence to the law.

Imagine if you will that a charity is like a family driving in their car, perhaps off on holiday or a day trip. And imagine the parents are the trustee board – the ultimate decision-makers on this journey (as well, in this case, the implementers of those decisions).

I’ve been arguing for a year or two now that ‘impact’ has become much too closely associated with measurement, monitoring and evaluation.  It’s almost as though some people are unable to think ‘impact’ without automatically thinking about whether and how to measure and evaluate it. For the last ten years, the discipline of monitoring and evaluation has taken impact hostage. But impact has broken free.  It is now increasingly accepted that the impact topic overlaps with monitoring but is quite distinct from it.

Last month I posted a blog asking whether or not there is such a thing as an impact measurement personality type. I had started to suspect that some people simply prefer focusing on the measurement of impact, while others are happier focusing on planning it, communicating it, improving it and of course delivering it. I also wondered whether these preferences had any link with people’s deeper personality types, as demonstrated for example by the Myers Briggs Type Index.

I’m starting to wonder whether some us are heavily disposed towards impact measurement, some of us are allergic to it, and some of us can take it or leave it. Here’s a snippet from a strategy away day that I was facilitating the other day.

I was talking to my friend over the weekend – on Friday he’d been on a leadership training course.  He couldn’t play me at swingball, he said, because he literally had sore ribs from trying to suppress hysterical giggles during the course.