Hi Margaux That was interesting - for something that's supposed to be a festival of creativity, it's amazing how similar all the ideas are! "We took X and we turned it into Y" - woop, big deal. After the third time I saw that in an entry I was getting somewhat bored. My favourite is the Barnardo's because it's the only one that contains a real human showing real emotion. The last shot of the little boy saying "I'm scared" really got me. And it got me, because it had eased me in with the nice, confident well-adjusted young man at the beginning. But I didn't see an ask. And I saw no clear call to action on any of the pieces. I love the idea of the coin box, but I do find it a little removed from the cause? I also found myself bored by the entry video they had done, which is a shame. That ridiculous voice-over didn't help. The only other one that came close for me was the Greenpeace Arctic ad - again there was emotion in it. And great music choice, which is the secret 'glue' of any DRTV ad - to me the music has the job of fixing the image fast in my head, and this was perfectly timed to the slow gait of the bear. But again, the call to action is weak. It's a shame there were no results for us to see, because in the end, all the creativity in the world is pointless if it makes people just sit there and go, "Oh wow that's clever", but do nothing.....you have to get the message of "Give us the f****ing money!" or "Take some f****** action!" across - in a brand-appropriate way, of course ;-)

Mark and Morag - thanks for your responses. I think this would certainly be something the IoF could do as a massive service to its members - and might even be a great incentive for charities to continue their membership year on year, if it was regularly updated and proved useful. Mark, I totally agree with you about the difficulties of data sharing, but actually the Ross CASE survey of university fundraising (http://www.rosscasesurvey.org.uk/)is quite a good example of how this can be organised within a charity sector, although it's not terribly detailed - aggregate fundraising data is made available publicly without naming individual institutions, and for those who wish to share in more detail a confidential data set with named institutions is shared with those who've signed up to it. Interestingly as far as I can see around 75% of participating institutions have taken part in that more detailed exercise, so it turns out to be very interesting and useful. We're currently working on a similar more detailed exercise specifically around our 'annual fund' (i.e. essentially direct marketing) activity, which will be a lot more granular. So what would be necessary for the exercise would be a way of categorising charities, by cause area(s), size of budget, donor file, etc. and working out a way of categorising the degree of detail included in appeal data - type of appeal, i.e. cold/warm/public broadcast; medium - telephone, mail, radio, press, etc.; no of solicitations (where poss.), more granular appeal design specifics, i.e. letter length, leaflet (yes or no), response results, financial results, etc. etc. etc.! It would take a bit of doing to work out how granular the data set should be and also whether it should be historic or not.... ...but although it's hard, I think it would also be massively worth doing.

Hi Mark - it appears to be my day for commenting on your posts :-) David Ogilvy says in his talk above (paraphrasing) - 'you know to the dollar, that long copy outperforms short copy, that a 2 minute advert is more cost-effective than a 30 second one..." etc. And of course loads of tests have been done on those kinds of things in fundraising for years, and experienced practitioners know the results. Except that for some reason I (and I don't know how many colleagues have the same experience) seem to end up explaining this over and over again and being asked for proof, often by our seniors. There's no central source that we can all go to to show that these things are true, unless a charity has its own in-house historical database of results. And so here's a comment I made on ThirdSector back when Lindsay Boswell argued for more practical and applicable fundraising research: "Here's something I think the sector desperately needs: a direct marketing response database. Response rates for appeals at different times of year, via different solicitation media \(i.e. mail, phone, face to face, DRTV, Web 2.0) for different charity sector organisations. In the university sector, we have the Ross-Case survey, that delivers helpful broadbrush indicators of how different universities compare in their fundraising efforts - how valuable would a sector-wide database be? It wouldn't necessarily involve any identifiable data being stored, just appeal stats against an agreed protocol. Also, we have the excellent www.sofii.org - a fundraising archive of the most effective \(and less effective!) appeal creative from around the world. Could this also be integrated as a kind of creative benchmarking knowledge bank? You could potentially have a subscription-based database delivering statistically reliable, up-to-date quantitative information, to be used for benchmarking and forecasting. I'll leave it to my colleagues in other fundraising areas to put their suggestions forward, but as a direct response fundraiser, that's what I think would be incredibly valuable."

Hi Mark - that would be great! I'd love to see a post all about the phone. I've had some very good and some not-so-good fundraising calls recently from a couple of charities, would be happy to share my experiences 'off-list' if it helps :-)

Hi Mark - really interesting, but I wonder where the phone comes in in all this? The chance to actually talk to people, find out what they're really interested in, highlight the areas of a charity's work that fit with donor needs - surely the phone is the tool par excellence for this? Nobody seems to talk about the phone any more! :-)

Love it, thanks Aline. And this wonderfully pithy and apposite quote is also attributed to Churchill: "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."

It's a 'rattle' of collectors I think, Craig!

Yes, I give to the charity I work for! Same reasons as those who've posted above.

So it seems we have a notional figure in our heads of what's 'safe' to give away to charity and when you work it out it comes out as about 0.4% of household income.....that's really interesting from a fundraiser's point of view, because it pretty much shows us where we sit in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I tried to work out what 0.4% was and got it wrong the first time (Mark kindly deleted my post!) For me and my partner it's about £320 per year, and we're both on pretty good professional level salaries. That sounds pretty shockingly low - but actually if you'd asked me how many charities per year I felt we could comfortably support, I'd have said 'about half a dozen' and that works out, if you assume we'd give about £5 per month - not so little as to be stingy, but not so much as to be 'imprudent'... So we know where we are, now! If you're going to a household with overall income of £80K a year, that household is likely to feel comfortable giving half a dozen charities gifts of around £5 per month, and no more. Can we use this? What other data can we bring into the mix to find the households who will give above average % of household income across all income bands?

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