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Happy asian woman taking a selfie
Cancer Research UK's #no-make-up-selfie fundraising campaign was successful, but the idea didn't originate there. Photograph: Wavebreak Media ltd / Alamy/Alamy
Cancer Research UK's #no-make-up-selfie fundraising campaign was successful, but the idea didn't originate there. Photograph: Wavebreak Media ltd / Alamy/Alamy

There is too much talk and not enough action in the charity sector

This article is more than 9 years old
Voluntary sector fundraisers must take bigger risks if they want to lead radically innovative campaigns

As a sector we seem to have become worse at innovation over the years and certainly worse at taking risks. And while that goes for everyone in the voluntary sector, we fundraisers are not immune from this.

I remember once, as a consultant, a client gave us the brief that they wanted something that was really radical and new. Looking at the charity and the market, we came up with some really exciting radical proposals. Their reply: "Mmm … can you tell us who else has already done this successfully?"

We're all good at developing strategies and even at restructuring, but when it comes to taking risks we seem to be as cautious as ever. We should learn from the fast-moving consumer goods (products that are sold quickly and at relatively low cost) sector. Those companies expect up to 90% of product tests to fail, but they make a mint on the other 10%. I know of few charities that are even happy with a 10% failure rate. Low failure rates tend to lead to low success rates.

We've also got worse at looking outside the sector for new ideas. Let's be honest, fundraisers are not very good at coming up with the next big thing. If we look at big fundraising earners of the last 30 years, they all started outside the sector. Consider direct mail, telemarketing, door-to-door fundraising, street fundraising, direct-response TV marketing, challenge events – they have all been sold in to us by companies operating outside the sector, initially.

So let's take a closer look at how most charities innovate and think about how it could be done. Currently, when someone comes up with an idea, it goes into some sort of product development cycle, with a series of evaluations and developments, a good dollop of market research (qualitative and quantative ideally) and months of discussion before we get to a prototype which we then trial on a small basis – if we ever get that far. We usually junk almost anything at this stage if the answers are not conclusive.

And after all of that groundwork, if the idea still isn't suitable, we slip it under the bed so that no one knows it was ever there – we don't often learn fully from our mistakes. If it does work, we roll out cautiously, only to find that some other charity nicks our idea and makes a mint out of it.

So how could this process be improved? I think the best form of market research is to actually test your product in a live fundraising environment. Rather than checking whether people would donate "if asked" – ask them to donate. Streamline the whole process by asking three basic questions:

What is the product?

Who is it aimed at?

How will it raise money?

If you get decent answers to those three questions then move straight to prototype and test it live with real people. Review the results, junk, tweek or roll out. If you junk it, learn from it and tell others. If the returns are good and it's scalable, go straight to the board and prize investment money out of them. Let's challenge ourselves to get from idea to prototype in twelve weeks – that's what the best private sector innovators do. We should also celebrate failure, whether that's in our own charities or across the sector. It's time we started congratulating those who took a risk, failed and learned from it, and sharing those lessons with others.

I remember when we were testing face-to-face fundraising in the late 1990s: we went from idea to recruiting 7,000 regular donors a month in little over six months. Where are the examples of that sort of radical innovation today – even on the internet? The latest #no-make-up-selfie fundraising campaign is a great example of a charity making £8m – but it wasn't their idea and it's not repeatable. Nonetheless, well done for grasping the nettle, Cancer Research UK. Let's have more of it, people!

Simon Burne is director of fundraising and marketing at The Children's Society.

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