This isn't about ways to spend a huge fundraising budget, but what you could do if you had the cash knocking about your bank account.

Sadly I suspect none of us have that much loose change: most of us will not even earn it over our entire working career. But let's not get downheartened - what would you do with your £2.5m?

Let me share an idea with you, in case a lottery win in the next few weeks makes you feel like splashing out.

This Christmas the RNLI have launched their virtual gifts catalogue, with a test mailing to half their members and donors. Lifesaving Gifts offers supporters a new and exciting way to help the RNLI save lives at sea.

Running alongside the existing gift catalogue of RNLI-branded merchandise, Lifesaving Gifts has inspirational present ideas to reduce the stress of present-buying. We're hopeful that the RNLI's loyal base will take to charity gifts for Christmas like ducks to water - in the way the wider public has embraced the 'goat-for-Christmas' gift offerings of overseas development charities in recent years.



Gifts range from £12 for three cans of self-heating meals for crew – including sausage and beans and Irish Stew - to RNLI lifejackets for £500. You can get hold of a copy for yourself through the website, and some of the gifts are also being sold on ebay, to raise extra funds.

So far so good, but what's this got to do with spending £2.5m? Well, if you want to make waves this Christmas you can buy a state-of-the-art, super-sophisticated, custom-designed, computer-controlled Tamar class lifeboat. Quite simply the best all-weather lifeboat in service in the world.

Imagine one of those in your Christmas stocking! Perhaps some extremely generous individual will buy a Tamar for the RNLI this Christmas. For the rest of us, who just want to show our support for the ordinary men and women who do extraordinarily brave things as volunteer lifeboat crew, there's always sausage and beans.

John Turner

Posted by Whitewater Team at 05:30 PM | Permalink

2006 has been Whitewater’s most successful year. Ever.

The omens were good back in January when we beat off a strong cast of agencies to win the RNLI account. It was a great start to what has been a year of exceptional growth, for our clients and ourselves.

Originally published in Professional Fundraising magazine: to read this ad in full download the pdf.

Posted by Whitewater Team at 11:26 AM | Permalink

It's a brave charity that risks valuable budget on a concept that includes sending a length of cut steel cable to its most valuable donors. Practical Action deserve great respect for having the confidence to go ahead and be different. This mailpack, sent to their high value donors, was a winning and unforgettable combination of audience understanding, lateral thinking, first-class creative and a ballsy fundraising team.

The ask was to help construct gravity ropeways in Nepal, to help villagers living in remote mountain communities to get their produce down to valley markets quickly and safely.

The whole execution feels unusual and authentic. The Jiffy bag outer ensures attention on the doormat. The copy tone quietly reinforces the need without resorting to charity histrionics. The prompts are expressed as lengths of the steel cable needed to construct the ropeways. The presentation of the background material is simple and real.

And the candle on the cake was a six-inch length of 8mm galvanised steel cable. You hold in your hand what your money is helping to buy.

The pack was a finalist in this year's international ECHO Awards, but even better than that were the results... target income was beaten by 59%!

Nick Couldry

Posted by Whitewater Team at 03:18 PM | Permalink

The world of nonprofit blogs is small, but growing. I thought I'd point you in the direction of a few I check regularly: hopefully they'll provide a good jump-off point for discovering many more. These few are all US-based - our transatlantic cousins are ahead of us in the use of this technology.

First up is Getting Attention. Nancy E Schwartz updates very regularly with great content. Recent gems include tips on starting online conversations, using your enewsletters to best effect, and she has a whole category on blogging in case you're still wondering why you should care.

The Nonprofit Blog Exchange is a great resource for links to other nonprofit blogs: just scroll down and look at the huge list under the heading 'Blogroll'.

Kiri Leroux at NonProfit Communications is always interesting, and currently has a post up on things you can do to make your website more user-friendly - without having to redesign the whole thing.

Kiri has also been linking a lot recently to the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Let me explain: A 'carnival' happens where a host collates a number of posts, from various blogs, on a given topic. The host creates a single post on his or her own site, linking to all the posts (or the best, depending on numbers participating) submitted on the subject. It's a very cool way of discovering lots of new, relevant sites. The Donor Power Blog is hosting next week's carnival and it's an open topic - so if you're blogging on the subject of nonprofit fundraising you need to get your entry in, tout de suite! Help! I think that means me!

In the next week or so I'll be searching out UK-based nonprofit blogs - give us your recommendations, regardless of geography, and we'll see if we can build our own list of blogs that deserve our attention.

Anna Crofton

Posted by Whitewater Team at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

To celebrate the end of a record-breaking year, we are giving each and every one of our staff £100 to give to charities of their choice.

The only conditions:
They can't give to a charity that another staff member has given to.
It can't be a charity that they're supporting already.
They must bring in everything that the charity sends... so that we can seek learning and inspiration from it
They have to contribute to this blog to tell us "What happened next?".

If you'd like to be updated each time our team tells us what happens next, register for an RSS feed or email updates (put your email address in the box in the right hand column, beneath where it says 'subscriptions'. Then hit 'Go').

And hey, why not join in by adding comments of your own?

Happy Christmas!

Steve Andrews

Posted by Whitewater Team at 02:09 PM | Permalink

Breakthrough are enjoying some great results from their Crocus Fund programme, with almost £150k having been raised from 90 Crocus Funds since the establishment of the programme in 03/04. Last year alone saw income double - not bad growth considering that, by their own admission, the Tribute Fund team had not done much active promotion of the scheme.

Gary Kelly, Breakthrough's Senior Legacy and Tribute Fundraising Manager said: "We are very excited about the potential of our Crocus Fund programme. The scheme is showing some great returns, and we believe things can only get better as we focus more on this area. We are particularly pleased with the performance of Crocus Funds that have a website function. On average these Funds are worth about 25% more than those without a website."

Spring may seem a long way off, but for Breakthrough the Crocuses are already blooming!

Clare Hallsworth

Posted by Whitewater Team at 10:30 AM | Permalink

What do people hate about charities? Direct mail appeals from charities they haven't given to. They throw them in the bin. And when they moan to their friends about charity direct mail, their friends agree, because they throw them in the bin as well. Why do charities waste their money sending direct mail appeals when everybody throws them in the bin?

It's a huge issue for charity fundraisers - not talking in response terms, because we know that direct mail appeals work; otherwise we wouldn’t send them, would we?

But the vast majority of people who throw appeals in the bin don't know that they work. All they know is that they throw them in the bin and so do all their friends. This wouldn't matter much if we were selling credit cards, cars or gardening equipment, because the recipients couldn't give a damn if commercial organisations waste money. But they do care, very much, if they think charities are wasting donations.

And that reflects badly on all of us. Despite knowing that our audience think we're wasting money, we keep bombarding them with direct mail appeals because a small percentage of them respond and make it worth our while.

But we don't tell them that.

Perhaps you don't think it's important what non-responders think, as long as the responders make it worthwhile to keep mailing.

But long-term, it does us no favours at all. Those people who throw away our mailings aren't just 'not interested', or 'giving to another charity', or 'haven’t had the right ask yet'. They are beginning to actively distrust us because they believe we are wasting donated money. And they will tell their friends.

Let’s do something about it before it's too late. From now on, let's print something like this on all our recruitment outer envelopes:

ABOUT THIS MAILING: [Charity name] relies on public donations and we use mailings like this to inform people about the work we do, and ask for their support. These appeals are designed as economically as possible. To print and post this to you has cost us XXp and, although not everyone who receives one will respond to it, it is still an extremely cost-effective way of raising funds to help [cause]. In fact, over XX% of our income comes from appeals like this one.

Think it's a dumb idea? Think it's a great idea? Tried it already? Got a question? Let me know - post a comment below.

Nick Couldry

Posted by Whitewater Team at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)