Postage, Downstream Access - DSA, to those in the know - is becoming more and more exciting. No honestly! Bear with me…

When the Royal Mail was opened up to competition by alternative carriers in January last year, we looked into whether there were benefits for our clients. There weren't, then. The new DSA carriers weren't interested in providing an alternative service to MS3 1400, because they still had to pay about 13p per pack to Royal Mail to carry the job "the last mile" - so there was no margin in it for them.

Now all the big deals have been done and the contracts signed for the hugely lucrative transactional post market, DSA operators are at last setting their sights on other markets – like ours!

This, coupled with the news last week that one of the major obstacles to charities taking advantage of DSA – namely VAT – has now been drastically reduced, means that there are now very significant savings to be had.

It would almost be rude not to.

If you'd like to know more information about how DSA works and how you can use it to make cost savings on both postage and fulfillment, well, you know where to find me.

Heather Collins

Posted by Brad Bell at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I was working on a presentation this week, something struck me: the charity sector is packed full of challenger brands. Quite a few of them are Whitewater clients.

Very often, a cause area is dominated by one well-known player which, by virtue of its size and associated resource, becomes the all-too-easy default option for donors. These organisations – the CRUKs, Oxfams and NSPCCs of this world – bag the buck because they're able to lay claim to the generic cause. So the rich charities keep getting richer, with more to spend on consolidating their position. Organisations targeting similar donors on a fraction of the budget might feel like their outlook is very bleak. But they needn't - because, actually, a challenger brand is the most exciting thing to be.

I've been dipping into Eating The Big Fish by Adam Morgan recently. He builds a strong case for challengers to break the rules of their category. Rather than trying to beat dominant organisations at their own game, rather than emulating their stratgies on a smaller scale, he would encourage challengers to stop being copy cats, stop letting the competition define them and break the mould. His formula for competitive advantage? Be as daring and creative in your advertising and publicity as you can.

Asking the question, 'how can we zig while everyone else is zagging?' is a sure-fire way to freshen up our thinking and to keep us interested and inspired by the work we do. We took this approach for the client presentation I mentioned at the start of this post… and we had an absolute ball working on it. I hope the client - a challenger brand - was as excited by the ideas it provoked as we were, and that I'll be able to show you some of the results here in due course!

It can be incredibly liberating to take a brand into new waters. But it inevitably means taking a risk. In our sector, perhaps more than any other, this a scary and uncomfortable concept because charities have to be so frugal with and accountable for their marketing spend. Learning what has worked for the competition is a sensible approach, which minimises the risk - and I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should be irresponsible. We'd be mad not to learn from tried and tested techniques that we've seen perform well. But the safest route is unlikely to be the one that allows a charity to fundamentally cut through and really get noticed by the donors they desperately need to attract.

Perhaps I'm just feeling feisty. But I'm going to keep Adam Morgan on my desk and encourage our clients to be brave little fish.

Michelle Dennis

Posted by Brad Bell at 09:27 AM | Permalink

As suddenly as they started, our Window into Whitewater adverts are ending with this one. It's time to move on.

But fear not! You can still access Whitewater's incisive view on the fundraising world in two great ways...

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

Posted by Brad Bell at 10:36 AM | Permalink

A recent article in the Guardian identified polar bears as latest 'poster child' for the fight against global warming. It got me wondering... why hadn't I seen the great white beasts staring out at me from a charity tube ad or insert yet?

Iconic images of polar bears (supposedly) stranded on icebergs, or lying on melting ice, have been the basis of a massive amount of PR activity in the last 6 months; surely this public awareness could add plenty of weight to fundraising appeals by the right charities - imagine the persuasive power of a big furry bear (claws and teeth sheathed) as the face of a national fundraising campaign running in line with the BBC's Planet Earth series!

Their declining numbers have even been a key factor in the US Government's recent admission of global warming - clearly qualifying them as the most powerful of spokes-animals.

No sooner than I had finished my thought and turned the page of my newspaper, then what should fall into my lap but an insert from a leading environmental charity - orangutan on side, polar bear on the other. The insert invited me choose whether to support the polar bear programme, the orangutan programme, or both. So, it's hairy tree-swinging veteran of the fundraising game vs the even hairier new pretender: I'd be interested to know who wins...

Richard Halliday

Posted by Brad Bell at 10:31 AM | Permalink

Just before Christmas 2006, everyone who works here was given £100 to give to charity and asked to track 'What Happened Next?'. It's pretty depressing to clock up the numbers of how many of us haven't received so much as a proper thank you.

I gave the full £100 to one organisation; a small environmental charity I have always admired. I gave through their website and got the usual automated acknowledgement to show that my payment went through. But I never expected that to be the end of it. No proper thank you, no introduction to their other work, no interest in my motivation to give, no phone call. Nothing.

It seems that those of us who made our donations online are most likely to have been ignored and forgotten. Are charities so well-funded they can be this blasé? Do they care so little about creating loyal supporters that they can let common courtesy fall by the wayside?

When my kids receive gifts of money from their grandparents, they write thank-you letters. Even if they've said thank you over the phone already. Is that ridiculously old-fashioned? They say how they think they're going to spend the money (or what they've bought already). Grandma and Grandad have no doubt that their gifts are noticed and valued.

Saying 'thank you' is one of the best opportunities you have to inspire your donors, to make them feel fantastic about their decision to give. Do it right and, next time you turn to them, they'll remember how good it felt to support you.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that charities shouldn't ask for money if they're not going to say thank you for it. It's true that my kids write their thank-yous because their parents tell them to – so who is the 'parent' in your organisation, making sure you mind your manners? Who knows that no gift is too small to be acknowledged, and the value of a simple gesture of gratitude, sincerely meant?

If you're looking for the next big thing in fundraising, this could be it.

Steve Andrews

Posted by Brad Bell at 01:40 PM | Permalink

Now I'm thinking there's really something in Nick's theory...

Steve Tse

Posted by Whitewater Team at 02:24 PM | Permalink

I recently travelled to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent to spend the day visiting the lifeboat station there with Barry my writer on the RNLI account and Imogen our Account Manager. What a great trip it was - it's always so good to visit the 'coalface' of our clients' work.

We met the coxwain and couple of his volunteer crew members who told us about what motivates them to risk life and limb to save the lives of strangers at sea. Suitably stirred by their stories, we took a tour of the station and had a look at the two lifeboats, both spotless and in superb condition.

We were invited aboard the Trent, and saw it from a perspective usually reserved for crew and rescued sea-goers. This experience directly inspired a couple of ideas for appeals, and probably will see us through many more.

Everything was spotless, neatly stowed, safe and secure. The Trent could have been fresh from the boatbuilder. 14 metres long, she carries 4,200 litres of diesel, giving a 250-mile radius. Two V10 engines (mounted at 180 degrees to each other - weird, but it works) each give 850 horsepower. Astoundingly, she can carry up to 74 survivors as well as the ten crew.

The upper steering position seems remarkably high for the length of the vessel and you can imagine without too much difficulty - but with some nausea - what it must be like up there, tossed about in a heavy sea.

Every six months the Trent has an underwater inspection. Every two and a half years she gets a PRISM refit (whatever that is) and a total refit every five years.

There's a neat little galley where the crew can make tea and coffee, and a Tupperware box of chocolate biscuits - it's good to know we have so much in common.

I want one! But to be honest, I'm probably better suited to the smaller, remote-controlled model...

Simon Mills

Posted by Whitewater Team at 10:43 AM | Permalink

In My Lame Attempt at Video, the folks at see3 wrote:

"I thought, lets make this trip to Israel an experiment to see how easy it would be for me and Dori to produce some short videos for the web while on the trip. I am telling clients all the time how easy it is and so I needed to know a little more about what I am saying."

Agency people, eh? Excellent experiment!

Lately, I keep learning the same lesson repeatedly: you don’t know something until you do it. Blogging is pretty straightforward in theory, but you don’t find out for sure until you actually do it. The things you thought would be easy turn out to be difficult. And vice versa.

It seems we approach creating a blog as we would any other project: plan what it’s about, get it started with some early posts that are temporarily kept private, design what it looks like, and have some kind of launch. And that seems to keep being wrong. A better approach might be: don’t try to define what it will be about, just start posting. Do a quick design which you know will change. Don't 'launch' - a blog is always alive and never finished. Meaning, design, readers will all emerge. Keep in mind you're creating a blog, not a book.

Anyway, I enjoyed the video and it led me to see how video blogging could be really interesting. Think of a video as photos with sound, and if a picture tells a thousand words, a 15-30 second video clip could communicate the same message as several blog posts.

For the end user, I get to see fragments of the context of your trip/work/life, like hyper-charged photographs, and you don't have to spend much time editing (titling, searching through footage to meaningfully cut together).

The entire editing process might mean grabbing one or two good bits, that are representative but aren't necessarily loaded with meaning. Meaning will emerge through cumulative posts, over time. Maybe the blog publishing tool is really the video editor, not Movie Maker. After all, you're not making a documentary. So once you’ve got your shooting sorted, it's quick and dirty the rest of the way - it has to be, if you're going to update once or twice a week!

So now you’ve got us interested - deliver! I’ll be back tomorrow ;-)

Brad Bell

Posted by Brad Bell at 11:25 AM | Permalink