Report of the Volunteer Board Fundraising Special Interest Group Seminar:

Developing and delivering a volunteer board fundraising strategy

Wednesday 13th March 2013

This was our second seminar in which we continued to follow the arc of setting up and running a Volunteer Fundraising Board.

Introduction to the Speakers

Bill Midgley OBE, Philanthropist and former appeal board chair

Antonia Malagnini, Head of "Create the Change" campaign at Cancer Research UK

Bill Midgleyspent over 20 years in the banking industry and was Chief Executive and Deputy Vice Chair of Newcastle Building Society. He is a former President of the North East Chamber of Commerce and has sat on numerous boards, including Mencap, and as a Patron of the Downs Syndrome Society. In the early 90s he chaired a £5.5m appeal to build the Marie Curie Hospice in Newcastle and went on to become a Trustee of Marie Curie. He chaired the Development Board at the Hospice to raise funds for the revenue costs of the Marie Curie Hospice between 2008-12, and was introduced to the audience by James Holland, who worked closely with him. James gave a telling example of how Bill approached/s his role as Chair on volunteer boards: "He started meetings at 7.30am, finished them at 8.30am and would make sure that the minutes were out by 12.00 the same morning."

Address the negatives first, so you can focus on the positives

Bill provided his own tongue-in-cheek introduction, describing himself as "an amateur, one of those awful volunteers who do everything you don't want and who get in the way of what you actually want to achieve". He followed this with a caution: "National charities should be wary of dictating terms to a regional board." Referring to his involvement with Marie Curie's Capital Campaign for the Newcastle in 1991, he said the charity had some very high powered people on board, including the CE of Rolls Royce. "Marie Curie brought in a firm of professional fundraisers, who started telling us what to do, including that we had to donate personally and until we did we couldn't fundraise". The professional fundraiser insisted it was only the board who would make the asks, telling them: “I will co-ordinate and you will do all the work”. Upon which board said they would walk away. Marie Curie listened! " The negatives are important", Bill commented, " and you need to start with them, because if you eradicate them first you end up with the positives."

Have a business plan and the right people and skills in place

Bill identified the key elements required for a successful board. "You must have a business plan and you need to be clear what its objectives are. Why is it there? What is it raising money for? You've got to be committed and to convey that. It's no different to running an organisation and what you do with your staff. That springs out of the business plan of the organisation usually. And you must ensure that the board members you recruit have the skills you require. Someone to open doors with bankers and solicitors, for example, someone who is good at events, and such like. Don't play the numbers game. If you focus just on professionals, you may be missing out. And please recruit people who are prepared to ask the question. They are there to raise money and should take that on board from day one. If they are embarrassed about asking , then you must offer to go along to present the organisation's case. This is all part of getting the buy in. The reality is that the overlap between the professional and the amateur tends to blur."

Make sure your regional plan melds with the national one

Bill emphasised that when doing a regional campaign it is important to recognise the regional differences and take account of local practices. "You need to tease them out and make sure both the national and regional fundraising plans can work side by side. Your business plan needs to show what your target is for the area, broken down so you know who you're going to target and for what. Bear in mind, if you have the right people they are experienced in that area. The national organisation should draft it (the business plan) and invite comments from the local board who can review it. If it's wrong, change it to make it work."

Value and engage your board members

Bill's advice for all fundraisers is that we must respect our volunteers. "They are very valuable. Everyone who works for you should be there because they have a particular skill, not because they sit on a particular board but because they give real value to your organisation. So nurture them, don't abuse them. Tell them why they're there. Make them part of the organisation." Bill said he has known organisations who couldn't say thank you or couldn't get their message across, both of which are critical to keeping board members enthused and getting the most from them. He also highlighted the importance of the fundraiser being well informed and board members being well briefed. "The board are likely to want to know all about your finances, so make sure you have the answers to their questions, for example what your reserves will be used for. Make sure the board is educated on this so they can pass on the message. "

"It is also important to enthuse the prospect as much as you enthuse your board", he added. "For example you have to be able to answer the question what's it going to do for my region? Make sure you can answer that. Don't sell them London. Marie Curie is a good example - all money raised by Bill in the North East, is spent in the North East"

Provide feedback and thank them.

In Bill's experience providing feedback to board members is critical, and the advantage of a local board is that you can feed back to them via small gatherings. He also emphasised the importance of always thanking them, and referred to a recent event at which the Chief Executive of a charity came along and made a point of thanking two individuals who had not in fact been involved in the fundraising campaign.

Bill's final piece of advice was that it can be all too easy to see your fundraising board as a homogenous group of individuals. "It's really important to understand the motivations of each one - and get to know them well."

Antonia Malagnini

Antonia has been at Cancer Research UK for 10 years. She is currently heading up CRUK's "Create the Change" campaign and has been involved from the very start and throughout the planning phase. The campaign Chair has been in place for one year and the campaign board has been coming into place over the last 12 months, so they have only just started fundraising.

Antonia explained that unlike the Cambridge College, where she was previously based and which does a lot of major donor fundraising, the leadership at CRUK had not been geared up for this area. 90% of its donations are from people giving small amounts like £10. Historically they were raising about £8million from major gifts and ran a campaign a few years ago which raised £6million.

2-3 yrs ago CRUK developed a better proposition for major donors to get them supporting the charity. They have a campaign to raise£10m in Manchester. They also have set up the Catalyst Club, the vehicle for a £10m campaign, aimed at younger entrepreneurial philanthropists, through which they asked individuals to give £100k over 3 years. Antonia said that each was developed to build CRUK’s major giving programme.

The "Create the Change" campaign

This campaign is part of a partnership between 6 different medical research organisations to develop an international institute for biomedical science. It is a £650m project and CRUK’s target is £100 million. "We have had limited track record in major gifts but this allowed us to make a big step-change in our fundraising. It is an inter-disciplinary project that is to open in 2015, and it suited us as an opportunity to upskill our major gift fundraising and ask for bigger gifts. We decided to go down the campaign and volunteer fundraising route and we did a fundraising feasibility study with an external consultant, which allowed us to have external experts giving the right messages to us and our leadership."

From feasibility study to fundraising plan

The feasibility study identified that they didn't have enough networking contacts, so they spent some time talking to a number of people who might be suitable candidates. According to Antonia the process took too long as they made approaches to people sequentially asking them to chair it. "We then involved some headhunters", she explained, "and they went out to a whole lot of people at the same time, which worked much better, but because of the initial efforts the whole process took over a year and a half."

Antonia said that they had broken down the fundraising target into distinct areas: corporate, international, existing audiences, etc. They also had a draft business plan which helped to inform and involve the Chair. "Our terms of reference were quite long at first, but they ended up being very short. Essentially we required board members to open up their networks and support the project. There were some (potential) chairs who wouldn't have fitted with the plan, i.e. some would have focused more on running events, but we knew we needed to target individuals and trusts for large donations."

Working in partnership with the board

Antonia said she and her colleagues took a partnership approach with board members, rather than placing expectations on the board alone. She also explained why Charles Manby is a very good Chairman for the campaign: "He has a strong connection to the cause but no previous involvement with CRUK. Although retired from Goldman Sachs he still works there, has excellent networks and is brilliant at relationship building. He has also done some previous fundraising, co-chairing a fundraising campaign for his college as well as fundraising for other charities. We used our and his contacts together, we went over the plan we had to identify which sectors the money might come from, including who could draw money from overseas." Antonia pointed out that one thing that really helped was getting early "yeses" for the board from people who were "names", because CRUK was not well known in MG fundraising.

Organisational challenges

A challenge for the organisation is having to manage different campaigns and making the right fit with individuals. An example of a current campaign is Stand up to Cancer. “There are lots of competing priorities”, Antonia explained.” To get round this we try to work closely with the other teams and the Create The Changeboard to identify what opportunities there might be for CRUK, not just for the campaign."

So far, so good!

She was pleased to report that so far it is working extremely well. "We have made lots of connections through the board as membership covers a variety of sectors such as finance (Charles Manby) through to retail (Ray Kelvin, Founder of Ted Baker). Already ideas and suggested vehicles are coming up which the charity could never have conceived or achieved on its own. We have only had a couple of board meetings so far, and we are still working on how to get the most out of everyone. The campaign has already raised £32.5m and there have been gifts of£10m, £5m and £3m, but that leaves £67.5 million to raise and so we need to keep our and their focus on that."

Summing up Antonia's talk, VBSig committee member Frances Lawrence identified the key ingredients for a successful volunteer board strategy as a sound plan, the right people and a partnership approach. Questions were then invited from the audience:

Question and Answer session

Q. What is Bill's opinion about board members giving themselves?

BM : I would hope so, but you cannot demand it of them. You need to know their real worth to you. Can they open doors? What introductions can they give? You have to ride with what value people have. I think it's wrong to demand of individuals that they give. You may lose them. If they want to give, they'll give."

Q. What advice would you give to the Chair of a volunteer board who is in their early 40's and is finding it difficult coping with successful board members who are in their 60's?

BM: I had that problem from the other end! If a Chair is too old, they may lose their connections. Similarly, someone in their 40s may not have an" in" to the older ones. You have to use your board according to what they bring, and you need to explain what you want them to do and why.

Q. Antonia told us that the feasibility study CRUK undertook identified they didn't have enough relationships. Now that the board is up and running, have you got more?

AM: "Yes, we had loads of lists of people we wanted to speak to, but lacked peer links. Now we are starting to find ways of linking to people on those same lists. We also have board members, as Bill pointed out, who can bring other people on board with them."

Q. What is a good size of board and what resources do you need to steward them?

AM: "There are 16 people on our CRUK board. You probably need about 10 plus. We have a group of 7 fundraisers focused on this campaign and the board members are split around the team. CRUK's leadership and the Director are also involved. In addition to that we have operational support, e.g. for research, for admin support on the meetings, which equates to a further 3 people."

Q. When developing a volunteer board but not for a specific campaign, should you have a fixed term?

BM. Yes, it's good to have that. Make it renewable. 2-3 years is sufficient. Have a fixed term can help you refresh it and deal with people not pulling their weight. But you need to have that in place from the start. Or if you subsequently decide you're going to do it, then you have to make the clock start from the day you begin it. And there will have to be a quiet word from Chair with those who (aren't proving their worth).

Q. How much of a role do you have as a Chair in supporting and mentoring your volunteer board members?

BM. It depends on the individual. It hasn't been a problem with Marie-Curie, because everyone's thinking was very much in line. It has been with other boards, particularly where you inherit a board. I wouldn't use the word mentor, rather just sit down and talk with them, guide them, make sure they are getting what they want out of the board.

Q. What do they get out of it?

BM: Different things: the networking with and getting to know others. Meeting people who are at different stages of philanthropy, for example young people wanting to get more experience. Also people wanting to get to know the project. Some people like to put something back. Sometimes that's financial, sometimes it is effort. Also it's great management training. The experienced ones will teach you how (to run things). Often it can be for personal reasons, to stay close to the organisation. That is something, if you capture it, which is really important.

AM: In addition to the above, the Chair of Create The Change is ambitious, and he loves the challenge.

Q. Bill, what have charities done for you?

BM - I have seen the difference the (Marie Curie) hospice makes to people at a time of life when their quality of life is ebbing away, so it's feeling you are helping in some way. Also I was involved with Mencap and Downs Syndrome - it's seeing the difference you can make to people who are vulnerable. Deep down I think we all want to make a difference. There was a local newspaper article asking people what they wanted to be remembered for - and the most common answer was "I would want it to be known that I made a difference".

AM - With CRUK we take people on lab tours to see our work in action. In our last board meeting, we had the chief clinician come in to explain what impact the project will have. Sometimes we may focus on scientific areas and may link up board members/donors with a particular scientist.

Q. You both talked about campaign boards which were mostly for capital appeals. Have either of you been involved in campaigns for ongoing revenue fundraising?

BM. That's quite different. It's much easier to do capital fundraising, because you have something tangible there. You can also put names on things to acknowledge people. For Marie Curie's regional campaigns they dress it up - eg. we need £100k for this bit of equipment. Marie Curie would normally have to spend it anyway. You still have the issue of basic revenue. Some trusts will do that and some organisations will help you with specific revenue fundraising Santander is funding a fundraising post! The other side is events - a great way of revenue fundraising - latch onto them, large and small! Volunteer board members are often keen to do that for you using their links. You can often do that through a sub group, too.