Fundraise like a gardener

Monday to Friday, I support senior charity people to manage their increasingly complex and diverse fundraising portfolios, through the stormy times of covid and the cost of living crises.

But come the weekend, you’ll find my ankle deep in soil on our local community garden, growing fruit and veg with our London neighbours – or pottering around growing sunflowers on our patio at home.

It struck me recently that the two are not so different after all. All the principles of good gardening can be applied to fundraising to help us get the most out of fundraising portfolios.

Fundamentally, the job at hand is to grow the most fruitful harvest from your little pot of limited resources in an increasingly volatile and ever-changing environment. So, here’s a few handy hints for fundraisers, directly from the allotment.

1.Check the weather forecast.

I made an unforgivable mistake this year of planting tomato shoots outside on a week that suddenly turned cold. They’ve still not recovered. Working with charity clients, we know the busy day-to-day means it’s easy to forget to look outside and see what’s going on across the sector, or even outside the sector.

We often work alongside Wood for Trees, who’s recent State of the Sector report acts as a good bell-weather of the current climate. Key signs are that, currently, high value giving is the key growth area for the sector – and that regular giving is showing signs of recovery. With strong lifetime values, it’s worth the investment.

2. Be a constant gardener.

Gardening is hard work and takes time. In a busy schedule, the temptation is to give a day to the allotment once every few months and to leave it. But that’s a sure way to see your garden wither on the vine. Similarly, we see lots of organisations set grand ambitions on annual away days, only to see things fade away. They key is to set out a roadmap – and to keep going back to it regularly, every month, every week even, to check growth is happening and is on track.

3. Think succession planning.

The daffodils and bluebells of British spring have now bloomed beautifully and faded away. The gardener’s trick is to always think ahead – and succession plan, so once the flowers of early spring are done, there are new summer blooms coming up right behind them. A good senior fundraiser needs a helicopter view on their fundraising portfolio – knowing the products that are at maturity, the ones that are fading, and the early shoots showing signs of growth. You need to work with competent data partners and have a good audience segmentation to gain the holistic data for making these decisions. It’s easy to experiment with new innovations in your portfolio. The real trick is to drop the products that don’t take root, and quickly scale up the ones that show potential for growth.

4. Don’t forget to cross pollinate.

In your small plot, it’s important to consider the compatibility of nearby plants. Did you know that potatoes and peas grow together nicely – but potatoes and tomatoes together is a disaster? In a large charity, it’s easy for each project to be managed individually without much thought for integration, but this isn’t how supporters see our charities – and it misses the enormous opportunity for cross pollination. In Wood for Trees State of the Sector report they benchmark that only 11% of people go on to take a second action for a charity. Imagine how much more fruitful our fundraising could be if we encouraged just a small % of supporters to take further actions for our causes.

With these principles in hand, any fundraiser should be ready to grow support for their cause. Don’t forget that, like gardening, fundraising is best done in a community.

As a sector, we rely on each other for shared wisdom, insight and support. Keep a look out for more research and insight into the future of fundraising from GOOD throughout the year.

If you are a member of the third sector or an interested brand who would like the recording of this session, or to be added to our mailing list for future events please contact hello@goodagency.co.uk