Fundraising Team of the Year

Howard Lake | 26 June 2007 | Blogs

Fundraising utilises a diverse range of skills, not always present in the same person. This award celebrates the principle that often ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. It is made in recognition of outstanding fundraising work by a team.
The shortlisted nominations are, in alphabetical order:
Leonard Cheshire
The proposer of the Leonard Cheshire Corporate Partnerships team says that the charity is less well known than its top 10 charity status would suggest. This team has taken a history of averaging around £200,00 a year to great heights and increased it to £1.7m for 2006/7, making it the charity’s biggest growth area.
The team of five – which changed its name from ‘corporate fundraising’ – make a piece of work ‘reek with relevance’ so that a company only sees its mirror image in the proposals. This means much hard work behind the scenes – including one proposal that ran to 47 drafts before the team were happy with it.
Successes have included winning a £3m, three-year partnership with Barclays for ‘Ready to Start’ – a new programme to help enable disabled people start their own businesses. It won the charity’s’ first national charity of the  year with a retail partner: Krispy Kreme. Half a million pounds was raised by HBOS employees in a single year; a £150,000 partnership was set up with Alliance Boots and a partnership worth £400,000 has been forged with Howdens Joinery.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE)
The Development Team of nine at RBGE was created around five years ago and manages project specific and revenue fundraising activities. It is now fully integrated in the organisation and has achieved: a £15.7m capital fundraising campaign; raised an additional £1m from project funding, membership, donations, patron income, legacies and the commemoratives programme in two years; launched and developed a membership programme that has increased membership income and numbers by around 60 per cent.
It has also assisted members’ groups to organise more than 30 events a year, launched and refined a patrons programme, increased donations from Garden visitors eightfold, and produced key new media tools to support fundraising and awareness raising efforts.
The staff have partnered each other to share skills and increase the overall success of the development programmes. They have often been a catalyst for change and helped individual departments to look at how best to broaden the outreach of a variety of activities and forged links to all aspects of the Garden’s work. The team is now looking more towards medium and long term strategic developments which leads to more appropriately planned fundraising processes for future projects.
Woodland Trust
The proposer of the Woodland Trust’s fundraising team describes it as ‘the best fundraising team in the world’. Their fundraising successes have included raising £1.3m from companies – more than three times 2004’s figure; secured £3.2m from community appeals, local grants and major donor fundraising – almost double 2004; secured £3.1m from major grants and charitable trusts – a 30 per cent increase and achieved new records in lottery and merchandise income.
Described as ‘passionate and energetic’ they work well across the whole organisation, demonstrating effective team working and encouraging others to come up with creative ideas. They make sure everyone thinks of income generation as completely integral to every one of the Woodland Trust’s activities.
They have created a range of corporate partnerships with Sainsburys, BT, Dorothy Perkins, Yellow Pages, Penguin and Spar. Grant applications have been described by grant givers as some of the best they have seen.
They secured £20.3m for 2006 and have promised to deliver £23.8m for 2007.
 

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.