Great Fundraising Organizations, by Alan Clayton. Book cover.

UK Fundraising is 10 years old today

10 today - yellow button with black text
UK Fundraising is 10 years old

UK Fundraising was first published on 30 November 1994 as a single Web page.

UK Fundraising is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. For ten years we have
lead the way in using the Internet to share fundraising expertise to improve the effectiveness of fundraisers. We’ve served fundraisers at thousands of charities and voluntary organisations throughout the UK and in many other countries around the world.

The site was set up to demonstrate by example the importance and value of the Internet to charity fundraisers. We have banged on about the importance of Internet fundraising (ie. using the Internet to help *all* aspects of fundraising, *not* just online donations, important as they are), and after ten years we can take some comfort that the message is now embedded in many UK charities. There’s room for improvement of course, and we’ll keep suggesting these, but we’ll take some credit in urging fundraisers to explore and test the remarkable potential of the Internet.

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Indulge us while we list our achievements and thoughts on reaching ten.

Our achievements

We’ve notched up so many firsts – here are some of them:

In many ways we believe we’ve led by example. We’ve shown charities, either explicitly or implicitly, how they can create, publish and develop a Web presence that can generate income, reduce their costs, build their brand, and help achieve their charitable objectives. We’ve shown how it can be done from a standing start and with no promotional budget in 10 years.

We also believe our environmental footprint has been small: no company car, all business travel by public transport (and trains rather than planes where possible), and very limited use of paper.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this site over 10 years. You’ve proved that enlightened collaboration using new technology can help build an even more effective fundraising profession. Ten years ago such a concept was far from the commonplace it is now.

Thank you too to everyone who has paid to advertise their services or job vacancies here over the years.

It’s almost invidious to thank individuals given so many people have given so much to this site, but special thanks must go to Andrew Thomas of Charity Consultants Ltd, James Redhead of Redhead Consulting, and Sarah Hughes of Charities Aid Foundation for their early and consistent support and interest.

We’ve truly enjoyed the last 10 years. We’ve met with frustration of course: our first NatWest bank manager told us in 1996 that “no-one can make money on the Internet”. The charity sector as a whole was desperately slow to embrace the potential of the Internet. But that simply confirmed the value and importance of a site like UK Fundraising and its message.

One final confession: this site is the work of just one person, its founder and sole salaried employee, Howard Lake. We now use the services of excellent Web designers and developers, advertising sales people, and other professionals, but the site, its promotion, its content, its customer service, its e-mail newsletter publication, is all handled by one person. We hope that inspires you when you hear that your charity can’t afford to update its Web site or accept online donations, or some other seemingly insurmountable problem.

We hope you’ve found our 10 years of service useful and inspiring. We’ll put aside our laurels tomorrow morning, so keep sharing news of your success and failures, ideas, achievements and aims, and we’ll keep using the Internet to spread this best practice to make our fundraising even more effective.

Coming soon: our birthday offer – win a free job advert or banner advert on UK Fundraising.

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