I am currently at the MIRA Alliance Staff Meeting where representatives from MIRA Alliance member organizations meet to exchange experiences. A few highlights:
We have had some interesting discussions with John Rux Burton and Verena Timbul from Rux Burton Associates about key success factors in running annual funds and telephone campaigns.
In brief: It's not only about the money, students are much better than call centers, and stewardship is important here also. Institutions running a well organized campaigns typically get a participant rates of 30% - 40%. That is: for each called alumni, every third makes a donation, which was much higher than what I expected.
We also had a good discussion about prospect research led by Johannes Ruzicka from Brakeley Germany.
Prospect research is of course essential to any capital fundraising campaign. It is labor intensive, requiring both time and knowledge about public databases and other sources. Preparing a donor profile takes about half a day, and with 50, 250 or more, identified potential donors, it requires a substantial amount of work.
We discussed the challenges and benefits of organizations running campaigns do prospect research in-house. In-house staff have better understanding of the fundraising organization, needs and, often, about potential donors. Professional prospect researchers might have better knowledge about databases and other sources, prospect research methodology, and be more efficient.
We also discussed how the EU directive on data protection and personal integrity is interpreted in different countries, and the added complexity of the Nordic laws such as Principles of Public Access, Act on the Openness of Public Documents ("offentighetsprincipen"). Although the laws of all EU countries are based on the same EU directive, the interpretations seem to differ.
From the Nordics, we are represented by Patrik Malmunger and I from Mira Network and by Johan Wennström, Peter Rohmée and Merike Roneus from Brakeley Mira.
The MIRA Alliance is a group of fundraising and management consultancies serving the not for profit sector throughout the world. The principals of the member firms were colleagues for some years in the Brakeley group.
Our common objective is to provide global best practice in fundraising, philanthropic and related consulting to not for profit organizations in Europe and Asia, as well as to those in America that are fundraising internationally.
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