Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear. Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraising everwhere.com/podcast to subscribe Now onto today’s episode, enjoy.

[00:00:59] Simon Scriver: So, usually what I ask is I ask something about Amber Consulting because it always fascinates me where people get their company names from.

[00:01:06] Julia Worthington: So, I’d been inspired by some people I’d worked with years ago, and they sort of had names like, one guy had a name Chess, and another guy had a name Aquarius, so I wanted a single word, which was that then in another language wouldn’t be a weird word, so.

[00:01:24] Julia Worthington: And then it also combines, this is, this is really awkward. This combines my name, my first name, my first name is Amanda, which I never use. And my, my husband’s name is Robert. So Amber, it also combines

[00:01:40] Simon Scriver: the two. I like that. Cringy.

[00:01:43] Julia Worthington: Um, so yeah. And

[00:01:46] Simon Scriver: do you, was there ever any point, because you’ve been running that a few years now, is there any point where you regretted the name and you were like, Oh, that’s a pain.

[00:01:55] Simon Scriver: I should have not done that.

[00:01:56] Julia Worthington: No, because it’s nice and short. And then I added the coaching for fundraisers or a fundraising consultant. Cause it was like Amber on its own was, yeah, it didn’t really say what it did on the tin. So I just added that on. So when my lovely graphic designer created it, you can see, she just sort of put it on the branch of a.

[00:02:16] Julia Worthington: of a tree to add that for fundraisers. And yeah, no, never regretted it actually. No,

[00:02:21] Simon Scriver: that’s good. And I do like your logo. I have a thing for owls as well. That’s a coincidence. That’s not on purpose.

[00:02:29] Julia Worthington: Got my owl earrings in today as well.

[00:02:31] Simon Scriver: I do love a good owl. That’s beautiful. All right. Well, hello everyone and welcome.

[00:02:36] Simon Scriver: We are officially kicking off now. This is the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. Thank you for joining us. We’re just letting this run live a little bit because people are watching us on LinkedIn live. And so hello to you if you’re listening, watching us on LinkedIn live and people are also in the corporate fundraising chat, Facebook group.

[00:02:53] Simon Scriver: So hello to Julia’s posse, Julia’s crew in the I’m a newbie to the corporate fundraising chat. I’ve only just joined and I’m, I’m, I’ve been digesting that, but hello, hello to those watching and then to the rest of you who are listening back on the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. You are very welcome. My name is Simon Scriver.

[00:03:09] Simon Scriver: I am one of the co founders of Fundraising Everywhere. I’m your host today on the Fundraising Everywhere podcast with my wonderful guest. Julia Worthington. Hello Julia. How are you?

[00:03:19] Julia Worthington: Hi Simon. I’m really well. Thank you. The sun is shining today. It’s just glorious. So

[00:03:23] Simon Scriver: it’s so lovely to see you. You seem like in such a good mood and we’ve just been catching up that we haven’t seen each other since the last conference before Covid.

[00:03:32] Simon Scriver: I saw you at a conference that I was speaking at and I think you were speaking up. Yes.

[00:03:36] Julia Worthington: Yeah, I was there. We,

[00:03:37] Simon Scriver: uh, yeah, there, there were, there were murmurings of the Covid and then literally I got back to Ireland and went into quarantine and that was it. And I haven’t seen it, so it’s so lovely to see.

[00:03:46] Julia Worthington: Yeah, we’ve been watching each other though, haven’t we?

[00:03:48] Julia Worthington: Like observing what each other’s up to.

[00:03:50] Simon Scriver: Well, I’m always, I’m always fascinated by you because, well, we’re here today to talk about corporate fundraising in particular because it’s kind of corporate fundraising month in, in my world because the Fundraising Everywhere Corporate Partnerships Everywhere conference is happening.

[00:04:04] Simon Scriver: That’s happening on Thursday the 20th of March and you should find a link for that wherever you’re listening or watching to check out our conference. So we’re in the mindset of corporate. And one of the people I think of when I think of corporate fundraising is Julia Worthington. I’ll tell you why, because, because I’m not a corporate background.

[00:04:21] Simon Scriver: I was kind of thrust into corporate fundraising when I became a head of fundraising in a small charity and you know, you end up taking on things that you had not really done before. And one of the people I learned from was you. You know, there’s not, there’s not a whole lot of corporate fundraising trainers and people who are so open and sharing with the knowledge.

[00:04:39] Simon Scriver: But then in particular, people who dare I say, specialize in small charities. Like I’ve, I always feel you, you specialize. So I’ve always found you a wealth of information. So I’ve, I’ve invited John. People are going to hopefully ask some questions wherever they’re watching this, but I’m going to crack your brain open, Judith.

[00:04:56] Simon Scriver: Okay. I want to understand corporate funding. So, so tell me about your background because you’ve been a consultant for a few years on this, but you are a charity background. You’ve done this in house as well.

[00:05:09] Julia Worthington: Yeah, my very first roles actually, I did work in the corporate world and I do think that gave me an added skill when I came to do corporate fundraising.

[00:05:21] Julia Worthington: Cause I understood it. I went in as a graduate trainee, so I was kind of immersed in that. Nice, hi Kevin. I was immersed in that culture completely of, yeah, understanding the corporate world and understanding what they needed to get from what you were doing. It was, it’s all about profit, isn’t it? And then I left that sector because it left me a little bit cold and joined a really small charity at the time called Railway Children.

[00:05:45] Julia Worthington: I was their first paid employee, so I did everything.

[00:05:49] Simon Scriver: You were Railway Children’s first paid employee?

[00:05:51] Julia Worthington: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:52] Simon Scriver: Oh, wow.

[00:05:54] Julia Worthington: Yeah, and the income when I joined them, so good fundraisers I always think have great Great memories from numbers, 80, 000 turnover when I joined them. And yeah, I did everything, you know, I took the rubbish home because we used to get charged by our building for rubbish.

[00:06:08] Julia Worthington: So I took that home and, you know, but I also did the, created a gift aid scheme because it was so long ago that it was Millennium Gift Aid. That was when that was brought in. I created that with our treasurer, who was a volunteer, of course, and also started corporate fundraising when I was there. and cut my teeth on Chartered Institute of Fundraising courses.

[00:06:30] Julia Worthington: You know, like you, you take things on that you know nothing about. And I didn’t know anything about corporate fundraising. So I did that course. And then we started to work with corporates in, in the railway industry and the railway industry is incredibly loyal to its sector. And so all the railway companies, and there’s thousands of them, because you’ve not got, just got your train operating companies, but you’ve got your engineering companies and the people who make.

[00:06:54] Julia Worthington: I don’t know, make the signals and just thousands and thousands of them. Once we started talking to them, all wanted to work with us and support us. And we got this amazing relationship from, we had a ball in London, which we had a team of trustees who used to organize this ball every year and it was always at the Grosvenor.

[00:07:14] Julia Worthington: So it was amazing. They have an events company that helped them with it. And from that event, one of the corporates came forward and said, we’d really like to. but you to be our corporate partner. And like I said, there’s thousands and thousands of rail companies. And this was actually one of the retailers on, on the railway stations.

[00:07:33] Julia Worthington: So it’s a franchise SSP they’re called, they’re part of the compass group, which is international and they do all the food outlets on all the stations. So they own all the food lets on the station. So whether that’s a Burger King or an upper crust or a pumpkin or a lemon tree or. whatever you want.

[00:07:50] Julia Worthington: They’re all franchises that are owned by SSP. So they came to us and said, we’d like to fundraise for you. And so immediately I had 400 food outlets all over the country that I had access to as a fundraiser. And I was like, okay, how do we do this then? So it was, it did land in my lap, but then took it by the scruff of the neck.

[00:08:12] Julia Worthington: It was a nightmare the first is what we were trying. And, you know, this is This is kind of pre mobile phone days, and, or if they were, you know, they were just bricks. So what we wanted was everybody to have collecting tins out on all their railway stations, and, but we had to go through their distribution system, and then things would get into the distribution system, and then they’d didn’t come out the other end and they had to try and find a way of ordering stuff.

[00:08:36] Julia Worthington: And then when we did actually get the collecting tins out into all that, because we didn’t have a load of volunteers to go out and do it for us. We were a very small national international charity. When we did get them out onto the stations, then getting the money to us was really difficult because the money would, then it would go into collecting tin.

[00:08:53] Julia Worthington: They would then put it in through that hill. And then we had to get that out the other end. So we had to work that out with their finance team, how that was going to work. It took us 12 months to sort that out. Wow. Get it working in the slick way. So the first year our income from that was about 5, 000.

[00:09:13] Julia Worthington: This is, this is why I’m somebody who goes, you don’t want a charity of the year partnership. You want a multi year partnership because it can take a year to bed it in. If, if it’s a slick company that does it year in, year out, and they know what they’re doing, then yes, they can get it sorted. But if it’s a brand new partnership and they’ve not done it before, you will have lots of hiccups and issues along the way.

[00:09:33] Julia Worthington: So by the time we got into our third year, I think it was, this was bringing us in a hundred grand a year, annually, just from collecting tins.

[00:09:42] Simon Scriver: Well,

[00:09:42] Julia Worthington: because everybody had cash at that time, nobody was using contactless or phones or ever to pay for stuff. So people still using cash. But then we did that. So we have to develop that relationship.

[00:09:54] Julia Worthington: And I think that’s where for me, you know, I really got very good at corporate fundraising. It was like, we need to be coming into this at lots of different levels with lots of different contacts and lots of different tentacles into the organization. Their marketing manager director was really interested in what we did.

[00:10:10] Julia Worthington: So I suggested we got her on as a trustee and she joined our trustee board. So, you know, she was great on the trustee board because she had that marketing knowledge, but equally it kind of really ties them in as well. We started doing some commercial participator agreement stuff. So when they launched a new.

[00:10:26] Julia Worthington: prawn cocktail. What did they have? Prawn chili cocktail roll or something was one of the ones they launched. So we would get 10p on every one of those. So that’s how I learned about CPAs. And they understood that actually they sold more if it had a railway children’s sticker on it. And, and, you know, there’s the evidence out there now you can read about that to see that it does increase sales, which is why so many companies do it.

[00:10:48] Julia Worthington: We got people to go out to India to see our projects. So whichever. outlet, food outlet, raise the most money, one of their staff could go and then, but we actually managed that so that of course, somewhere that’s got six collecting tins at Euston station is going to earn more than a little station at say somewhere in Scottish Highlands.

[00:11:06] Julia Worthington: So then we had to make sure that that was fair, so that how many staff have you got, how many tins have you got, and that’ll be the winner. And somebody what did win, who was right way up in the Scottish Highlands, one of the staff there went out to India. Wow. To see our projects out there and I had to do a lot of coaching with her before she went so that she’d understand what she’d be seeing and, cause it’s a real shock when you go out to India and work with one of the homeless kids projects, you know, it’s not something you’ve ever seen before.

[00:11:34] Julia Worthington: And certainly when you live somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, it’s not something you’ve seen before. And then they went out there as a team, the director of marketing went out with a few of her, her team, this project. And they saw that they were trying to build a new school. So they committed to building a new school for them.

[00:11:52] Julia Worthington: I’m like, well,

[00:11:53] Simon Scriver: blow down everyone.

[00:11:58] Julia Worthington: So we had, you know, some difficult conversations around that. So they just raised, it was only 20, 000 to build a school. So they just said, well, we’ll raise an additional 20, 000. We’ll get everybody doing some challenge events, doing fun rooms and that sort of thing. And so we just were layering it in lots of different ways.

[00:12:14] Julia Worthington: We got them to be regular givers, the staff to be regular givers after we’d worked with them for about five or six years. So that, cause I wanted to maintain some of that income once they decided they wanted a new partner. So we’ve got staff as regular givers, but then we also had leaflets out on, on the stations for customers to take away and become regular givers.

[00:12:34] Julia Worthington: And so we. We’d get a little, you know, maybe one a week from those and it’s income that stayed. Some of it will probably still be there now. They’ll still be getting that income now. So that was, that was my biggie. It raised a million pounds over 10 years and that really grew my knowledge from You know, zero corporate fundraising knowledge to like, yeah, you try this, try that, see what works.

[00:12:57] Julia Worthington: And then I went and worked for Prince’s Trust and did corporate fundraising with them. And that, you know, national brand, big brand, completely different kettle of fish in terms of the contacts that they had and the existing relationships they already had. But the skills I’d learned at a small charity have been the skills I’ve used all the way through.

[00:13:20] Julia Worthington: It’s all, to me, it’s all about relationship building.

[00:13:23] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I was going to ask, like, what are those skills that make a good corporate fundraiser? And when you say relationship building, like what, what should corporate fundraisers be bringing to the table in this? Like, what are they spending their day doing?

[00:13:36] Simon Scriver: Cause, cause I’ll be honest, like sometimes I find when you talk to, especially people who are new to corporate fundraising or people who have had. Corporate thrust upon them as part of their job that often they, you know, you almost don’t know where to start and the board, you know, board members are telling you phone Microsoft or whatever, but it’s like, it sounds like you have a real skill there of layering lots of different elements, but, but is that an organization thing?

[00:14:04] Simon Scriver: Is that an innovation thing? I mean, cause, cause the, the things you’re talking about, they don’t necessarily sound like. Things we didn’t already know existed, but the way you’ve been able to kind of bring them all in and different layers, how, what skill is that?

[00:14:20] Julia Worthington: It’s, I mean, I, I just, I like people and businesses are made up of people.

[00:14:25] Julia Worthington: And I think often when you’re first starting to do it, there’s this, this fear, we use this word corporate, and I think that doesn’t really serve, serve us particularly well in lots of ways because people think corporate and you’re like. as you say. But when we talk corporate fundraising, we just mean businesses and it can be any business.

[00:14:43] Julia Worthington: And it, and that’s the issue. It can be any business. So it’s like the thousands and thousands of thousands in the UK, but it could be, it’s a business that will work for your charity. And so if you’re, I’ve done a lot of work with small domestic abuse charities and for them, one of the things they know, is that one of the few times that the women who are being abused get away from their abuser is when they go to the hairdressers or the beauticians.

[00:15:10] Julia Worthington: The guy might sit outside in the car, but they’re on their own. So as a, um, a fundraiser, but also as an organization, one of your objectives might be, we want to be able to help businesses understand how they can help people who are being abused. So it might be, we want to do some training with them. So actually I want to go out and meet businesses that are our target business area, which might be small businesses and talk to them about how we can help them do their jobs better, how we can help them.

[00:15:42] Julia Worthington: My sister’s a hairdresser and she says, you know, the things you hear people say, but she didn’t know how to deal with them. So you could go in and help them. Like, we’ll come in and we’ll do a bit of training on, on how you can help these people and give them our number and put them in touch with us.

[00:15:53] Julia Worthington: That’s not about making money at that point. It’s about building relationships to say, look here, I’ve got something that’s really useful to you. And people in business, businesses are in business, shareholders in business to make money. But actually, and again, there’s evidence out there that if you are supporting a charity and working with that charity in such a way that it supports your customers, your staff are happier.

[00:16:17] Julia Worthington: Your staff are more motivated and more motivated staff are more productive and more productive staff make more money for you. So ultimately, by doing something with a charity, you can actually Have a more productive team and people who retain your staff as well as staff retention is much higher and that was one of the things that came out of relationship with SSP.

[00:16:35] Julia Worthington: They, they did some research around that in their HR team and discovered a turnover reduced. So that’s a reduced cost. So when you’re looking at who you want to work with, it’s very much let’s. Let’s hone this down to our people who are really helpful for us as an organization, but people we can help too.

[00:16:56] Julia Worthington: So forget the scattergun approach, forget cold, cold emails do not work. How many cold emails do you open? None. And do you take cold calls? No, you get off the call as soon as possible. So people aren’t interested in cold calling. So although it is a numbers game, it’s about let’s reduce this down. Let’s focus in on who works for us.

[00:17:16] Julia Worthington: So if you wanted, I’ll carry on with the domestic abuse charity analogy. It’s like one in five people suffers from domestic abuse. That’s men and women. One in five is one in three women. I think it’s one in one in six men, something like that. So if you work, if you go for a company, he’s got 250 employees.

[00:17:34] Julia Worthington: That’s a lot of people who potentially are being abused, not necessarily physically, it could be financial abuse, it could be verbal abuse, you know, all sorts of different kinds of abuse. So you want your team leaders and your HR team to understand how to work with that if somebody comes to you and says, this is going on for me.

[00:17:51] Julia Worthington: So as a corporate fundraiser, you can say, okay, that’s, that’s one of the objectives of one of the things that I want to do is go out and find some businesses that are the size that will have a lot of employees that this is going on for, and I want to meet them. So then you start to build a list of, okay, who are those businesses in my area that are that size now?

[00:18:10] Julia Worthington: How do I meet them? And the meeting is the networking, you know, get out there networking. And that is, Kevin did, Kevin did, Kevin Crowsdale, who just said hello before, did a great webinar last Thursday for me on using LinkedIn and using LinkedIn to reach out to corporates. So you can start to follow the bigger corporates in your area.

[00:18:28] Julia Worthington: You can go networking. You know, we’re, we’re post COVID now, you can physically go out networking. So start going out and meeting the businesses that are the ones that are on your list, have a list, have your prospect list because otherwise it’s just too many, it’s just too big and you can’t focus on anything and think, right, these are the ones that I want to do, which will help me hit that objective.

[00:18:51] Simon Scriver: Well, let me take a step back from that because I definitely want to, I want to ask you about that. Um, That meeting and that getting in front of them and, you know, even networking, how it works, but taking a step back, we, we have a question here from Tim about what is your view on hunting versus farming?

[00:19:06] Simon Scriver: And I, I, you know, I think he’s thinking along the same path to me as you’re building that list, you’re saying some really interesting things about the matching of, of the size matching of the type. When you talked about SSP railway, I always find it funny in corporate fundraising that it’s like 99 percent of the companies out there you’ve never heard of.

[00:19:24] Simon Scriver: No, and they have money, they, they’ve never really been approached at this conversation. And so, so talk me through that hunting versus farming, that building list. Is it, is it literally sitting down with people in your organization and brainstorming that list or how, how do you approach it when you’re coaching corporate fundraisers, when you start building that list?

[00:19:43] Julia Worthington: Yeah. So if you have, if you haven’t got any corporate contacts at all. And I don’t think that’s true for anybody because I’ve had so many people say that to me and then I start talking and they go, Oh yeah, well, the person who, I don’t know, provides our photocopier.

[00:19:59] Simon Scriver: I got a photocopier from them. That was one of my first corporate wins.

[00:20:03] Julia Worthington: The person who does that also gave us a Raffle prize for an event. So you probably have got some businesses out there who are supporting you, but in a very small way at the moment, because you haven’t asked them for anything else. And most people give because they’re asked. So Yeah, look at, look at what’s going on internally, who’s already supporting you in events through raffle prizes or coming to events and buying tables or buying tickets or who’s gone out there and done some challenge for you or challenge event.

[00:20:30] Julia Worthington: And this is where silo working in, which you see a lot more in larger organizations than you do in smaller ones. It’s like events team are like, you’re not talking to my people, they’re my people. But actually you’re building a relationship with them and people want, they don’t see it as events and corporate.

[00:20:45] Julia Worthington: They just see you as. whatever that your charity is. So it’s getting those relationships internally, finding out who people know, who your suppliers are, as you said, your photocopier supplier. If you’ve got grounds, you know, do you have a gardener? Do you have, you’ll have somebody who comes in and does possibly your IT for you or, you know, just look at all those contacts you already have.

[00:21:05] Julia Worthington: And then I always encourage fundraisers to go out and meet all the other. team members, so the teams, so talk to your service delivery team, because if you send an email and say, does anybody know any businesses that I can talk to? It’ll be tumbleweed. You’ve got to go and meet people one to one in their place where they work.

[00:21:23] Julia Worthington: So your service delivery, go and meet them and sit down and talk to them because their brains work differently to yours as a fundraiser. They, they’re thinking about the clients. They’re thinking about the beneficiaries, you get talking to them and you’ll quite often find they know two or three corporates and they’re like, Oh, I didn’t really think about them for you.

[00:21:41] Julia Worthington: And because their brain just works in a different way. They’re not focusing on the same things you are. And then you can, if you’re a small organization, it might be you can talk to trustees one to one. And again, don’t go to a trustee meeting and just ask anybody know any corporates because. They’re not going to open your little black book up to you until they trust you.

[00:22:01] Julia Worthington: And generally, people in larger meetings don’t really say much. So again, if you can meet them one to one and find out who they know and who they might be able to introduce you to. And if you can go with a list of people you want to meet locally or businesses you want to meet locally and say, you know, these are my top 10 that I’d really like to meet because we’re looking at potentially going in and giving them training on domestic abuse.

[00:22:26] Julia Worthington: They might say, Oh yeah, well, I’m in Rotary with so and so or I’m in Suroptimists with so and so. And yeah, I could do an e intro for you or I could get on the phone now and, and introduce them. So that’s kind of where you start with your warm contacts. And then, but also the cold contacts is look at what your objectives are.

[00:22:48] Julia Worthington: And I know one is always raising money, but what else do you need? Some new trustees. Do you need some new volunteers? Do you? Do you want to go out and do some training around what your, your charity does? Do you need some food parcels because you’re a homelessness charity or do you need some gloves for the winter or whatever, you know, you can talk to people about those and they’re always pleased to give things and then look at the businesses that you think, okay, who’s most likely to be able to do this for me?

[00:23:13] Julia Worthington: Where’s the synergy? You can also start to look at synergy around values as well. You know, cause there’s obviously some businesses that there’s very different synergy say for corporate fundraising. If you’re going to go and speak to Michael O’Leary at Ryanair or. I don’t know, BA, you know, or Wizz Air, or they’re all, all have different cultures.

[00:23:37] Julia Worthington: Michael O’Leary is very obvious about, he just wants to make money. He just wants publicity and to make money. So if you went to talk to him, if provided he passed your due diligence and everything, Which you might not be like, well, we know we want to do, he, he wants to do something that will just make a big splash and we’ll end up on the front pages of all the newspapers.

[00:23:55] Julia Worthington: So if we’re doing something that we think he might buy into, we can go and talk to his team about maybe some sponsorship or working with us on that. So it’s about looking at the synergy of always as a corporate fundraiser, you’ve always got to look at what is the business going to get from this?

[00:24:10] Simon Scriver: Yeah.

[00:24:11] Julia Worthington: And yes, they will get a nice warm feeling, but tangible thing.

[00:24:15] Simon Scriver: I think that’s such an important thing that you’ve brought up and for me, that was the kind of switch flick in my fundraising career, you know, doing corporate, I learned from people like you, I learned from Chris Bayless in Canada, Johan Fox, who is Johan Fox, who is speaking at our conference, the fundraising corporate partnerships conference on Thursday, the 23rd of March.

[00:24:36] Simon Scriver: But one of the biggest things I learned was it’s what value you’re giving them. Do you know, like usually when, when, when you work with boards or when people are new to corporate fundraising, it’s like, well, what do I want from them? And it’s all about crafting the ask. Actually it’s about what, what you bring to the partnership.

[00:24:52] Simon Scriver: ’cause they are a business. Yes. They’re made out, up of people, but they’re a business. And I remember Chris Bayless said, and I’m sure you say something similar or, or maybe you disagree, but he said, you know, when you have that first meeting with a corporate, you’re not arriving with your brochure and you are thing, you’re arriving with a blank piece of paper because it’s all about finding what they’re trying to achieve.

[00:25:12] Simon Scriver: Bring that, and I’m hearing that echo to everything you, you say even from the beginning of the conversation. It was, it was. Well, what can we do for their income? What can we do for their, their staff? And then the relationship seems to follow. Am I, am I. Am I paraphrasing you well?

[00:25:26] Julia Worthington: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it’s more than ever now.

[00:25:31] Julia Worthington: Absolutely more than ever. You know, 10 years ago, businesses did have a little charity pot, you know, not, I’m not saying a charity charitable trust because a lot of businesses do have charitable trusts and that’s a whole other conversation with that sits in corporate or, or trust fundraising. They just aren’t those little pots of money anymore.

[00:25:49] Julia Worthington: I know they started to dry up in 2008 when we had the crash and a lot of businesses. took their money down to London and out of all the regions and you had to make a big business case to get somebody to buy a table at something and it’s got even worse. And what businesses are looking for now is value based partnerships.

[00:26:06] Julia Worthington: So what do you bring to the table? And, and I’d say more than ever, And I know this is what a lot of smaller charities don’t want to hear is employee engagement. They want employee engagement, but that doesn’t mean volunteering to come in and paint your walls or do your garden. You know, if you’re a charity that doesn’t have a property.

[00:26:26] Julia Worthington: doesn’t have a venue, they can help you with, I don’t know, we’re bringing in a new database and we really don’t know where to start on assessing databases. Do you have a team that can help us to do that? We’re looking to develop our business strategy, our five year business strategy. We’re, we’re looking to train some of our trustees on, I don’t know, reading a financial spreadsheet and reading, reading the books.

[00:26:45] Julia Worthington: Cause a lot of trustees don’t ask money, ask questions about the, the income and the budgets. Cause they’re, they don’t necessarily understand it and they don’t want to look like an idiot. We might need some help with legal stuff and there’s so many different legal kind of contracts that you do need out there and lots and lots of solicitors do pro bono work, but has a value.

[00:27:08] Julia Worthington: So they’re looking for those volunteering opportunities. And if you are getting any of that pro bono stuff, make sure you have a gifting kind register or a laboring kind register. So you say, okay, this lister wrote, wrote us a commercial participatory agreement and they said that the value of that was about a thousand pounds.

[00:27:28] Julia Worthington: So you put that on your gift in kind register, it’s a thousand pound income you’ve generated as a corporate fundraiser, but otherwise the charity would have had to spend that money. So you’ve saved them a thousand pounds. And I started doing this recently with somebody who’d never had one before, a small charity new to corporate fundraising, and within the first two months, I think, she realized she’d generated 40, 000 of income for the charity through Gifts in Kind.

[00:27:54] Julia Worthington: And she hadn’t been monitoring that at all.

[00:27:57] Simon Scriver: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just seen as a, it’s just happened.

[00:28:00] Julia Worthington: Yeah. It’s just something that’s happened. And if you’re, if nobody’s seeing it, potentially they’re then saying to you as a fundraiser, we’re not seeing you raising any money. Well, I brought 40 grams worth of income in that otherwise would have cost us money.

[00:28:12] Julia Worthington: And a charity accountant should. be asking you for a gift in kind register that goes through the books, you know, it’s in and out money. It doesn’t sit on your bottom line, but you know, a lot of treasurers for small charities don’t have charity accounts training. So won’t know that either. So I won’t be asking you for it.

[00:28:33] Simon Scriver: I mean, I, it’s important to know, um, and we’re, we’re running short, so I could talk to you for ages too. But it’s like from the stuff you’re talking about there, that, that in kind stuff is capacity building. So it does set you up to kind of perform better and fundraise better in the future. But it also is that kind of ladder towards perhaps a financial gift.

[00:28:50] Simon Scriver: And I do want to, as I do want to just ask you this question quickly before I start to say my goodbyes. But Tessa asked how this is going back to the SSB. How did you get them to become regular givers from only internally or payroll giving? I wonder if you have any thoughts about that is when you have these relationships with the company, how do you start to pull out some of those individual givers?

[00:29:12] Simon Scriver: Have you any thoughts on that?

[00:29:14] Julia Worthington: Yeah, I didn’t go down the payroll giving route. I have, have done a lot of payroll giving beforehand and, oh gosh, payroll giving is so hard to get people to sign up to, and when they leave the company, the money’s lost.

[00:29:25] Simon Scriver: I spoke to two great payroll giving speakers on the last podcast episode.

[00:29:29] Simon Scriver: So I’m just going to give a plug for that. If anyone, don’t listen to what Julia says about it being tough. These last two speakers said it was great. But Julia, what’s, what’s your part? Well, I

[00:29:38] Julia Worthington: can say for a while I worked for the Civil Service Benevolent Fund and I went out and recruited people. I stood in front of groups of people and recruited for payroll giving.

[00:29:46] Julia Worthington: And yeah, it can, it can be done if, if you focus on it. But. individual giving, if they leave the company, you could still carry on getting the money. And the data is around, people generally only stop direct debits going out of their bank account when they get divorced, they lose a job, or cost of living crisis, you know, that might be when they stop.

[00:30:07] Julia Worthington: But otherwise, it just keeps on going out and often people forgotten they’ve got it. And the way we did it was we got The managing director, CEO of the business was really on board with this. He was the one who brought us in as a charity, so he really supported it. So I asked him if we could send a letter to every staff member from him.

[00:30:26] Julia Worthington: So I can’t remember who wrote the letter, whether he wrote it or I wrote it, but between us, we wrote a letter to the staff saying, you know, Hey, I’m, you know, and he was, he was well liked as well. I’m, I’m going to start doing this because I think it’s a really great way of supporting the charity. So I’m going to be giving every month to this.

[00:30:42] Julia Worthington: And you know, I’d really encourage you if you love what they’re doing, um, you know, we’ve done lots of engagement with them. So they’d seen videos of what we did as a charity that had staff go out to India. You know, they really were fully engaged with, with the organization and what we did so that, you know, that was five or six years in to the partnership.

[00:31:01] Julia Worthington: It was like, okay, let’s ask people if they become payroll, regular givers. And yeah, so it went down the individual giving route.

[00:31:07] Simon Scriver: And I love that social proof from the CEO, you know, that it’s like, I mean, everyone hates the CEO, but you know, just to have someone from their writing, I’m doing this, you know, and I’m making you aware, I think is a really powerful way to do it.

[00:31:17] Simon Scriver: That’s great. Julia, I could keep asking you questions, but we are going to start to wrap up. If people want to learn more from you and your wonderful guests, Julia is running a special at the moment where she’s doing 25 percent off her on demand stuff. But do check out amberconsulting. org. uk. You’ll find that there and we’ll post the link as well.

[00:31:35] Simon Scriver: But amberconsulting. org. uk. And Julie, I would encourage people to, to get in touch with you, but you’re taking a bit of a holiday.

[00:31:42] Julia Worthington: I am. Yeah. I’m, I’m going to take a sabbatical from the end of March through to September next year, and then I’m September this year, sorry, and then I’m going to be deciding what I’m going to do next.

[00:31:52] Julia Worthington: So if you do want one of those webinars replays, they’re only available till the end of March. So you need to, to. Get them as soon as possible. And I did give your Fundraising Everywhere conference a plug on my webinar last week as well, Simon.

[00:32:06] Simon Scriver: You’re very sweet and you’re going to have to sit through me doing it again.

[00:32:09] Simon Scriver: Please everyone do check out the Fundraising Everywhere corporate event coming up. It’s Corporate Partnerships Everywhere on Thursday the 20th of March. You’ll find a link in the description of this and on the podcast if you’re listening back. We’ve got lots of great sessions from the likes of Cats Aid and Dogs Trust, which we hope won’t cause any troubles if they meet in the hallway.

[00:32:26] Simon Scriver: Some specialist causes like Debra UK and we’re going to be doing sessions on regional corporate fundraising on newsletters on LinkedIn and we have some wonderful speakers. And Julia, when you come back for your trip, I hope you will come by the fundraising, if I’m still around, if you will come by the fundraising of Red Podcast and tell us what you’re up to, because I’m always excited to see what you do and, and genuinely you’ve been such a help to me and I know to so many people in terms of their corporate fundraising, making it manageable, making it like something Achievable.

[00:32:54] Simon Scriver: So on behalf of lots of people, I would say thank you for so much you’ve put into this and I, I really hope you do deserve your, your well and break.

[00:33:02] Julia Worthington: Thank you.

[00:33:04] Simon Scriver: That’s it everyone. Well, all the best to, I was gonna call Amber Julian. I did check Forget

[00:33:09] Julia Worthington: called Amber on a, on email

[00:33:11] Simon Scriver: amber consulting.org but UK.

[00:33:14] Simon Scriver: Uh, thank you to all of those for you listening. If you’re not already subscribed to the fundraising ever podcast, please do go ahead and click that sorry button. And as always check out fundraising everywhere. com for our events coming up, or get in touch with us at hello at fundraising ever, if you want to talk to him or talk about anything, I’ve been Simon scribe with the co founder of fundraising ever, lovely to see you.

[00:33:32] Simon Scriver: Goodbye.

[00:33:33] Alex Aggidis: Goodbye. Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend? And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time.

*************
This transcript was created using AI. If you spot any mistakes, please reach out. Thank you!