Room 1: Structure

Survive or Thrive? Changing the Game with AI
Speaker: John Dataro & Stuart Towell
In this session, join John Roberts to explore how charities – big and small – are leveraging the latest, AI-based tools to drive change – for the better – in a persistently challenging climate. We’ll be looking at real-world case studies which showcase how innovation can be the difference between surviving and thriving, and how even subtle adoptions of new technologies can have disproportionately large impacts on fundraising performance and efficiency.

Conversational AI: Opportunities, Risks, and Open Questions
Speaker: Winnie Street
What are conversational AI systems? What, if anything, do they really ‘understand’? What kinds of human values and perspectives do they encode? How will humans relate to them? This session will provide a brief history of the recent wave of large language models, illuminate some of their intriguing capabilities, and provide a broad overview of the social and ethical questions that they raise as they become part of mainstream human-computer interaction. Drawing upon her extensive experience working at the intersection of ethics, cognitive science, and AI, Winnie will provide a critical insight into how we might critically evaluate the role of conversational AIs in our lives.

Bringing Innovation Out Of Its Silo Into Day to Day
Speaker: Lizi Zipser
Innovation is exciting – helping to consider new ways to connect with potential and existing supporters, solve potential challenges and build revenue. However we know, for us fundraisers, it can be scary to consider or try new ways of working that may hinder performance and direct return. Also, if we’re being honest, it can be a distraction and perhaps be a shiny thing employees run at in the ideas phase and then away from when it comes to embedding it into the daily reality. In this session, with UNHCR, we’ll consider how innovation can be embedded into daily delivering helping you and your organisation build an experimentation culture that comes without huge cost.

How To Budget For And Measure Innovation
Speaker: Emily Clayton
Innovation in fundraising is needed now more than ever as we all face the impacts of the cost of living crisis. However ‘Innovation’ is so often misunderstood and just seen as new income. How often have you been asked ‘How much will it raise?’ for a completely new and untested idea? I’ll be using my experience of leading Innovation and product development teams in charities, as well as developing new digital fundraising products for different charities during lockdown.

Ideation & Creativity: Turning Insight Into Inspiration
Speaker: Amy Hutchings & Tanvi Yardi
You’ve worked hard to gather insight. But what do you do next? How do you turn insights, vox pops and indexes into great, responsive ideas? We will share a clear process and practical exercises you can use to come up with insight-led ideas. We’ll discuss common ideation mistakes and how to fix them, and help you bridge that gap between information and inspiration.

Trailblazing Trustees: Driving Innovation through Your Board – Panel discussion
Speakers: Magid El-Amin, Kizzy Gardiner & Michael Winehouse
Hosted by: Henry Rowling
We will discuss all aspects of innovation from the perspective of 3 trailblazing Trustees, delving into their experiences of working with staff teams to Innovate across the charities they have been Trustees for. Governance can often be a blocker to true Innovation. But trustees often want their organisations to be more innovative.
– Why doesn’t it happen?
– What are the blockers?
– How can we overcome them?
– What convinces Trustees to invest financially in innovation?
– And how can charity staff work more effectively with Trustee Boards to be more innovative?
Come along and see what Innovation looks like from the Trustee side.

Room 2: People

Democratising Innovation: Why Creating Change Is For Everyone
Speaker: Anne Race
Discover how innovation in the charity sector is a collaborative journey with Anne Race, a working-class, Asian Northerner, and Co-founder of Flying Cars charity fundraising innovation agency. Anne has helped some of the world’s greatest causes raise millions, not by working alone, but by harnessing the power of collective insight and collaboration. In this inspiring plenary, Anne will share her personal journey of failure and success, illustrating that innovation is about persistent learning and adaptation.

Inclusion In Innovation
Speaker: Bonnie Chiu & Eleanor Lisney
“Innovation”, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps, defines it as “a new method or new product that becomes a new practice somewhere in the world.” This definition, while it makes sense, like many definitions are made by the privileged few. There are also structural barriers that lead to the Global Majority not participating in innovation. How can innovation as a field and as a practice become inclusive? Listen to the stories of two social entrepreneurs – who both happen to be women of colour – driving innovations towards inclusion.

Number and Colours – How To Use Visual Data To Gain Buy In
Speaker: Magid El-Amin
Pies, bars, histograms, waterfalls and scatter plots; there are so many ways to visualise data but how do we tell the story powerfully yet succinctly? In this informative session Magid, the director of data at Catch22 and co-founder of the charity-specific AI platform CauseCompanion AI, will show you how to use dashboards to bring your data to life.

Innovation = Adapting
Speaker: Zoe Wagner
In this session seasoned fundraiser Zoe Wagner will talk through her past experience of adapting to the innovation needs and challenges of small, medium and large organisations. Come prepared to learn tips to embed innovation best practice in a range of organisations and circumstances to reach your funding goals.

How To Create a Product Your Audience Loves (With Them)
Speaker: Brian Dow
Mental Health UK’s Regular Giving Programme needed revitalising. With help from Flying Cars, we identified our target audience of women aged 35-55 and built a product specifically for that audience. We know that menopause is often surrounded by a lack of knowledge and surprise symptoms. And so, with input from our Experts by Experience, we created ‘Menopause, mental health and me’ – a guide to coping with menopause and the mental health challenges which can arise as a result of this life phase.

Room 3: Case Studies

Innovation on a Budget: Developing a New Regular Giving Product
Speakers: Alex Baker & Abi Fisher
You can innovate successfully on a budget, but it’s not always going to be smooth sailing! In this session we’ll be taking you on an adventure through the highs and lows of developing a new regular giving product with Sustrans – the charity making it easier to walk and cycle. We’ll explore how we set about defining an innovation framework, and then journey through the key phases of the project – from strategic planning and creative development, to live testing and insight gathering. We’ll take you right up to the present day, where we ask ourselves “what the heck do we do now?”.

War Child United – How Can We Use Football Shirts To Raise Awareness?
Speaker: Alicia Jumman & George Baverstock
War Child United is a fundraising and awareness-raising initiative using Football shirts. The project invites young people in our country programmes to design a football shirt in their region, which we will then sell in partnership with sports companies in the UK. Our session will focus on engagement from audiences, communities and brands, how to raise awareness and how to raise money! The very first War Child United shirt is from the Central African Republic. Come and listen to George and I speak about this amazing project.

Innovating On A Shoestring
Speaker: Muna Hussen
Have you ever wanted to launch a new fundraising campaign but wasn’t quite sure where to start? In this session, Muna will be taking you through several case studies of charities that have done exactly that. From launching a new virtual DIY challenge to expanding on an appeal and creating new donors for life, this session will be jam packed with tips and tricks to help your charity nail the brilliant basics of new fundraising campaigns and initiatives. Without a huge resource lay-out, whether that be staff time or financial.

Pivoting a Fail into a win/Successful Innovation when the budget is cut
Speaker: Daniel Field
In a 2-4-1 offer, in just 30 minutes you’ll learn how you can turn failures into success, and how to innovate when your budgets get cut. In the first half Dan will cover how he and the team took a failing product and turned it around into a £100k a year income generator, with a fraction of the budget. He’ll talk you through the process they followed and lessons learnt along the way. In the second half, Dan will talk about how any charity can innovate on a tight budget. Giving a real world example of when he and team experienced budget cuts and how they managed to continue innovating and piloting on a tight budget. This part of the session will give you some practical tips and tools you can use today so you can continue innovating regardless of budget.

The Only Constant: Innovation for the Cause-Driven Audience
Speaker: Jack Lundie
Jack will share his insight on some of the new ways of connecting, giving, taking action and speaking out that he’s been a part of over the last 20 years or so, in the hope that it may help you see that innovation is an act of faith, is accessible to everyone, and works (when it does work) in many different ways.

Innovation, How To Move From Ideas to Products
Speaker: Polly Shute
Polly will take you through her Top 10 tips for innovation. These tips are based on her last 12 years developing new products in the commercial and not for profit sectors. Her insights will include: The importance of passion and purpose; Pragmitism over perfection; and Gaining partners and supporters.