Charities Should Increase Focus on Non-Cash Gifts

Charities could unlock untapped resources if they were more strategic about raising non-cash gifts including goods, services, skills, knowledge, access and influence, according to UK experts.

New research from UK Clore Social Fellow, Caroline Beaumont presents the case for charities to develop a resource-raising strategy and offers some practical advice on how to do it. The Clore Social Leadership Programme, with mentoring from nfpSynergy, aims to build leadership capacity in the third sector.

Resource-raising is about generating donated resources for organisations alongside the more traditional donations of money and time.

The research report reveals how in-kind resources are being used, finding just under half of the charity professionals surveyed expecting to be working more with resources in-kind over the next year, due to increased demand from their organisations and an increase in the potential supply from supporters.

The survey found however that charities could do more to encourage and adopt a strategic approach to resource-raising and need to overcome what some charities perceive to be the barriers to resource raising such as being time consuming, producing hidden costs and being hard to manage.

Currently in the UK the total of ‘in-kind’ gifts reported by the top 500 charities in 2008/09 stands at 256 million pounds or just 4.3% of fundraising income.

The research says organisational cultures, systems and processes can conspire against
fundraisers who want to resource-raise and financial systems that don’t value resources in-kind are a particular barrier.

It says in a downturn, donors’ desire to give does not decline but the means to give might and charities therefore need to create ways to give that are high value to them but low cost to the donor.

Download the report at http://www.nfpsynergy.net/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/f/from_fundraising_to_resource_raising_july_2011.pdf