Margaret Bennett's Posts
‘Quick and Dirty’ Lifetime Value
August 10, 2010Lifetime value is the single most important part of an individual giving strategy. In fact, I might argue that it is the strategy. Lifetime value tells us who to target, what methods of support to promote, which recruitment channels to prioritise and how to develop our relationship with our donor to optimise loyalty and levels [...]
A question of style…
June 11, 2010I’ve been running a lot of strategic planning processes recently and it’s got me thinking about how important it is to choose the style of your planning process if you want to get the kind of strategy that’s right for your organisation at the point you’re at. Here are three different processes I ran around [...]
New Rapidata report sheds interesting light on direct debit cancellation rates
April 22, 2010The apparent reversion of 2009 cancellation rates to the pre-2007 levels and pattern is both encouraging and challenging. Encouraging, because it suggests that the future for direct debit regular giving – the mainstay of individual giving – may be brighter than we may have feared in recent years. Challenging, because we need to fully understand [...]
Herding cats? Practical tools for managing the supporter journey
February 24, 2010It comes and goes like a Mexican wave. In the last couple of years the supporter journey has been a hot topic again. It’s always been an interest of mine since I developed my first supporter journey at WWF in 1990. What I’ve been focusing on recently is how to take a conceptual approach and [...]
Is direct marketing about to be reborn?
January 11, 2010Direct marketing was the mainstay of fundraising in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The tools of our trade were direct mail, inserts, press ads and telemarketing. Our business was built on the back of the mail order catalogue sector which had created the universe of ‘mail order responsive’ lists that formed the backbone of [...]
Video: Interview with Margaret Bennett on Fundraising in a Recession
November 16, 2009At the 29th International Fundraising Congress in The Netherlands last month a series of Masterclasses were offered to attendees to provide insights into the latest thinking in fundraising from around the world.
With the effects of the recession still very much a big issue in the not for profit sector, Howard Lake from UK Fundraising interviewed [...]
Fundraising in an Unpredictable Market
November 11, 2009During a recession the one thing we can be sure of is that we will be fundraising in an unpredictable market. In the 1980s and 1990s, fundraisers had few reference points to enable them to look back at and learn from the past, but today we have a wealth of quite recent experience to draw [...]
Fundraisers add huge value to organisational planning
October 22, 2009Even in today’s enlightened sector, I still hear people outside fundraising saying ‘fundraising is easy’ and ‘we don’t really need fundraisers, people just give to us anyway’. Perceptions of fundraising have certainly improved in recent years, but sadly there are still organisations that continue to view fundraisers as a ‘necessary evil’ and do their best [...]






