Government Seeking Views on New Policy Directions for Big Lottery Fund

By Louisa|June 1st, 2016

The Big Lottery Fund is the largest funder in the UK, distributing 40% of Lottery income each year to tackle advantage and improve lives throughout the UK.

As all Lottery distributors are public bodies they are answerable to Parliament for how they distribute public money. The Big Lottery Fund (BLF) is required to distribute all of its Lottery income to charitable causes or for projects connected with health, education or the environment

The existing policy directions for the Fund’s distribution of money in England and for UK-wide programmes were last revised in 2012. Since then there has been a change of Government as well as the publication of the Big Lottery Fund’s new Strategic Framework, following on from its own public consultation in 2014.

The key principles of the new policy directions include:

• A renewed focus of local engagement, which means “engaging people and local civil society organisations in how funding is used in their communities, enabling and catalysing local partnerships and collaborations between communities, public, private and civil society organisations”.
• A new focus on variety and innovation, which means “distributing funds to a wide spread of projects, primarily those delivered by civil society organisations, in particular small and medium sized charities, or the organisations that support them, backing new and innovative approaches and organisations, as well as tried and tested models”.
• Explicit policy directions for distribution to the UK-wide funding portfolio, which are not applicable to the England funding portfolio. These include the desirability of supporting projects across the UK which have a focus on learning, growing or bringing people and communities together.
• The focus, when funding UK-based organisations to provide benefit outside the UK and Isle of Man, should be on the “exchange and interchange of best practices and […]
  

The importance of Thanking Donors

By Louisa|April 1st, 2016

Remember the childhood pain of being made to write endless thank you notes after every birthday and Christmas? As adults, we know that that wasn’t meant to be a form of torture, even though it felt like it! Instead, it was intended to teach us about manners, being polite and not taking kindness and gifts for granted.

When was the last time someone wrote to you to say thanks? How did it feel? Good, right? That lovely warm feeling you get is what we are talking about here. Thanking donors, whether they are individuals, organisations or trusts is so important – whether the gift is large or small. The simple step of saying thank you is sometimes forgotten amidst all the administration.

For the purposes of this post we are talking to small to medium charities who don’t undertake direct mailing to individuals and who don’t have vast call centres or agencies taking donations on a minute by minute basis – they probably won’t be reading this anyway!

We’re talking to those organisations who perhaps have a regular trust and foundation base and the occasional individual or organisational supporters. These are the organisations who do a million fantastic things day-in day-out, with often limited resource – so it’s no surprise  that thanking donors has fallen off the agenda.

The thanks doesn’t need to be fancy (in fact, it definitely shouldn’t be fancy) but a genuine, heartfelt thank you goes a long way to recognising support. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a long relationship with a donor. Here’s a few tips:

• It needs to be timely – as a guideline within a week is ideal
• Personalise it (their name, your name)
• Keep it short (one page is plenty)
• Tell them what difference […]
  

Small Charities Survey 2016

By Louisa|March 1st, 2016

• There are low levels of awareness of the review of fundraising regulations and that there is significant work needed to raise awareness of the forthcoming changes to all charities if a stronger regulator is established.
• Public trust and confidence are being felt differently across smaller charities – with 49% seeing not very much or no impact on their organisation, with 46% seeing some or a great impact.
• Smaller charities are most concerned about the administrative and cost burden of a Fundraising Preference Service. 40% thought it would result in a drop in donations rather than produce a better public image (29%).
• The survey was split over who should fund the new regulator – with 38% thinking it should come from charities that fundraise from the public and 34% thinking funding should come from government.
• There is general agreement on stronger sanctions needed – with 52% favouring cease and desist powers for the new regulator and 43% in favour of issuing compulsory training orders.
• While a fifth of respondents thought that the greater oversight of trustees would have a significant impact […]
  

Annual Report Writing: Top Tips

By Louisa|January 31st, 2016

We spend a lot of our time looking at Annual Reports. A LOT. We’ve seen some fantastic examples but probably twice as many we could hardly bring ourselves to read. We want your Annual Report to be one of those that simply demands to be read!

So – in no particular order – here are our top tips:

1. Don’t use too much narrative: There is a lot of ‘ticking the box’ to comply with the reporting requirements without thinking how can you use the numbers to help a charity to show how they are clearly achieving their aims and providing a key service to their beneficiaries- this is what donors are interested in. Too much narrative can make it difficult to actually see what the charity is achieving.

2. Think about digital options – There are lots of good reasons to think about a digital report. It’s cheaper to produce, has the opportunity to be much more engaging through visuals and can reach a greater number of people. Make the report easy to access by linking to it from your website. Issuu is a great platform for online Annual Reports

3. Use stand out text:Even when you’ve edited the copy down and feel that everything in the report needs to be included there are bound to be some real key pieces of information that you would want anyone flicking through to notice. Highlighting the text, pulling sections out or using larger text will help draw the readers eye to key pieces of information.

4. Be transparent, open and honest:The report is a space to voice achievements and celebrate successes, however if the organisation hasn’t been able to achieve all it wanted to in the past year then be honest […]
   

Changes to Gift Aid declaration

By Louisa|November 5th, 2015

This Blog was first published in November 2015 – the changes it outlines became law on 5th April 2016:

You may have already seen that HMRC have published a new Gift Aid declaration which is a shortened version of the previous wording. The new declaration needs to be in place by April 2016.

The wording is designed to be simpler and to increase take up of Gift Aid on donations. The inclusion of a new line –  warning people that if they pay less tax in a year than the amount of Gift Aid claimed on all of their donations it is their responsibility to pay the difference – has raised some concern that this may be offputting and reduce the number of declarations made.

While this remains to be seen, it is worth giving some thought to the changes and how you plan this in to upcoming campaigns and publication – as we hurtle towards Christmas, April will come around sooner than we think!