Volunteering in 2013 for the UK office of an overseas health charity operating in Haiti, I couldn’t have imagined that the experience was going to be so thought provoking! It all started with sorting out Gift Aid forms - this exercise revealed a striking disparity between the number of one-off donations received in 2010 and those in any subsequent (or prior) years. This was easily accounted for; three years after the earthquake had thrust the small Caribbean island into the public eye, interest, attention and crucially, financial support were waning.

So I wondered: how does a charity deal with the challenge of translating such an unprecedented amount of one-off donations into the long-term support needed to make a lasting difference in the lives of beneficiaries?

The Challenge

This challenge is by no means exclusive to the overseas aid and development sector.  The Ice Bucket Challenge for the MND Association and the No Makeup Selfie campaign for Cancer Research UK are a couple of notable examples of viral campaigns which - like disaster appeals - are highly unpredictable and heavily reliant on spontaneous donations from individuals.

Despite such campaigns occurring across different charity sectors every now and again, not every charity knows how to utilise the funds thrown at them, not to mention how to turn these donations into long-term support.

I saw two sides of a coin, two main issues a charity should know how to deal with. On the one hand, I considered myself a part of the charity as a volunteer – therefore, I was interested to see if my organisation knew how to utilise these funds. On the other hand, as a charity supporter, I was curious to see if communication and feedback methods to donors are different in such unusual situations.

Utilising Funds

Discerning how to best spend a sudden and unexpected influx of donations can present a challenge to small charities unfamiliar with mobilising vast sums of money, and to larger more established charities alike; an example of the latter being Cancer Research UK which, following the success of the No Makeup Selfie Campaign, stated:

"Because these donations have been unexpected, we’re still working out the best way to spend all the money [. . .]. We can’t magic research projects out of the air overnight."

This was an appeal for patience that highlights the pressure on charities to deliver quantifiable results at a pace befitting their meteoric rise in the public’s awareness.  How effective a charity is perceived to be at this can have significant implications on whether one-off donations are turned into on-going support.

This is a point of particular salience for charities working in the field of overseas aid and development, which can find themselves under even greater pressure to evidence how donations have been spent. 

A pertinent example is the ongoing criticism of emergency aid distribution in post-earthquake Haiti, which speaks of the publics’ reservations around the efficacy of overseas aid and development, while compounding fears of corruption in the historically politically unstable country. Controversies have cast a long shadow over fundraising for the region, making long-term engagement a challenge.

In light of this, the charity for which I volunteered pro-actively sought to use the prestige of a recently awarded Department for International Development (DFID) grant to attest to its reputability. This, in addition to promoting its track record of delivering quality care (its rehabilitation unit – the largest in the country – is a lasting legacy of its post-earthquake aid effort), demonstrated to donors the material difference on-going support makes to their aid efforts. 

This brings us to the second challenge faced by such charities - the need to provide effective feedback to donors.

Feeding Back to Donors

By maintaining routine communication with their supporters, charities illustrate the value of their contributions. Encompassing both the traditional thank you letter and on-going updates, providing feedback to donors is imperative when it comes to sustaining engagement. Charites must do their utmost to reassure donors that their money will be judiciously invested, as Cancer Research UK made a point of doing in their online Q&A.   

Posted a week after the No Makeup Selfie took off, Cancer Research’s Q&A afforded the charity an opportunity to outline their upcoming projects. This is an example of immediate feedback; other charities, such as the Teenage Cancer Trust, with their statement released to mark the one year anniversary of Stephen Sutton’s death, have shown how periodic updates can be used to re-engage those whose attention and support may have waned.

Meanwhile, the practice of submitting regular blogs, ‘on the ground’ updates and case studies is favoured by a number of charities (including the one I volunteered for). These tools demonstrate how providing feedback can form an on-going narrative, re-iterating that donations contribute to a larger story which does not conclude with the end of a disaster appeal or the gradual trailing off of a viral campaign.

Reflections

Disaster appeals and some viral campaigns are alike in so far as they are largely spontaneous. However, while a charity may not be able to foresee such campaigns – nor control them once they have gathered momentum – much hinges upon their ability to respond promptly, judiciously and creatively in the succeeding days, weeks, months and even years. 

Should they succeed in this, then even the most unsuspecting charities have a chance to transform both their capacity for service-delivery in the short-term and garner support for future activities.  By showing themselves to be competent and trustworthy, and by building routine communication with donors into their ongoing fundraising strategies, these charities have the opportunity to translate the impulsive generosity of such campaigns into the lasting interest and investment their beneficiaries require.