Training of global proportions

By Penny Stephens
Professional Fundraising, UK, July 2007 

A trip to the UK to learn more about how charities fundraise proved to be a valuable experience for a group of Indian fundraisers, as Penny Stephens found out

Fundraising in the UK is constantly evolving, improving, expanding but, according to one fundraising director, is still at least 10 years behind the US. Look at fundraising in parts of the developing world such as India and the situation is the reverse.

Indian fundraising is evolving, improving and expanding, but to professionalise further, it needs to look outside its own borders.

Venkat Krishnan, director of GiveIndia, believes that as fundraising in India expands and professionalises, there is a need for ‘exposure’ based training for fundraisers to learn about major gifts, high net worth individuals, capital campaigns and legacies – none of which currently exist in any meaningful way in India.

He came up with the idea of a study tour for a group of Indian fundraisers from a wide range of organisations to learn how UK fundraising. He believes such exposure is often more powerful and valuable than training provided locally. The Resource Alliance was chosen to organise the event.

A grant from the Ford Foundation for US$10,400 covered some of the costs, and this was supplemented by each participant or their organisation contributing $1,000. Ten participants were selected through an open application process based on pre-set criteria. Resource Alliance’s India office was involved in the process.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Resource Alliance put together a timetable for a week of half-day visits that included time at the London Marathon with Macmillan Cancer Support, and visits to Sue Ryder Care to discuss corporate and events fundraising, Jewish Care to look at peer-to-peer fundraising and volunteer capital fundraising and Cancer Research UK for a presentation on legacies. A visit to two different Oxfam Trading shops preceded a presentation from Concern Worldwide on individiual giving and direct marketing, face-to-face, major donor and community fundraising. Help the Hospices also contributed a session on corporate fundraising. Agencies Whitewater and Cascaid talked about individual giving and direct marketing and in memoriam fundraising, and fundraising strategy respectively.

All 10 fundraisers were enthusiastic about the content of the tour. Nidhi Bhasin Singh of Concern India Foundation said: “It was great that we got to learn about everything from legacies to direct marketing.” She pointed out that the latter in India is very immature, and much can be learned from the UK’s experiences.

Likewise, the concept of legacies is very new and sparked a deep interest among the group. Laws and traditions surrounding inheritance of property are changing there and Mathew Luckose of charity CYDA said cultural differences meant India was 10 to 15 years behind the UK in terms of legacy fundraising. All the fundraisers felt legacies could become a very important source of income given the right investment – cultural and otherwise.

Steve Andrews of Whitewater said he was astonished at the returns they appeared to be achieving from direct marketing. “I told them if British charities could recruit new donors as profitably as they were, we’d be spending vastly bigger budgets to make hay while the sun shone,” he said.

Face-to-face fundraising – although generally door-to-door rather than street – has also been tried in India with varying degrees of success, but where it has worked, it has more than justified the investment.

The one thing the group were all in agreement with was that they needed to invest much more in their fundraising and one commented that this experience had given him the confidence to increase his fundraising team. Luckose said that it is only large organisations that can afford fundraisers and, more importantly, see the value of them. “There is no infrastructure in India to develop fundraising,” he said.

Pradeep Loyal of HelpAge India summed it up. “This has brought fundraising to the top of my mind and made me realise these are things I’ve been neglecting. We tend to forget that it is an ongoing exercise and that we can raise more from a few existing donors than we can in going out and trying to get more donors.”

With so few trained fundraisers in India, it’s clear that more education need to be provided. Fortunately, the number of training opportunities are growing – albeit slowly.

A Resource Alliance foundation course in fundraising in Mumbai is about to be repeated in Dehli, and the Ford Foundation has awarded a grant that will enable the training provider to repeat the course in three more Indian cities in the next year.