I was recently invited to join the Advisory Panel of Rogare, the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy’s fundraising think tank and the home of Critical Fundraising – the discipline of critically evaluating what fundraisers know, or think they know, about their profession.
“Rogare is the engine that turns academic ideas into actionable information for fundraisers.”
Ian MacQuillan, Director of Rogare
The aim of Rogare is to generate new practical ideas by pulling together the academic and practitioner branches of the fundraising profession. In a profession that is too often still driven by anecdotal information, Rogare draws on academic research and uses this evidence base to address practical solutions to the challenges faced by fundraisers on a daily basis.
In September, I attended my first meeting of the advisory group to hear about the current research projects underway at Rogare. The team are currently focusing on four main challenges within fundraising today:
- How to improve stakeholder perception by understanding the exact nature of stakeholders’ objections to fundraising
- ‘Tomorrow’s Philanthropy’ – which is identifying how different types of philanthropic innovations develop and may be related to each other.
- A review of the theory behind relationship fundraising and stewardship – some interim results on this were published recently by Adrian Sargeant and Roger Lawson. See http://bit.ly/1Wd9vvo for results of a study of 14,000 UK donors.
- Helping fundraisers better understand what it means to ‘innovate’ in their profession.
If you’re interested in keeping up to date on the latest research in fundraising, see http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/criticalfundraising/ and @RogareFTT. Likewise if there is any feedback you would like to pass onto the team at Plymouth, please don’t hesitate to contact me at gaby@purplegrass.ie
