strategy

We established in my previous post that to run a very good idea session you need to put in some time and thought to planning. We covered the importance of the physical environment, how a focus will help you get better results and the need to inspire as well as get the right mix of people in the room. This blog gives some tips on how to structure the session to get the most from your participants. Some things to consider;

Have fun – Most people come to meetings their mind filled with the pressures of daily work, the stress of overflowing emails and numerous deadlines. You will get better results if you help people relax. Start with an ice breaker or an exercise to change the energy in the room. You don’t have to make people do crazy stuff, but something to set the tone, even simply playing music will help. The internet is packed with ideas to try out, Google ‘energizers and ice breakers’ for ideas. Humor and a sense of play are important catalysts for innovative thinking. Creating a playful atmosphere will help your creativity. It’s a legitimate part of the idea generating process – so embrace it. (more…)

In my last post I wrote about the challenge of making time to innovate and the importance of focusing your innovation efforts on the parts of your fundraising strategy where you have the potential to make the most difference.

One way to focus time, either for new idea generation or to develop existing ideas is to run an idea workshop or ‘brainstorm’. In my experience a lot of time can be wasted in ineffective idea workshops. Often these sessions are unstructured with underwhelming results. However, with a bit of planning you can transform something mediocre into a very good idea session. The reason why lots of ideas sessions are mediocre is because no planning goes into them. It’s crucial to plan your session to get the results you want. This blog is designed as a guide to help you with that transformation. (more…)

You hear a lot about the importance of innovation in fundraising and there’s no doubt that innovation is important – all the ways of doing anything that are now widely accepted, traditional and best practice, were innovations at one point, after all.

Things always move on and almost everything can continually be improved upon, but I still don’t think innovation is as vital as it’s hyped up to be, and there are usually very significant wins to be had by improving on what you’re already doing.  If I were a Director of Fundraising, I’d want my team to have optimised the ROI of existing activities before I invested in creating anything new.  As Percy Barnevik famously said, when chairman of ABB Asea Brown Boveri (the world’s largest electrical-engineering group):

“We don’t need any more bright ideas. There are lots of them around… In business, success is 5% strategy, 95% execution.”

(more…)

So you have been working on your attitude to innovation. You have decided that ‘just ticking along’ is not an option and you are thinking about how you can make the most difference to the cause you fundraise for. You have also set yourself some Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Now what?

Your next innovators’ priority is to consider where to focus your efforts. This should be driven by your fundraising strategy. It is vital that you make time to ensure you are focusing your efforts on the right activities; the activities that will make the most difference in achieving your fundraising and engagement targets.

We all have the same amount of time in a day: 24 hours or 1,440 minutes. You have exactly the same amount of time that was given to Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa and Albert Einstein. It’s how you maximise the difference you make that’s the real challenge.

(more…)

In my last 101fundraising crowdblog I talked about the difference between innovation and creativity, incremental and radical innovation, and dispelled the myth that innovation is about a lone genius. Innovation is more likely to be a combination of a slow hunch with a series of previously unconnected connections rather than a single ‘light bulb’ moment.

Your challenge now is how you DO innovation. How do you have more connections, combine them in new ways and actually turn them into successful fundraising, not just once but as part of a continuous cycle. How do you turn ‘innovation’ into business as usual? How do you turn innovation into simply ‘how we do things round here’? (more…)