Jonathan Waddingham

I’ve been lucky enough to be at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention (#iofnc) this week, learning from the best minds in the UK charity sector. It’s always a great opportunity to meet fundraising friends IRL, but there have been lots of great sessions too.

If i had to try and summarise the key trends from the last three days (from the sessions I went to), they would be…

• Multi-channel fundraising is a must. You can’t stick to one way of talking to people anymore.
• Innovation is more important than ever, but you have to be prepared to fail to innovate. It’s all about testing,  learning and continually iterating (and will be more and more about lean startup methodology, I suspect)
• Mobile is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s here now, not a future trend. It also helps you simplify your products and propositions. But it’s not necessarily the holy grail in itself (see trend #1)

To try and be more organised this year, I’ve used storify to collect mine and others’ notes on the presentations I’ve attended, and these were my top 3 highlight sessions…

• Innovation in giving with @reubenturner and @wordofjoe
• Mobile and digital journey at UNICEF with @spirals
• Dryathlon and click to cure with Cancer Research UK

I’ve embedded the relevant storifys of each session for your delectation below…

http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-2-part-2

http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-1-part-2

And Laila’s slides below:

http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-2-part-1

I also shared plenty more notes from sessions on crowdfunding, shaking the digital tin, the opening plenary and online video, and more…

This year I also had the pleasure of working with Merlin’s Danielle Atkinson and PayPal Giving Fund’s Nick Aldridge to put together the digital stream for the Convention, so if you do have any feedback on the digital sessions and would like more or less of certain things, drop me a line on twitter or email.