A day in the life of a fundraiser

The telephone switchboard at the hospice lights up with internal calls from all over the building. All the calls are asking the same thing: is that a six-foot chicken walking up the drive? It is indeed. And I am that chicken. 

Like much in fundraising, where we ended up is not where we thought we would be. We were organising a duck race in the beer garden of a pub on Dartmoor that had a river running through it. Not with literal, actual ducks of course but the plastic ones. Eager as ever to look for a way to promote it, we thought it would look great to have someone dressed up as a duck for the press photos. Except, we couldn’t find a duck costume for love nor money, so settled on the closest thing we could find, a splendid yellow chicken outfit. As the team agreed I had legs closest in appearance to that of a chicken, I got to wear the outfit. 

The fundraising team had its own offices away from the hospice building, down the drive before you got to the hospice itself. To walk to the entrance at the hospice you had to walk past the hospice wards. We thought it would be fun for me to say hello to the patients in the wards dressed up as a chicken – not entirely sure why – and as I couldn’t actually see in the outfit, I had a helper to guide me. So there I am, walking up the drive dressed as a chicken, and I am pretty sure a thought that didn’t go through my head was: my parents must be so proud. 

Anyway, apparently the patients loved it, and the staff were quite beside themselves, but then who wouldn’t want to see a six-foot human chicken? And, possibly despite rather than because of the chicken outfit, the event was a tremendous success. 

Fundraising has given me so many experiences like this, and that is one of its attractions. It can also be uncomfortably close to how Philip Henslowe describes the theatre in Shakespeare in Love, “the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster”. But, like theatre, it normally turns out well and, when it does, lives and communities are transformed. It’s holding that tension – the frequent difficulty of what we do, with the impact it makes when we do it well – that is key to surviving and thriving in the fundraising world. 

I’ve done lots of different fundraising roles over the years: community fundraising, direct mail, major donors, corporate fundraising, grant making trust applications and so on. There’s normally been gloriously random aspects to them all and I found that the ‘any other duties’ line in a fundraiser’s job description is often 90% of the role. As a result, fundraising can be many things, but it is rarely dull and that is a huge plus. It enables you to see things differently, to meet such a broad range of people, to learn things you never knew you needed to know, to discover talents you never felt you had. 

And the thing that keeps drawing me back to it is this – you see again and again how decent, kind and generous most people are. In a world which frequently appears to be hurtling headlong to hell in a turbo-boosted handcart – particularly if you see life through a social media lens – fundraising shows us the best of us, and how lives can be transformed by the kindness of strangers.

Jonathan is the author of The Porcupine Principle – find out more and buy your copy here.