The number of people with dementia in the UK is estimated at 850,000.
There are around 540,000 carers of people with dementia in England. Approximately one in three of us will care for a person with dementia in our lifetime.
In our community are a number of small charities supporting people with dementia and their carers.
You can help them by becoming a volunteer or by making a donation:
60% of adults in the UK don’t have a will and although they ‘would be happy to’ leave gifts to charity, only about 6 per cent actually do so. This is a huge opportunity for local charities to explain what the work they do and inspire people to leave them a gift for a community cause they care about.
Writing about legacies on and offline can be daunting. Knowing what to say, getting the tone right and knowing where to put the messages on your website or in your literature is challenging. This is where Google is your friend! Look online at how the big charities tackle legacy fundraising – legacy visions, language used, stories, how legacies are spent, information on will writing and the downloads they offer to supporters.
However, the most important consideration is making sure everyone in your organisation (staff, trustees and volunteers) know about your legacy giving program and are confident to talk about making legacy gifts as a way to support you. Presentations (internal and external) should include a slide about how you would spend a gift from a will. Repeat the message little and often by telling stories to help normalise the idea of legacies as a way to support your organisation. The more people who are confident talking about legacies and including them in their wider work, the greater reach you can achieve with your message. If your volunteers/staff find the subject uncomfortable, make sure they know who in your organisation they can refer enquiries to, so that the opportunity is not lost.
Finally, know the law. Approach a local solicitor to talk through the legalities of accepting legacies and put together the information a potential legacy donor and their will writer might need. Helpful information is likely to include your official name, address and registered charity number.
Being a small organisation shouldn’t stop you adding legacy to your fundraising strategy and seeking funds through gifts in wills from your supporters.
Before getting started I strongly recommend you read:
Institute of Fundraising https://www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/guidance/fundraising-with-individuals/legacies/#introduction
Code of Fundraising Practice https://www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk/code/specific-fundraising-methods/legacies
Charity Commission https://www.gov.uk/guidance/wills-and-charitable-legacies
Remember a Charity https://www.rememberacharity.org.uk/making-a-will/
Charities must diversify their fundraising strategy, raise their digital profile, increase their supporter base and generate online donations – an out of date website and ignoring social media is not an option.
Your website should be the centre of your communications. Visitors to your site are interested in the people you help, how you help them and how they can get involved.
Please remember that donors fund people not organisations.
You have 15 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention – this is called the 15 second bounce. In those 15 seconds you must stir emotion, empathy and invite engagement.
Menu Options: You should have no more than 5 menu options with short, call to action words:
About Get Help Get Involved Contact Us Donate
Mission statement: The message on your home page must be simple and immediate ‘We’re ending homelessness and rebuilding lives’
Fundraising: It must be obvious to the donor who you are fundraising for. Donors and funders will check your site to see what you do with your money. Tell beneficiary stories and have project pages with images and totals raised. Keep pages and interest fresh by updating regularly.
Donations: Your donate button should be in the top right of your website and visible on every page. The button should be a different colour from other menu options. No more than 3 clicks to donate from anywhere on your site. Where possible offer different donation values and tell the donor what their money buys.
Tell Stories and Use Images: Site visitors want to hear about real people and their lives. They want to hear stories and quotes from volunteers and beneficiaries about how your intervention improves lives and makes a difference. If you have vulnerable beneficiaries, try copying the image creativity of larger charities to get around the problem of showing faces. Don’t bury your stories deep in the website – they should be easy to find.
Calls to Action: Every web page, email, Tweet, Facebook post should have a call to action – donate, volunteer, contact, support, sign up, share.
Mobile Friendly: Google penalises websites which don’t display well on mobiles or tablets. In 2018 25% of all online donations were made on a mobile.
What are you for? Who do you benefit? Where are they? Show faces and tell stories. You have 15 seconds before I bounce.
Charities need data to improve their performance and services for beneficiaries and charity fundraisers need data to prove impact. For both, the data must tell a story in order to be meaningful and powerful.
There’s much talk in the charity sector at the moment about collecting and using data. To understand service users’ needs, improve performance, showcase our impact and better present information to the public we must decide what data to collect and get started!
It is also increasingly important in funding applications to prove project need and expected outcomes/impact with hard evidence in terms of real data in order to be successful.
As well as collecting your own data, baseline and national statistics will give context to your applications.
Charity Digital News this week produced a list of the best data resources for UK charities:
UK Data Service – The UK Data Service claims to be the UK’s largest collection of social, economic and population data resources, including UK census data and government funded surveys. You can browse over 6,000 digital data collections for research and teaching purposes covering an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, and spanning many disciplines and themes.
Office of National Statistics – The ONS is the UK’s largest independent producer of national statistics and supplies a large variety of datasets, ranging from business, economy and employment to population and societal data.
National Archives – The National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) collection preserves and provides online access to archived digital datasets and documents from UK central government departments. NDAD spans 40 years of recent history, with the earliest available dataset dating back to about 1963.
London Data Store – This London-centric data bank was created by the Greater London Authority (GLA) as a first step towards freeing London’s data, with the aim of allowing everyone to be able access the data that the GLA and other public sector organisations hold, for free.
Data.gov.uk – Find data published by central government, local authorities and public bodies to help you build products and services.
NHS digital – Formally known as the Health and Social Care Information Centre, NHS Digital has responsibility for standardising, collecting and publishing data and information from across the health and social care system in England. Over a thousand datasets are available on a variety of sobjects from care quality through to population health and the outcome of treatments.
Openly Local – Launched by the Social Tech Trust, Openly Local provides open UK local authority data from 160 UK councils on 12,000 elected local officials, 8,000 committees, and over 100,000 committee meetings. Its council dashboard shows the distribution of £14 billion of local government spending, between private, public and charitable contractors.
London Datastore – The London Datastore is a free and open data-sharing portal where anyone can access data relating to the capital. Whether The site provides over 700 datasets to help you understand the city and develop solutions to London’s problems, with topics ranging from employment, transport and environment to housing, health and population stats.
Met Office – On the Met Office website, you can find historic UK climate and weather data from long-running stations, some of which go back 100 years. The pages are updated each month to reflect the latest month’s weather across the UK.
Ordnance Survey – OS open data products (OS OpenData) are a set of digital maps of Great Britain, available for anyone to use, for any purpose. Choose from maps at different detail levels to many different geographical datasets overlaid with information including addresses, postcodes, location names, transport networks, political boundaries, crime and pollution. Ordnance Survey OpenData products are free under the Open Government Licence but they ask that you acknowledge them when using them.
Justice Data Lab – Justice Data Lab is run by a team of analysts at the Ministry of Justice, providing organisations that have worked with offenders and would like to understand the impact of their intervention access to central information on reoffending. The service provides this information to help organisations to assess the impact of their work on reducing reoffending.
Data.police.uk – This site provides information made available by the Home Office on behalf of police forces in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and the British Transport police, such as street-level crime, outcome and stop and search information.
NCVO: Civil Society Almanac – View and download extensive data on the state of the state of the charity sector’s finances.
EU Open Data Portal – Looking further afield, the EU Open Data Portal is a central hub for free open data published by EU institutions and bodies. Subjects range from trade, economics and finance to environment, employment, agriculture, law, politics, education and communication.
Understanding Society – Data from the Understanding Society study covers everyone in a household, from children to adults, covering a wide range of themes such as family life, education, employment, finance, health and wellbeing. Anonymised data is exported to create public use files.
Gapminder – Gapminder compiles datasets on numerous categories from a wide range of datasets, aimed at helping people better understand the world at large based on data and not assumptions.
Free Company Data Product – The Free Company Data Product is a downloadable data snapshot containing basic company data of live companies on the Companies House register. Companies House is now part of the Public Data Group (with Met Office, Ordnance Survey and Land Registry), which was set up to maximise the value of the data held by member organisations and make it available free of charge.
Registry of Open Data on AWS– This registry exists to help people discover and share datasets that are available via AWS resources. You can find scientific, geographic, satellite and space datasets among others.
World Health Organisation – The WHO data repository is a gateway to the world’s health-related statistics and datasets across 194 countries and can be categorised by country or theme (there are over 35).
Humanitarian Data Exchange – Managed by the Centre for Humanitarian Data, the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organisations. Launched in July 2014, the goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis.
IMF Data – The International Monetary Fund publishes data on international finances, debt rates, foreign exchange reserves, commodity prices and investments.
Shelter Housing Databank – The Shelter Housing Databank brings together government data on housing need, supply, affordability and other issues at a local, regional and national level. You can view the data as a table or graph, or download it for further analysis.
Google Dataset Search – This little known Google function allows you to search for literally any set of data currently openly available.
Google Trends – Find out what people are searching for on Google.
Surrey-i – Data from key stakeholders across the county of Surrey.
NWSCCG – Information and news from North West Surrey Clinical Commissioning Group.
SHCCG – Information and news from Surrey Heath Clinical Commissioning Group.
Runnymede Borough Council – Information and news from Runnymede BC.
Surrey Heath Borough Council – Information and news from Surrey Heath BC.
Spelthorne Borough Council – Information and news from Spelthorne BC.
Surrey County Council – Information and news from Surrey County Council.
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