Building successful relationships between Marketing and Fundraising teams - Key Insights
Yesterday, we at Ashby Jenkins Recruitment, hosted our ‘Building successful relationships between Marketing and Fundraising teams’ event, looking into how to drive collaboration between these two teams. As a recruitment agency specialising in the charity sector our aim is to support the sector in a variety of ways, this includes things such as:
– Free events throughout the year to share best practice
– Free mentoring programme
– Blogs and resources to empower the sector
After officially launching our Marketing and Communications area earlier this year we want to make sure we provide tips for charity sector marketing teams alongside the support we’ve been offering to fundraisers for years.
Our guest speakers were Rachael Franklin (Breast Cancer Now), Alex Talcer (Samaritans), Emma Greaves (Teenage Cancer Trust) and Samir Afhim (Speech and Language UK), who shared key insights into how best structure this relationship and overcome challenges.
We’ve put together an abbreviated version of the insight share with some tangible tips and takeaways below:
What Facilitates Successful Relationships between Fundraising and Marketing and Communications
Encouraging vulnerability and a human-first approach – open dialogue helps to resolve misunderstandings and creates a fail-fast and then restart culture. Avoiding a culture of blame and fear means that teams collaborate more honestly, understanding that you learn more from when things go wrong than when they go right.
Measuring Success – this is still a work in progress for most charities, everyone in the room seemed relieved to hear this. Tools like brand tracking and engagement metrics can help assess what’s working. Use data (brand tracking, comments, shares, or spikes in searches) to measure success and fine-tune campaigns as needed.
Reflecting on the language used to ensure teams feel equal – there is always the believe that fundraising gets largest budgets and more headcount investment, phrases such as “marketing being absorbed by fundraising” tend to be commonly used. Ensure that teams feel equally valued.
Top 5 Tips for Improving the Relationship Between Fundraising and Marketing and Communications
1. Setting Shared Goals & Clear Accountability: Ensure that both teams are aligned on what they are trying to achieve. Set joint targets and metrics that require both teams to collaborate and communicate expectations clearly.
2. Don’t Make Assumptions of knowledge: terminology barriers and differing team structures can cause confusion, if you are a marketing specialist don’t assume that fundraisers know what abbreviations mean and vice versa, don’t even assume people know who does what. Have clear internal documents with roles and responsibilities outlined, buzzword documents are also always useful.
3. Celebrate Successes Together: Acknowledge and celebrate the wins from both teams. This helps create positive reinforcement and can motivate teams to continue collaborating successfully.
4. Ownership and Clarity: When it comes to campaigns, clarify who owns which parts of the project. Transparency around roles and responsibilities leads to a smoother process and more effective collaboration.
5. Encourage Healthy Tension: the panel highlighted that disagreements and friction can lead to better results. If teams always agree, there may be missed opportunities for improvement. Respectful disagreements can push both teams to produce more creative and effective solutions.
Final Thoughts
When charities are facing challenging economic times the majority resort to focusing on in-year income. Which often forces a focus of investment and pressure on fundraising teams which can often lead to marketing and communications teams being overlooked and under-valued. Especially as financial results are often easier to convey to trustees Understanding the above and keeping sight on the longer-term strategy and the absolute need to focus on genuine engagement with the audience charities are there to serve should see both teams put on an equal footing.
By focusing on understanding each other’s challenges and being transparent about expectations and responsibilities, these two departments can work more effectively together to truly maximise the impact they have on the people who need them most.
To read a blog on our last event about using AI in the charity sector click here. For more tips for charity sector marketing teams and wider sector trends and insight please check out our other posts.
