CIoF Convention
Building the charity sector’s capability with the CIoF Convention
Bringing different perspectives together to help build charity’s capabilities.
Impact measured against UN Sustainable Development Goals
Intention
The Chartered Institute of Fundraising is the largest membership body in the UK fundraising sector. When they are operating well, the whole industry operates better.
They have made a huge number of mistakes over the last few years – namely not fully listening to their members’ experiences about sexual assaults at their events.
We have worked with them on their annual convention, which continues to be a highlight in the charity education calendar.
Over 1,400 people attended the virtual three day event in 2021, with more set to view content on-demand following the event.
We helped to bring in fresh perspectives by running an ‘outside the sector’ track which was built to bring in a diversity of perspectives not previously seen at such events.
Results
Highlights of the outside the sector stream included:
Liz Sparrow, British Gliding
As well as being a world leading glider pilot, Liz has also designed groundbreaking services for the public and private sectors. Her early career in engineering gave her a unique view of how coaching, workload management and a focus on processes can deliver lasting change that people buy into. She’s since used this considered, kind and human focussed approach to tackle systemic issues in the gliding industry, the civil service and other public sector organisations.
Saielle Silva, Cazoo
Human-centred design is the practice of meeting people’s needs through products, services and tools. In this session, Saielle looked at how just because we can make something people will use, should we do so?
Faris Aziz, Bloom & Wild
Bloom & Wild is one of the largest and fastest-growing online flower delivery and gifting platforms. In this session Faris Aziz, lead product manager, took us through how the company has continued to develop a close, effective and collaborative culture, despite many of its teams not having met each other.
Thanks a lot Saille. Great mindset shift.
Becky Beevers, British Heart Foundation
What’s next?
There is more that charities can learn from organisations that sit outside the third sector. From inspiration on strategy, through to specific tools and techniques, we should be pulling in a wide range of perspectives to be inspired by.
Next year we aim to have a wider range of companies – some purpose-driven and some not – to increase the diversity of lessons we can learn from.
We are also exploring our own event series that brings together organisations that value people, profit and purpose to inspire better ways of working.