You probably won’t remember Harold Sumption. He more or less started Oxfam’s fundraising in the 1970s. He was actually an adman and was behind some of the best charity advertising ever seen. (He has a page on Wikipedia which is well worth reading).
I got to know him well and he was a great teacher of the art. The saying that most sticks in my mind is that charity advertising should look “as though it’s been put together late at night by two old ladies at a kitchen table”. The exact wording varies and these days the two old ladies get left out. What he actually meant was that fundraising advertising shouldn’t look glossy and clever. Where, after all, is the need if the ad looks so polished that the organisation clearly has a lot of money to spend?
Not so long ago a well-known charity (you know who you are) sent a film crew to South Africa to make a film asking donors to give money; the commercial by a big posh ad agency featured the recipients rising up into the air (literally) as a result of the sought-for kindness of the donor. I kid you not. The results were, let us say, not exactly encouraging, and the production costs were what you would imagine from a big posh ad agency. It’s never seen the light of day since.
Contrast that with the Micheal Buerk footage in 1984 from Ethiopia. Here was reality, grim and raw, and it raised millions via, amongst other things, Band Aid and Live Aid and inspired Bob Geldof’s immortal line “give us the fockin’ money”. Harold would have been delighted.
Reality is much harder to create in fundraising communications. It demands that the art is hidden. It demands truthful access to the cause. It lets the need speak a lot louder than the film or the press ad or the mail pack or the post. It will never win a creative award. But it will win lots of new supporters.