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A podcast for fundraisers who want ideas, examples and inspiration to help you raise more money for your charity or non-profit.
Rob is an author and award-winning fundraising trainer. Each week he and his guests share examples of successful fundraising, as well as lots of practical tips to help you apply these techniques in your own job.
Hey. This is Rob. Welcome back to the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast. Today, we're looking at ideas to help you raise funds for your charity, school, or university through Giving Days. Mel Bushell is director of development at Winchester College, and over the years at different organisations her teams have achieved wonderful results through Giving Days.
Speaker 1:In our chat she shares what she's learned and offers some great examples and tips to help you.
Speaker 2:In terms of incentives, any gift that was made, you were guaranteed your name would go up on a big wall in the sports centre, which was amazing. That worked, that worked well. Examples of what I would call giving days are things like children in need and COVID relief and sport relief and all those kinds of things. So people might not have been calling them giving days but they've been happening for a while. And he said then my colleague Juliet and I would like to stay up for the full thirty six hours and do an online radio show.
Speaker 2:And I was like, well, yeah, if that's what you want to do, I would never have thought of it. I would never have had the nerve to ask anyone to do it. And it was fantastic. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be back.
Speaker 1:Yes. I should say welcome back because you've done not one but two episodes for us over the years, which have been super popular. You now work for a different organization compared to when I last spoke to you. Where do you work now?
Speaker 2:So I'm Director of Development at Winchester College. It's actually the longest surviving school in England. So it was founded in 1382. So there are a couple of other schools which were founded earlier than us, they've sort of stopped at some point along the way and then come back again, whereas Winchester's been running consistently for nearly six fifty years now. Six forty years was all male, all boarding, and since September 2022, we've had a small number of both boys and girls as day pupils, and we're about to increase our number of girl pupils, because this year, September 2026, we're opening our first girls boarding house.
Speaker 2:So it's a time of quite a lot of change. And over this period, the school will have grown by about 20% as well, but all the growth is in the sick form. So in about three or four years' time, we'll be up to about 900 pupils.
Speaker 1:And development is an important part of the school's approach. The other thing I wanted to just say is congratulations. You are now the chair of the IDPE. In case our listeners don't know what that is, what does IDPE stand for? And how is that going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you don't work in schools, probably wouldn't know. So it's the Institute of Development Professionals in Education. So effectively the organisation for people who do fundraising alumni relations in schools, predominantly fee paying schools, but some state schools do have development offices these days increasingly, and the multi academy trusts are doing as well. I've been doing it about four months now, since November 2025. It's an interesting time, because I think most people will know that since the beginning of last year, the government has levied VAT on school fees in independent schools, which has made it a challenging time for the whole sector really, because even for schools like Winchester, which tend to have wealthier families in them through being a full boarding school, still increase the price of anything by 20%, and it has an effect on your customers.
Speaker 2:And the kind of upside of this is there are various professional associations in schools, so there's like the ones for headmasters and headmistresses, there's one for us, Fundraising's, there's the marketing ones, and we're all working much more closely together, because we realise that we've got vested interests in each other. So it's kind of broken down some of the silos between the different professions, which is an interesting development.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And one of the themes I really like, and that especially got me through the COVID challenges, was a book called The Obstacle Is The Way. And trite and cliche though it might seem, the book really helps one tune into the advantage within any big disadvantage. And when you really search for it and actually focus on it and potentially make use of it, sometimes that upside is at least as big as or greater than the initial challenge which we might be tempted to give all our energy to. So I I think that phrase obstacle is the way can absolutely apply to this challenge you've been talking about.
Speaker 1:In today's chat, Mel, I really wanted to zoom in on the fundraising tactic of giving days. I know that you've got lots of experience of this. Your former job was at Portsmouth Grammar School. In fact, three or four years ago, you came on the same show and talked about an extremely successful giving day that your organization did then. But as you said to me the other week when we were catching up, a lot has moved on, Rob.
Speaker 1:And equally, lots more organizations rather than primarily schools and universities are doing giving days than used to be the case. So what I wanted is to basically pick your brains on behalf of the listener, things you've learned about a recipe for a successful giving day. And, of course, your recipe will be different from someone else's recipe. We're not saying it's the only recipe, but I have noticed that you've been studying this long and trying different things. And I think it'd be really useful if you could give us a few examples and and your tips of things you wouldn't necessarily have known when you started doing this.
Speaker 1:I guess my first question is, what are the advantages of choosing to do this spike in development or fundraising activity at a particular day or a particular week of the year compared to spreading it out?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because, you know, examples of what I would call giving days are things like children in need, and COVID relief, and sport relief, and all those kinds of things. So people might not have been calling them giving days, but they've been happening for a while, you have this real spike and there's an opportunity to make a lot of noise about your cause. And probably the most lasting legacy of the giving days I've been involved in, has actually been the communications around them. The money's fantastic, and that's what everyone focuses on at the time, but you may call this noise, and it sticks with people after the event. So very much thinking about the first one I did at Portsmouth Gramme School, PGS, and all the fundraising we did prior to our first Giving Day, which was in 2021, major donor conversations are literally happening behind closed doors, and we did telephone campaigns every other summer, but in the summer holidays, there was no one in the school, and even the people who were working in the school weren't there when the phone calls were being made, because they were being done in evenings at weekends.
Speaker 2:So everyone could pretty much ignore the fact that fundraising even happened, and then suddenly, you've got this kind of big focus, and at PGS we had pupils off timetable for a whole day, we did sort of a thirty six hour email campaign around it. And people couldn't ignore it, and actually people enjoyed it and got interested, and thereafter I'd never had more people want to talk to me about fundraising as I had ever. So we did The Giving Day in March, and we were doing a telephone campaign in the summer holidays in July. And when the end of term came, people were going, Oh, you're doing a telephone campaign this summer, aren't you? I hope it goes really well.
Speaker 2:And literally no one had ever spoken to me about what we did in terms of fundraising before, so that was the kind of internal benefit. But also, pretty much all the Giving Days I've been involved in have been about fundraising for bursaries, and just really, there's been an amazing opportunity to really set out the message of why we think bursaries are important, and why they're a fundamental part of the organisations that I've been a part of. And I can't think of any other way where you would have the opportunity to really make that message stick with people other than making a huge amount of noise for quite a concentrated period of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. And a few months ago, my family got kinda hooked into all the energy around children in need, because we listen to radio too, and we like Sarah Cox. And it's no question that in the last few months, all of us have had more conversations about children in need, about just various random things, than we would have done had not that big story hooked us in and got our attention?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, exactly right. No, it was really interesting. And again, one of the big successes at PGS was, in particular in the first year, the number of staff we got who kind of emerged as donors. And we'd never, for obvious reasons, included staff in the telephone campaigns, because ringing up your old teacher to ask them to make a donation would be a very uncomfortable thing for your average 19 year old. But doing a giving day, and obviously we could see who was suddenly coming out of the woodwork and making donations.
Speaker 2:So it kind of gave me insight as to who my key allies were internally as well, which we could then take forward throughout the rest of the year and things that we did.
Speaker 1:Yes. This makes lots of sense, Mel, and I work with quite a few schools and universities, and almost always, one of their top two or three challenges isn't so much about the fundraising or the donors. It is about how hard it can be in many educational organizations to get the attention of or the interest of teaching colleagues in fundraising or development. So if a Giving Day helps some people pay attention and tune into the messages around development, then that just has to be valuable, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, understandably, more than 99% of the people in a school are focusing on educating some young people day in, day in out, and they're not remotely thinking about fundraising. But when you can kind of pick off one or two and get them on side, then they can have disproportionate impact, and certainly the first given there had at PGS, we knew we wanted lots of activity on-site, pupils getting involved in fun stuff, and I just, there's no way myself and my small team had the relationships with pupils to make that happen. But I managed to kind of, invert a comma, recruit a really key member of the teaching staff who was interested in what we were doing. So he kind of managed that side of things, and kind of got other teachers interested, then some of the sixth formers, and it kind of cascaded down.
Speaker 2:What was also very helpful was that he'd actually just been promoted, that particular member of staff, and just prior to that he'd been a housemaster, and he was still in everyone's mind very closely associated with his old house, and that really kicked off rivalry between the houses. But for alumni it's always there, and the pupils it's always there, but amongst the teaching staff and how they were trying to outdo each other with giving, which was just fantastic, I wouldn't have forecast that, I couldn't have engineered it, but it was absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is brilliant, and I know that competitiveness between houses is surprisingly intense and really never gonna go away, and is a feature of most schools. So I absolutely see how this would have worked in your favor to achieve this outcome.
Speaker 2:I just actually there's a Winchester story around that as well. So in 2025, we had our most successful Winchester Giving Day yet, and we very much focused on people supporting bursaries in the house that they felt associated with. But we built up to it over a sort of six month period. So we were doing the Giving Day in June. We started with notice that there were gaps in the photographic archive of different house photographs.
Speaker 2:So at Christmas, we did an appeal saying, while you're up in the loft getting your Christmas decorations out, can you have a rummage around for your old photo albums and see if you've got any photos of the whole house photos that were done on an annual basis, or just life in your boarding house. Which was brilliant because it got us some resource, but we also then, we basically had a gentle lead in over about six months of making people think about their life in their boarding house, And then when it came to Giving Day, it was like, oh, look, and here's a landing page specifically about your house, someone who's in the house at the moment on the bursary, someone from the past who was on the bursary, and interesting things have happened in their life, and oh, look, you can support the same thing in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's brilliant in several different ways. But one of them, would just draw a parallel with a thing that many hospitals do successfully, which is when they ask people to donate to the hospital itself, it can be hard. But when they invite people to have the opportunity to donate to a particular ward with which they probably have a much more intense emotional affinity, fundraising tends to be much more successful. So I love that you're broadly making use of that same thing that human beings are always associating most to their in group they are most familiar with. But just before we move into some advice you might have for someone planning a giving day, could you give us a sense, really, line of the scale that your one at Portsmouth Grammar School was?
Speaker 1:Because I gather that was the most successful giving day organized by a school that had happened at the time. But also, really, top line for context, what level are the Winchester ones operating at?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Certainly. So, yeah, you're right. The the PGS one at the time was the most successful school giving day. A key part of that was getting a really generous gift from a major donor to to get us started, which we could use for match giving and some fundraising challenges.
Speaker 2:And he gave us £100,000 to get us started, and we wanted to make sure we used all that much funding, so our mental target, internal target really was 200,000 in total, and at the end of the day we got to 2 and 50,000, which was just amazing, like it was almost as much as we would raise in the whole of the rest of the year at PGS at that time. And I think we had about 500 donors, that's a while ago, so I struggle to remember, but I think it was about that. There'd been three giving days at Winchester, two before I was in post and one since I've been there. So the first one was actually around the same time as the first PGS one, and that raised just over a 100,000, but they didn't have much match giving. And then the next one in 2022 was 275,000, and that had about 500 donors.
Speaker 2:So that was very similar to the PGS one really, a little bit more match giving. And then last year's, the twenty twenty five one, we raised just shy of 329,000 from six seventeen donors, six seventeen. So Winchester, every year, every metric has increased. So the overall amount raised, the amount of match giving it had to start with, the average size of gift and the number of donors. But I think a key part of that has actually been working really hard to keep it fresh and do something a bit different each time, which can be hard.
Speaker 2:But I one of two Oxbridge Colleges has sort of stumbled a bit there, and they've kind of got a bit stuck, and had a couple of giving days where they've gone down from the previous one. So that's why we've really worked hard at thinking of something a bit different each time.
Speaker 1:Can you give us a sense of how one might do it a bit different? Is it an entirely different theme, or lots of the tactics are the same, or different messaging? Could you give us a sense of how that pans out?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the first Winchester one was about bursaries. It was also in the COVID year, so all lessons are different, aren't they, from the COVID years? Then in 2022, they could actually see each other face to face and things like that. That was the tail end of a major capital campaign, so it was for the sports centre, so it was a different cause.
Speaker 2:In terms of incentives, any gift that was made, you were guaranteed your name would go up on the big wall in the sports centre, which was amazing. Worked, that worked well.
Speaker 1:So in terms of other advice, you've already alluded to one of the things. But from me studying these things, doesn't matter how effective all the messaging is and segmenting of audiences and so on, if there aren't some matched gifts from some major donors or even just one major donor, it all becomes much more difficult. So what would your advice be in terms of finding those matched gifts upfront that then makes everything else possible?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, as I said, that was a really key aspect of the success of the first PGS Giving Day. We had this major donor. You listen to what they say, and he'd been asking me if there were any tactics that we wanted to engage so that we could track down more lost alumni. So I was thinking, he's thinking about volume, and we've done everything that we could think of, because he basically said that he would pay for anything like that.
Speaker 2:But I thought, well, we were planning our first giving day, they were a bit of an unknown quantity, but I thought there were some parallels there, this is about volume. And so that was basically the basis on which I went to him. I said, I think we've done everything we can think of for getting more alumni to really significantly increase the number of donors I want to do this giving day. And that was the argument I used with him and that worked. So yeah, I think it makes a real difference to donors when they know that their gift is going to be more than doubled, and then if you add on Gift Aid on top, then it's even more, and we can certainly use that in the comms.
Speaker 2:And then in every giving that I've been involved in, we've had the sort of straightforward match giving, but then also some challenge gifts. So when we get to the first 100 donors, 5,000 is released and that kind of thing. Or 30 donors from overseas and £2,000 is released, or whatever. I think it's a matter of knowing your major donors really. So at PGS it was very much fun, there was the one person who was very keen to put in a big chunk of money.
Speaker 2:At Winchester it's been more of a kind of patchwork really, of a handful of significant donors kind of putting in maybe 5 figure gifts, so like £10,000 or £25,000 or something, to kind of build up a pot. And again, it's been quite personalised really, knowing what they've shown an interest in in the past. And, yeah, I think it is just major donor fundraising one zero one, really.
Speaker 1:But one thing I love about match funding as a tactic for a giving day is, a, it should be easier to get a meeting or at least a conversation with someone who cares about your cause if you know you've got this extra interesting hook to run by them. So it makes you more confident to seek out those conversations. And b, obviously, as you've alluded to, then when the Giving Day is happening, it makes it much more compelling for people who are doing the fundraising on the day because, again, knowing that those extra incentives and doubling your impact and so on are happening. So it's so effective and fundamental, I think, really, to to making these things work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think also if you haven't yet done the giving day, then that's quite an exciting thing for a donor potentially. It's like, we want to try something new. Will you help us make it a bigger success?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that I hope many people who care about a particular cause will agree to have that conversation, won't they? It's excellent. If there was another piece of advice you would give us if we're planning a giving day, what would it be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, something I'd spent a lot of time on was thinking about different audiences. Because in the school, I mean, you've got alumni, and where we had, you know, alumni start at the age of 18, and we never actually had anyone who was 100, but they were pretty close, so that's a massive age range. There are people in different parts of the world, there are parents, there are staff, there's all the internal audiences. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what messages would be important to different audiences, and who might be the best person to deliver each of those messages, and that's one of the really good things about Giving Days, is you've got this kind of blitz of maybe up to a dozen emails, and you might have video content as well, and then you've got your social media, And so you've got lots and lots of opportunities of framing the same message in different ways from different angles, and we had parents of children who'd received bursaries and the difference it made to them. We've got pupils that did this anonymously, but talking about how they were loving the fact that someone else was paying for them to be in the school, because otherwise they would never have been there.
Speaker 2:A young alumni talking about the difference it made for them. Again at PGS, they'd been a member of the teaching staff who'd been absolutely iconic and he'd worked there pretty much his entire career and he was well into his 90s. He was the one, all the alumni from the 1960s and 70s would always ask if he was still around and he still lived locally. And so we got a little video message from him and that obviously had a massive impact on several generations of people. So yeah, that was a really big one for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I remember from that very successful campaign that there was the effort to understand those different audiences and therefore which messenger or spokesperson would most resonate with them. So there's variety and focus. But equally, the overarching story, the message about the amazing difference these bursaries make, that was always the same.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Was the same message, but just from different angles and different voices, but it was absolutely that. So we came up with a hashtag, be the difference, and then we had very clear branding.
Speaker 2:We had like sort of social media slides which were ready to go that we could drop in the imagery come the day when we knew exactly what people were doing. And it was the same that went out on all the email headers, our normal email footers for quite a few weeks in advance as well, so not just the giving day comms, they all had the same thing, the same kind of red triangle thing.
Speaker 1:And then if there was just something different that you've learned that may be different about schools compared to some other organizations, but in terms of making it work with the reality of what's going on in your organization, what have you learned?
Speaker 2:I think that's been, with me changing schools, I think that's been a really interesting part of it, because it's not so much the fundraising part necessarily, but it's the extent to which you have stuff actually happening in the school and pupils off timetable or not, and what that might look like. So PGS is a day school, about 1,500 pupils, but the whole age range from two and a half to 18, whereas Winchester is predominantly male, so still 95% male, and only age 13 to 18. So the kinds of activities you might do on-site on the day are going be very different, because if you're used to your school having lots of very small people in it who kind of come in in fancy dresses sometimes, that kind of infects the whole school in a way, so you can really play on that come a Giving Day. One of the PGS things was the emblem was a lion, so we invested in a lion mascot costume, and this person dressed up as a lion would go around visiting classrooms and stuff on the giving day. Whereas at Winchester, if we did that, they'd think we'd gone completely mad, because these are teenage boys, and you choose something very different.
Speaker 2:So work with your community and what's going to land and what's just going to make absolutely not work, think is really important.
Speaker 1:Hi. It's Rob. And just before we get to the last bit of the conversation, I wanted to ask, is there an area of fundraising that you need to improve this year? If there is, and if you find the Bright Spots ideas we share in this podcast helpful, please get in touch. Whether it's a bespoke training session for your team or our learning and inspiration club, the Bright Spot membership, or one of our two high value mastery programs, we would love to help you smash your target this year.
Speaker 1:To find out more or request a chat, go to brightspotfundraising.co.uk. Yes, Mel. I guess it is obvious in a way, but so much of success is about tuning in to the nature of your organization and maybe the certain things that wouldn't work here, but maybe this particular charity or this particular school does have certain opportunities or assets that are right under our nose?
Speaker 2:Yes. Again, my first one, back at PGS, with having the sort of through school, you've got teachers in junior schools are quite different from senior school teachers as well, because they're dealing with very small children, so they probably have a more playful working life anyway than the senior school teachers. And the deputy head of the junior school came to me quite early on in the planning, he said, we've just had this idea, because technology being the way it is, we could do an online radio show. And he said, my colleague Juliet and I would like to stay up for the full thirty six hours and do a radio, an online radio show. And I was like, well if, yeah, if that's what you want to do, I would never have thought of it, I would never have had the nerve to ask anyone to do it, but he was willing to put in the hard yards, and it was fantastic, they had themes per hour, they had interviews with different people in the school at different times of the day, they kept going through the night, so we didn't have a lot of overseas alumni, but we had connected them with a few, so they had people to interview during the wee small hours, and it was kind of getting played in the background in lessons on one of the days, and it really brought people together actually, it was absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 2:And actually interestingly, obviously Winchester's got a much more international audience, about 20% of our pupils are from overseas, being a boarding school, and we haven't had that at Winchester, but what we have done is we've really thought about when our emails go out, and we've had things going out according to time zone, so that the people in America are getting the emails when they're awake, and the same for the people in the Far East. Whereas when I was at PGS, we just did them between 8AM and 8PM GMT, but we have thoughts about the international time zones in the other one.
Speaker 1:That makes absolute sense. So Mel, if there was one more piece of advice you would give to someone either who's done a giving day before and is considering doing another or an organization that has never done one but is really weighing up, taking a deep breath and going all in on this tactic, what's the last piece of advice you would give?
Speaker 2:Well, as people who have been listening can probably tell I'm quite a Giving Day fan. I mean, my one word warning is they are a lot of work, both in the lead up and then particularly during the, if you do thirty six hours, but they're also really fun and it's actually incredibly exciting to keep seeing your totaliser. I just kept refreshing my website, Or like, I was waking up at three in the morning and refreshing it again and quickly listening to the radio show. So they're hard work, but they're very exciting. And they also totally change how people look at fundraising and how they imagine your working life is.
Speaker 2:It's not about basically being horrible to people until they give you money, it's actually about it's all fun and positive. So, yeah, I would absolutely recommend them.
Speaker 1:Wise words. Mel, I've really enjoyed hearing your ideas again for the podcast. I'm really grateful for you making time to share. Thank you, and I look forward to catching up with you again very soon.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. My pleasure.
Speaker 1:There you go. Thank you for listening and for supporting the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast. If you enjoyed it, please don't keep it a secret. I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd spread the word to your colleagues and on LinkedIn so that together, we can help as many good causes as possible. Good luck this week.
Speaker 1:Do let me know how you're getting on, and I look forward to sharing another Bright Spots story with you very soon.