Fundraising Manifestos
As a think tank, Rogare looks to the academic world to mine insights that can be synthesised into new applications in professional practice. Our core audience is always fundraising practitioners.
We are proud to be part of the fundraising profession and we are proud to be fundraisers ourselves.
We hold a set of beliefs and values about our role as fundraisers within the fundraising profession. We have written two ‘manifestos’ based on these values that we hope will chime with the professional values of many other fundraisers.
I Am a Critical Fundraiser – exhorts fundraisers to always critically reflect on their practices, ethics, and opinions and to keep striving to know more.
This Is a Fundraising Office – aims to instil a sense of pride in being part of our noble profession.
Both manifestos have been made possible because of the support of all our Associate Members and were designed by Bluefrog’s Rebecca Woodall.
I Am a Critical Fundraiser
Fundraisers need to make practical and ethical decisions every day. So they need to have the knowledge and competencies to make such decisions and they have to ask themselves whether they do have these. Understanding that you might not know something is the essential first step to critical thinking.
Our Critical Fundraiser manifesto challenges fundraisers to always keep an open mind about what they know, or think they know about fundraising, to keep their knowledge, ethics, and opinions under review, and be prepared to change them based on new and better information.
You can download two different versions of the manifesto below, according to your design tastes (version 1 is on the left).
And you can read an expanded version of the manifesto here. The expanded version sets out in the 10 statements in more depth.
You may also want to check out Rogare’s Critical Thinking Guide for fundraisers, which provides a framework to fundraisers to approach problem solving.
The Critical Fundraiser manifesto was devised with input from Rogare Critical Fundraising Network members Heather Hill (USA), Ashley Belanger (USA), Anthony Petchel (USA), David Pierce (UK), and Ian MacQuillin (UK).
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I Am a Critical Fundraiser – expanded version
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Rogare Critical Thinking guide – by Cherian Koshy and Ashley Belanger
This Is a Fundraising Office
Fundraising is a noble vocation and fundraisers everywhere should share a sense of pride in their profession.
But with fundraising and fundraisers so often misunderstood – and that misunderstanding so often becoming the basis of criticism and attacks on both the fundraising profession and individual fundraisers – rallying round a shared experience of being a fundraiser can be challenging.
That’s why we have produced the Fundraising Office manifesto.
Titled ‘This is a fundraising office’, it is based on Beatrice Warde’s famous ‘This is a printing office’ manifesto that was posted in almost every print room in the English-speaking world during the 1930s and 1940s, and is cast in bronze outside the US Government Printing Office in Washington DC.
We hope the Rogare manifesto will do for fundraisers what Warde’s did for printers – instil and foster a huge sense of pride in what they do.
Since we first launched this in July 2015, the manifesto has been posted in fundraising officers all round the world. A few of these are shown in the gallery below.
The manifesto is now is available in two different 30s-inspired designs, one more traditional (above left) and the other a bit more modernist (above right). There are version of each optimised for electronic sharing and home/office printing.
So please, download and share our ‘This is a fundraising office’ manifesto, put it up on your walls and doors, and above all, carry on being proud fundraisers.
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This is a Fundraising Office - traditional version.
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This is a Fundraising Office - modernist version.
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For an account of the genesis of the manifesto, the thinking behind it and why we’ve based it on Beatrice Warde’s ‘This is a printing office’, take a look at Ian MacQuillin’s blog on UK Fundraising.
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If you are interested in finding out more about Beatrice Warde, and are quite interested in fonts and typefaces generally (some people are, including Rogare’s director), you could do worse than get a copy of Simon Garfield’s Just My Type.
