How to Make Friends and Beat Mother Nature

Topshop and The Telegraph are supporting ShelterBox (link) this Christmas, which is good news for a charity whose fortunes are influenced by public reaction to the news.

Public Perception

ShelterBox has an interesting conundrum as far as fundraising goes. As a disaster relief charity, it can piggy back on the wide-spread and emotive publicity surrounding natural disasters, like the Haiti Earthquake. Substantial influxes of donations in the wake of these tragedies raise funds for responses to future disasters, but often come too late to impact directly on the disaster that inspired the mass generosity. Disasters occur on an ongoing basis, and the majority fail to make the headlines on anything like the scale required to initiate a mass outpouring of public sympathy and allow large-scale fundraising from individuals. Work out how many disasters you can remember off the top of your head, and reflect on the fact that ShelterBox has deployed life-saving aid (link) in 200 disaster-hit locations over the last decade.

Operational Reality

The operational reality for ShelterBox is therefore little different to that of any other charity – its beneficiaries need help in pretty much equal measure all the time. However, ShelterBox’s position differs to that of many charities because of the acutely uneven correlation between sporadic supply of funding and constant demand for ShelterBoxes. In order to be effective in its mission of saving lives by responding more rapidly than larger, less nimble NGOs and aid agencies (whose strength is in underpinning long term recovery), Shelterbox has to stay ahead of the game. This involves the huge expense of making anticipatory investments in its aid package (tents, stoves etc.), pre-positioning ShelterBoxes in locations from which they can be rapidly deployed to disasters when they hit, and training people so that teams are ready to help immediately when the alarm bell sounds. How to stay ahead of the game from a fundraising perspective, when your opponent is a natural disaster?

Diversity = Sustainability

As for any charity seeking to improve its sustainability, one way to make income less subject to matters outside your control is to build a large base of regular individual donors. If you were a manufacturer, you would prefer hundreds of smaller customers than one or two huge retailers on whom you were so dependent that you could be ruined by a single, random desertion. The extra paperwork is likely to be worth the reduced risk. Likewise, ShelterBox would improve its advance preparation and ongoing disaster relief if it could diminish its dependence on media coverage of a few mega-disasters of mass-donation-inspiring scale, by fostering a more diversifed and less volatile donor base.

Befriend the Public

This is why ShelterBox is celebrating its selection as the beneficiary of the Christmas charity appeals of both Topshop and The Telegraph (link). True, the support of these two public-facing giants will give the charity a welcome fundraising boost over the festive season. Perhaps more importantly however, ShelterBox will have a golden opportunity to broaden its profile among the general public, foster long term donor relationships and put itself on a more sustainable path to scaling up its simple, innovative and effective model for saving lives.