It’s been three months since I joined Flying Cars and I wanted to share how things are going. I have been developing ideas for charities for well over a decade – but I’ve never done it quite like this. 

Because here, we don’t have ideas for donors. We have ideas with them.

Over the last month, I have spent most of my time with real donors, working with them to pivot and develop ideas to make them better and better – turning them gradually into an offer they can’t refuse. 

I’ve always been grateful for my early jobs in face-to-face and telephone fundraising. Having spoken to thousands of people about their charitable giving, I still think about those conversations all these years later.

But I realise now it has been far too long since I spent proper time with donors. Though proper qualitative insight seems to be rather out of fashion (I think because, for agencies, it’s often expensive and time-consuming to deliver) it’s an essential part of our innovation cycles.

• First we recruit a diverse panel of your target audience

• We talk to them, listen to them, get to know their world

• We share insight and inspiration with our clients and facilitate them to have hundreds of ideas

• Then we go back to the same audience panel with a shortlist and work with them to pivot those ideas until they shine

This co-creation is just the beginning of Flying Cars’ prototyping methodology, but it’s a part that I love being at the heart of. This is what it means to be rigorously creative. For a creative and strategic hybrid like me – well, happy days. 

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I can already see the difference it makes. To work with donors, to give them agency in our fundraising, is transformational. They’re not passive, hypothetical people who live in a document we refer to once at the start of a project. They’re real people who want to do good in the world but who haven’t, for the most part, been presented with enough compelling ways to do that. 

That’s why involving the audience is so crucial. Because it’s not just insight that these people offer – but inspiration. With their help, we are working with clients to develop ideas that are fresh and different – not carbon copies of what’s gone before but new models with the potential to shake up our clients’ programmes and the sector. 

These are ideas that donors want – that they’ve helped us to create. “This is new. It feels unique. I’ve never seen anything like this before from a charity,” a donor told me yesterday, “it’s exciting.” 

I couldn’t agree more. I’m excited about what we are doing here. I’m excited about what happens when insight and inspiration collide, and what happens when we invite donors to create and prototype ideas with us.

If you want to grow your fundraising and develop new campaigns or products, we’d love to talk to you (or, better still, your donors). Book a chat here.