Charity Impact Podcast
Episode keywords:
Creativity and Innovation in Charities, Fundraising, Nonprofit, Fear, Long-Term Thinking, Acknowledging Failure, Psychological Safety, Nurturing People, Involving Audience, Problem-Solving, Learning from Failure.
Episode description:
Creativity in problem-solving and innovation in transforming these solutions into tangible results – simple concepts, yet often mistaken as one and the same, and riddled with roadblocks. Today, Lucy Gower, founder of Lucidity, helps to disentangle these concepts, while unearthing the hurdles that can hinder their implementation. From redefining innovation for your organisation, to confronting the fear of failure, we cover a wide spectrum of insight in this episode.
Don’t let fear and scarcity of resources stifle your creative spirit and hamper innovation. We candidly address these common hurdles, encouraging a shift in perspective towards embracing failures as stepping stones to success. Together with Lucy, we shed light on the necessity of a long-term vision in fundraising, bust myths about the digital shift during the pandemic, and uncover the silver lining that every challenge presents. Through this, we aim to inspire a fresh approach to problem-solving, ultimately driving your organisation towards innovative outcomes.
Lucy talks about the importance of nurturing our people during stressful times and fostering an environment of psychological safety to stimulate effective innovation. Lucy shares practical strategies to foster such a culture, and we highlight some valuable resources to further explore this topic. From learning from failure to committing to perpetual innovation, this episode is a treasure trove of wisdom on fostering creativity and innovation in charities.
Episode transcript:
You can access the transcript for this episode here. It is AI generated and not 100% perfect but I think it is good enough to follow the conversation. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resource to manually make the corrections.
Resources:
Lucy Gower
Lucy is founder and director at Lucidity. She is a coach, trainer and facilitator specialising in giving people the confidence and tools to think creatively, develop ideas and make their innovations happen.
She is bestselling author of The Innovation Workout and a global speaker on innovation. Lucy is passionate about helping people unlock their creativity and get the important work done. She enjoys working on projects with the potential to make a positive impact on the world.
You can find Lucy on LinkedIn.
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The Charity Impact podcast is brought to you by KEDA Consulting, where we help charities to increase their income and impact.
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If you are not securing the amount of grant income you think you should be, it is probably not due to a lack of capacity. It might be for a number of more complex reasons, such as organisational issues which require better collaboration with colleagues in other teams such as services, finance, policy and so on; or performance issues, such as ineffective practices within the trust fundraising programme. Or you may have a temporary reduction in capacity due to a trust fundraiser leaving or being on maternity or sick leave.
We have found that charities with small fundraising teams are often failing to maximise grant funding opportunities for one of three reasons:
We find that small charities usually have a history of raising most of their income from either grant funding or community fundraising.
If you lead a small, grant funded charity, you will probably be skilled in bid writing by necessity. You might be a great bid writer. However, we know that this is only one aspect of your role, alongside overseeing your services, managing the team and often everything else from accounting to fixing the printer! If you are stretched thinly, you will be missing out on funding opportunities that could help to grow your charity.
If you lead a small charity that relies on other forms of fundraising, you and your team may have very little experience of identifying and securing grant funding. You might not know where to start in terms of identifying the right funders to apply to, writing a compelling case for support or how to even make time for this amongst everything else.