This is Dominic from See The Difference. Firstly apologies if you didn’t receive a reply to your email. If you email me at change@seethedifference.org I’ll make sure you get a reply.

… and thanks for your thoughtful comments, as you are probably aware we developed See The Difference over the last two years in partnership with around 70 “pioneer” charities to ensure it really added something to the charity landscape and to also harness many of the team’s background here in media and storytelling for the benefit of UK charities. The key ambition is of course to make giving a more rewarding experience and thereby stimulating additional income and an amazing gang of 350+ people have collaborated pro-bono to make that happen. That’s a real labour of love.

I agree with Andrews point, givers care about the difference they make and specific projects are delivered by the charities, so as we say the star of the show are the charities individual stories, NOT see the difference. What we do as an organisation is help support and mentor charities to tell their stories, put all the info in one place to make it easy for givers to find and concentrate IT, creative and other resources to create a continually improving user experience for givers (investment which is beyond the scope of many individual charities).

To answer another point on DM. I don’t think this is the death of any other channel and we’ve had great engagement, debate and help in developing See The Difference from several large scale DM agencies. Many of the people we’ve worked with in that area think it encourages charities to think about the strength of connection you get with givers when you can see the difference you can make, something they have been advocating for many years and they have been actively encouraging the clients to experiment (with them making brilliant stories of course!).

If you be interested, you’d be very welcome to come to one of our charity briefings here at 140 London Wall, or watch over the web (via a webex briefings). If you’d like to come email me or Jill Ross (who runs the briefings) at jillr@seethedifference.org or the usual change@seethedifference.org emails.

Look forward to hearing from you – and thanks for taking the time to check out the website and feel free to continue the debate on http://www.facebook.com/seethedifference.org

Regards – dom

This really struck a chord with me and reminded me of something I wrote about a while ago with the increasing fracturing between fundraising/coms work and the actual work on the ground. It seems to me to be a growing trend for the “charity” that people donate to to simply be a conduit for funds that go to support multiple different organisations that acutally do the work. There’s a diversification, if you will, into specialisms.

The “charity” that raises the money doesn’t have to be backed by excellent, emotionally engaging and pertinent work – they can cherry pick the projects that are going to deliver them the return against a set of criteria. Then you have a whole range of charities on the ground, actually delivering projects and competiting for funding.

The charities that are big tended to have a combination of good work on the ground and good fundraising. Now that doesn’t need to be the case. Why slave away for 10 years building up rigourous evidence-based approaches and a bank of case studies that need funding when you can set up a brand online overnight and simply give the money to a different charity to do the work?

The classic example of this in my eyes is charity: water, who don’t actually have their own water projects, but fund a variety of other charities (some of them big in their own right).

Where I think they differ from See the Difference is that charity: water and others actually have a brand that you can emotionally connect with. It resonates and inspires. Can a portal achieve the same emotional engagement? I doubt it. People may become attached to the projects, but they won’t to the portal that helps them find them.

Yes I think See The Difference (I’ve just typed the acronym and it came up as STD so we won’t go any further with that ) has a potentially very powerful platform here. I’ve emailed them myself for more information but haven’t received anything in the last couple of months.

I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying this spells the death of direct marketing. After all, you can buy clothes in shops, but many catalogue businesses still make a profit from DM. And the danger with See The Difference is that it could promote a ‘beauty parade’ version of giving, with only the video-friendly work getting a look-in – and getting funded, if donors are allowed to tag their gift specifically. Charities will need to think carefully about how to promote unrestricted giving opportunities via sites like this.

That said, what a great opportunity to make our work even more relevant – without having to spend tons on DRTV! And maybe have a donor stumble across one of our projects who’d never heard of our cause. Bring it on – let’s see what happens.

Adrian Salmon
Annual Fund Manager
University of Leeds