SESSION #1

Session time: 10:00am

Duration: 60mins

 

Think to speak

Speaker: Alan Shortt

Topic(s): Personal Effectiveness, PR & Communications

1. Do you get cloudy brain or brain freeze during high pressure presentations?

2. Do you have difficulty in finding words to express your thoughts?

3. You can find the words but can’t seem to get them out? 

4. People don’t pay attention when you speak?

5. They don’t Understand what you’re saying?

6. They are not they persuaded by what you say?

7. Do you fear being found out?

If you answered Yes to any of the above, join Alan Shortt, presenter, writer & producer for an intensive communications session on Personal Branding, Personal Pitches, Presentations and Media Skills Techniques.

Learning Outcomes:

• How to turn your Data into Drama

• How top turn your Thoughts into Words

• How to turn your Pitch into Pictures.

Knowledge Level: Beginner, Experienced

Room: Pembroke

Style: Theatre Session (TS)

 

Doing the Right Thing: How pro-social organisations can brand more effectively

Speaker: Karen Hand

Topic(s): Future Trends

A Systems Perspective

1. There is a crisis of Trust – across all sectors – with trust levels being at an all- time- low for business, governments, media and NGO’s

2. For NGO’s, this is particularly dire where less that half of those who even bother responding to global surveys actually trust them to ‘do the right thing’….

3. In their original meaning, brands are about trust, a stamp of authenticity to underpin a transaction between a buyer and seller…

4. But the pro-social brand is different from a commercial brand in three key aspects….

5. First – the psychological contract relies on an ‘aid chain –reaction’ between different actors : donors- agents- partners-recipients; in contrast to a much simpler bilateral contract between buyer and seller in case of a consumer good… This aid chain can lead to misaligned expectations and incentives between actors, and reduced effectiveness  

6. Secondly, the basis of the psychological contract is moral capital versus simply financial, cultural or social capital…and behavioural economics has demonstrated that (i) there are asymmetric  trade-offs between these different currencies and (ii) that different contexts will frame different behaviour and beliefs. 

7. Thirdly while NGOs – as organizations – exist as a vehicle to achieve a valued social gain, corporate organizations  exist to maximise their own (or shareholder) gain, with the market being the vehicle to achieve this. 

8. Implications for pro-social branding include : (a) needs to be about impact versus inputs (b)  needs to be about outward accountable behaviour versus self – image (c) needs to sacrifice organisational survival for recipient  goals e.g. mergers to create bigger impact, ‘costly’ apology to protect recipient well-being, individual NGO’s, NGO staff doing the right thing for the long-term cause… the sector, the charity and the individuals will sacrifice themselves in short run for long-term greater good..

9. Base on recent empirical research we propose a framework for pro-social brands:  Brand as Shared Sacrifice – based on four elements of Moral Agency, Recipient Benefit, Radical Transparency and Collective Efficacy.

10. This helps enrich the shared value framework of Porter and Kramner on how stakeholders can collaborate to meet societal goals, with Michael Sandel’s perspective on the separate value/values of market framing and moral framing.  It can also work across the spectrum of stakeholder cultures  from financial to altruistic proposed by Jones, Felps and Bigley. 

11. There is clear psychological evidence that people can be cut-throat and competitive; but we can also be self-less and collaborative. NGO’s can promote these collective pro-social frames and values, or they can undermine them.  We provide clear guidelines for how NGOs should brand in order to embrace what they and others want them to be.

Knowledge Level: Experienced, Senior

Room: Lansdowne

Style: Informative Presentation (IP)

 

A new look at fundraising ethics

Speaker: Ian MacQuillin

Topic: Fundraising Ethics

When it comes under intense public scrutiny, the fundraising profession doesn’t always have the best arguments to defend itself. That’s because a lot of the ethical justifications for fundraising have never been properly explored. This session goes beyond applied ethics to develop a ‘normative’ theory of fundraising ethics (telling us not just WHAT we ought to do, buy WHY we ought to do it) that attempts to balance fundraisers duties to their beneficiaries with their duties to their donors. This will give fundraisers greater confidence and the moral authority to negotiate the boundaries of professional practice with government, regulators and the media.

Learning Outcomes:

• Better arguments advocating and defending fundraising

• Better and more consistent applied ethical decisions

• More professional self-confidence to enter public debates

Knowledge Level: Beginner, Experienced, Senior

Room: Meeting Room 6 (MR6)

Style: Workshop (WS)

 

What leaders and managers really do (or should do!)

Speaker: Lynda Byron

Topic(s): Leadership

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Most organisations today are over-managed and underled. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful organisations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the differences between leading and managing

• Understand how to develop leadership within functions and/or organisations

• Assess individual abilities as a manager and a leader

• Learn about managing complexity and leading change

• Learn why doing what you did before will no longer bring the results you need

Knowledge Level: Experienced, Senior

Room: Meeting Room 1 (MR1)

Style: Workshop (WS)

 

Creating fundraising support for a difficult cause

Speaker: John Church

Topic(s): Direct Marketing, Donor Care, Individual Giving

Arthritis is a disease that effects close to 1m people in Ireland and accounts for 30% of all GP visits, yet it is not seen as a cause worth supporting when it comes to public fundraising. It is seen as an older persons disease and an inevitable part of growing old. When in fact, there are 30-40k young adults and 1200 children under the age of 16 living with the serious auto-immune form of arthritis. This makes it an interesting challenge when it comes to trying to engage the public to raise funds. Competition is fierce and more "sexy" diseases often attract the public eye and gain a disproportionate amount of support. My presentation will show how Arthritis Ireland is using traditional marketing tools to position arthritis as a cause worth supporting and showing results.

Learning Outcomes:

• How to start thinking about marketing a difficult cause

• Treating your cause as a brand

• Our experience of employing multi faceted fundraising tools and what our results have been

• How to operate on a small budget and get some big impact

• Gain inspiration to create some good fundraising events fior their organisation

Knowledge Level: Experienced, Senior

Room: Meeting Room 2 (MR2)

Style: Informative Presentation (IP)

 

YES Equality - The fundraising story of a national campaign to inspire, engage and win

Speaker: Karen Ciesielski

Topic(s):  Events Fundraising, Corporate Fundraising, Data Protection and Fundraising, Community Fundraising, Major Gift Fundraising, Managing a team

This session provides an Irish case study on the YES Equality Campaign's fundraising, providing a local example of implementing effective fundraising tactics, engaging communications and best practice governance and stewardship. Through a multi-faceted campaign which comprised events, individual giving (both large and small gifts), corporate gifts, the development and sales of merchandise and crowdsourced funding, the campaign raised over €560,000 to deliver a national campaign which aimed to engage and inspire Irish voters to turn out to vote in May 2015 and which effectively secured an historic win for equality, the first country to do so through a national referendum. What makes this case study particularly interesting as well is the specific regulations and around fundraising for political campaigns, which YES Equality strictly followed.

Learning Outcomes:

• How online fundraising can work for Irish organisations

• Donor recruitment through sustained, consistent communications

• The power of storytelling in fundraising

• How having the right committee and people involved can make all the difference

• The importance of engaging design in our fundraising

• How important it is to say thank you - and in different ways

• How to capitalise on building momentum for raising funds

• How effective volunteers can be in our fundraising efforts

• The crucial role that good governance and decision-making can be to reaching funding targets

• How testing and trying new things can work

Knowledge Level: Experienced

Room: Meeting Room 2 (MR9)

Style: Informative Presentation (IP)

 

Driving Online Donations via Search and Display

Speaker(s): Ian Campbell and Peter Kennedy (Havas Media), Daragh O’Toole (Persuasion Republic)

Topic(s):  Digital Fundraising

The digital media landscape has over the last 20 years become very complex. Navigating this can be a challenging  at best with SEO & Programmatic advertising in particular creating more questions than answers. Peter & Ian will cut through the jargon and explain in real terms how they work, where they fit in terms of  your overall digital  the parts they can play in driving donations 

Learning Outcomes:

• PPC (optimising your Google Grant & moving to paid budgets)

• SEO & Content (improve your natural search positions & drive free traffic!)

• Display (Programmatic & retargeting - maximise your budget amongst your target audience)

Knowledge Level: Beginner,Experienced

Room: Meeting Room 36 (MR3)

Style: Solution Session (SS)