Fundraising Strategy: what do leaders need to do? Blog 2: leadership in uncertain times

This blog series is based on a session I presented at Fundraising Everywhere’s Charity Leadership Festival alongside Desiree D’Souza, Executive Director of Social Innovation at See Ability. In that session, available in full from Fundraising Everywhere here and so also in this blog series, we look at what fundraising leaders and the leadership team across charities need to do to develop and implement their organisation’s fundraising strategy successfully. We consider key issues such as how to get buy in, mitigating risk, and the importance of storytelling. We also consider the importance of focusing on team wellbeing, how to focus on the bigger fundraising picture and think about the time when you will pass the fundraising baton on to your successors. The first blog, on first principles for fundraising strategy leadership is here. This is number 2, about leadership in uncertain times for fundraising. Richard, how can we mitigate risk in challenging times? I have worked in and with quite a few charities in recent years, and I have noticed in that time an increased understanding of how to assess risk and how to analyse it. Many organisations now monitor the likelihood and impact of various scenarios and create risk registers in this way. But I have a few questions arising from this for everybody reading this blog. I’d like to know whether we are thinking enough as fundraising leaders about how we mitigate those risks and about how they're interconnected.