Guest blog: Kindness – the perfect guide to fundraising?

I'm delighted to share this guest post by Susie Hills, who is Joint CEO and Founder of Halpin Partnership: What if we re-imagined fundraising using the guiding principle of kindness? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that kindness is ‘the quality of being friendly, generous and considerate’. To help us further: ‘friendly’ is defined as ‘kind and pleasant’,‘generous’ is defined as ‘showing a readiness to give more than is necessary’, and‘considerate’ is defined as ‘careful not to inconvenience or harm others’. Sounds like a pretty good guide to how we should behave as fundraisers. Let’s see how they could look as a set of ‘rules’ for fundraising. Maybe something like this: “We will be friendly, generous and considerate as we fundraise. This means we will: Once we have our established our ‘kindness rules’, we could then measure all our fundraising techniques against them – perhaps even giving them a score out of 10 on our ‘kindness-o-meter’. This might help us rethink some of our fundraising practices. Let’s give it a try with street fundraising. Now I haven’t yet met a street fundraiser who didn’t seem kind and pleasant as they beamed at me and tried to engage with me. They often seem charming and likeable. They seem ready to give more than is necessary to get me to talk to them, but it’s more than I want as I rush down the street with other things on my mind. That’s when we ge