MuchLoved

There is still the lingering perception of fundraising efforts meaning running around with sheets of paper, pleading and haggling to persuade friends and family to sponsor you. Only your mum can ever be relied upon of course. One freshly shaven head later on comes the even worse time-consuming attempts to track down these promises [What do you mean he’s moved to Australia?] and collect in the forced bequests. Who hasn’t resorted in the end to topping up the collection from your own pockets to save face with the event organisers?

Well the face of fundraising is changing, with charities in particular benefiting from the emergence of simple on-line donation systems such as Justgiving and Bmycharity that take the collection effort out of raising money for good causes and ensure valuable gift aid relief never goes unclaimed.

And along with traditional form of fundraising, there has been a marked growth in the amount of money raised for charity in memory of people who have recently died as bereaved friends and family try to create something positive out of their loss. Twenty years ago people sent flowers to a funeral, but today half of all funerals include some form of in memoriam donations.

Details of a tribute fund can be added to a fundraising page and emailed to hundreds of potential donors in an instant, with the emotive pull of a ‘Target’ fund or a heart-felt message.

There are also memorial website services such as www.muchloved.com where next of kin can create a commemorative website with slideshows, stories and favourite music. Friends and family are then emailed an invitation to the site where they can send their condolences, add stories and pictures…..and of course donate to the chosen charity.

This all means that charities are benefiting from increasing in memoriam fundraising efforts and it certainly means that you will find it more difficult to avoid the gaze of the friend approaching you waving a pen and paper, even if you do decide to move to Australia.