I might have been back in the UK a couple of days, but I’m still trying to catch up with the blog posts I intended to send before leaving Kotu in The Gambia on Friday. I will save my last impressions of The Gambia and first impressions of being back in the UK until another post.
For the last couple of days working with the Board of AFOD - Aid for Orphans and the Disabled, we were concentrating on developing a marketing and fundraising strategy for the charity. We used the planning structure developed for my soon to be published book “Sure Stepping Stones for Fundraising Success” and we looked at issues like some of the reasons why people give to charities, the fundraising message the charity wants to portray, marketing activities they would like to use and the creation of a fundraising diary to ensure that marketing activities take place at the right frequency and times.
One of the marketing tools we looked at was the power of networking. I have written about this before in posts in the Enfys Acumen Blog, so if you are not sure what I mean please have a look there.
Before I returned home, the Chief Executive of AFOD, Lamin Fofanah and I, with the full backing of members of the Board, arranged to meet representatives of some of the key organisations with whom AFOD would like to form mutually beneficial partnerships.
Our first meeting was at UN House at Cape Point near Banjul and we were pleased to meet with Madame Edele Thebaud, the Head of UNICEF in The Gambia. This was a most encouraging meeting with Edele expressing a great deal of interest in AFOD and pressing on us to send in the Strategy Document as soon as possible, so that it could be considered in the context of UNICEF’s planning for the coming year. This was really encouraging and if successful, the outcomes of this meeting alone would mean that my trip to The Gambia has been a success.
At the other end of the spectrum, Lamin and I spent a few hours on Thursday morning sitting in the lobby of my hotel completing the write-up of our strategy – we did this essentially because the power supply at the hotel was more or less guaranteed unlike the supply at the AFOD office in Bundung Borehole, which we lost for most of a day several times in the two weeks I spent working there.
While we sat in the hotel lobby beavering away, several holiday makers came up to us to find out more and were keen for either myself or AFOD to contact them with more information on their return home. A networking bonus at this time was the chance Lamin and I had to formally meet with the hotel manager (a Mr Gambia, would you believe?) – he has agreed for AFOD to take a temporary display to the hotel on a fortnightly basis as an opportunity for holiday makers to find out more about the charity and of course sponsor an orphaned or disabled child if they want to!
At the other end of the spectrum, Lamin and I spent a few hours on Thursday morning sitting in the lobby of my hotel completing the write-up of our strategy – we did this essentially because the power supply at the hotel was more or less guaranteed unlike the supply at the AFOD office in Bundung Borehole, which we lost for most of a day several times in the two weeks I spent working there.
