Chief Executives and Fundraising Directors: May 2021, where the pandemic is positioning us now...

A year on and transitioning into another phase of the pandemic, our organisations are beginning to look quite different. I sat down with Gemma Peters, Chief Executive of Blood Cancer UK, whose community has been incredibly responsive to the uncertainties of the pandemic and continues on full alert to the changing landscape. Exactly how is it changing the way the charity is operating?

"We are in a time of opposing forces, the worst of times and the best of times."

 "I have been saying it is a year of opposing forces – the best of times and worst of times – and that is very much what it feels like to have been leading this organisation through this time.

 "It has been perhaps the worst time blood cancer patients have ever faced in terms of their susceptibility to the virus, changes to treatment as a result of NHS pressure because of the virus, lack of diagnosis because of the virus, and the fact that vaccines are less likely to be effective for them – these things are just awful."

 "The prospect that within 30 years people won’t be dying of blood cancer feels further away."

 "If I think about what we were excited about 18 months ago in terms of new treatments coming along and the prospect that within 30 years people wouldn’t be dying of blood cancer, then that now seems less likely than it did. That’s because of the short-term impact on our research and the fact that us and other blood cancer research funders are likely to have less money to spend on it than we expected to."

 "We are in the unimaginable position of a 1,000% increase in demand on services."

 "The increased anxiety in our community has translated into an increase in demand for our services. And it is not only an increase in the number of phone calls, but those phone calls are now different. The length of contact is much longer, the levels of anxiety are much higher, and the amount of support is much greater.

 "Earlier on in the pandemic, it was high volumes of quite light touch support, giving information on COVID and blood cancer. Now, those calls are more nuanced and much more complex."

 "We have had to make some great colleagues’ positions redundant"

 "I am leading an organisation where we were looking at a ￡6m hole in our income compared to what we had budgeted for, and we expected it would take three years before we recovered. This forced our hand into making people redundant. This was an incredibly tough time, because the people we were losing were really great colleagues, and we were having to lose them at a time when they had given everything for our community, having gone well over and above for a number of months."

"There has been an incredible strengthening and solidifying of our community."

 "People are rallying, whether staff, volunteers or supporters, to do absolutely everything they can to help us to offer their time for free, to take calls on the support line, to steward, to raise money, to donate money, support the online community and in a way it has meant that we have felt right where we should be - at the heart of the blood cancer community."

"We now have completely porous edges to the organisation, and there is complete enmeshing of who we work for and who we are."

 "Every single piece of what we do now has volunteers within it, because they care passionately that we achieve our mission, and they bring a perspective and skills that make our work much better. It feels incredibly energising."

"Every single thing is now informed by our community"

 "Our organisation feels right in its rhythm. We are now being pulled by the needs of our community, and they are working with us to deliver what is needed.

 "A good example of this is the research into vaccine efficacy. On 1 November 2020, I didn’t know that we would be pulling together funding resource, multi-charity partnerships and international partnership working with organisations around the world in order to try and get answers for our community.

 "But it became obvious through being that close to the community that we were going to have to do that; we would do it with them and would use some of their connections and insights to work out who to partner with and how to fund it."

"It feels like that’s the peak of what an organisation should be like to work for in our sector - that the community and the organisation are so closely aligned that you can’t tell them apart."

 "It feels incredibly positive to be aligning with our community in this context of very great need.

 "I am really excited that we have got the very best set of people pulling together at a very important moment with lots of opportunities in front of us, and it is incredibly fulfilling to think we are doing this at a time of very great need for our community."

"The edges between work and life have evaporated"

 "There is also a highly personal opposing force, including to me, in that the edges between work and life have evaporated as well and that’s a huge set of challenges for everyone in the organisation. We are just learning how we navigate that."

"You can feel incredibly lucky to work in an organisation, you can feel valued and you can feel the organisation’s objectives are clear, and yet at work still find things tough."

 "Staff wellbeing and culture has always been important to us and that’s really mattered in the last year. We conduct lots of ‘pulse’ surveys of the team, and it was only during the pandemic that we realised some of the questions we ask in a normal time would be an indication of how employees are doing, such as how engaged they are, and would they recommend us, were already high before the pandemic and we’ve seen them go up to 100% levels. And yet despite those great results, the mental health of the people who have been working here has been affected by everything that has been going on. A key challenge for us has been making sure people get the support that they need."

"I have never seen two such opposite simultaneous factors on wellbeing happening across the organisation at the same time, and it is really challenging us to think about how we look at our employee wellbeing and also the limits on what we can do."

 "You can make an organisation an incredible place to work, you can invest in that and you can have an incredibly supportive set of colleagues and it can still not be enough for people. And then what do you do you?

 "I think that’s where we are, we are trying all sorts of things at the moment, like extra support, focus days when we focus on extra development. We have extra leave and days where we finish early, to encourage people to do the things that bring them joy, in the hope that one of these things will work. I think the jury’s out as to whether they will, but the key thing is that we need to keep trying until we find the right combination of intervention and support for our team."

"We reset the parameters for building back resilience and mending this coming year in our strategy, and then we started to see evidence that the vaccines may be less effective for people with blood cancer."

 "I was talking a lot with my Board at the end of last year about how the number one priority for this year was going to be about my team, and how we are going to build their resilience back because they are doing amazing stuff but they are so tired from operating beyond what they have the resources to do.

 "We agreed to cut right back on what we thought we would deliver to allow capacity in the organisation this year for mending and regenerating, and we would lower our expectation on what we could do. But then we started to see doubts about how well the vaccines would work for people with blood cancer. No one else is doing the research to find the answers. So from somewhere we found the fuel to rev the engine again.

 "We are now hitting numbers I thought it would take ten years to get to on brand awareness."

 "We’ve outstripped the metrics we set ourselves particularly around brand awareness, We changed the brand on 31 March 2020, just at the start of the pandemic, and we’ve gone up 10 percentage points since March, so we’ve clearly seen a massive benefit.

`"The reason for the change before the pandemic was having a straightforward name and clear identity to make it easier for the people who need our support to be able to find us, and we’ve increased our reach simply by giving people the information they needed about Covid.

 "We now get called for our view on things even when we haven’t put out a press release."

 "This didn’t happen to us before the pandemic and I think that will have a longevity. There have also been many more media opportunities.

 "Tens of thousands of people are coming into contact with us for the first time"

 "We have a new community of people who are affected by blood cancer who now know us and think we will add something of value, and those people will benefit our work going forward, because ultimately we’re a vehicle for people who care about beating blood cancer enough to make it happen."

 "Suddenly there is now an embedded culture of testing and consistently bringing new products to market"

 "This time has hot-housed all our learning. All the work we’ve put into putting products together and backing the right things has paid off as suddenly there is a new culture where being agile with fundraising products has never been more important. We’ve brought 10 new products to market and they have all exceeded our expectations terms of income. One of the events we held this year was the most successful in years, and our understanding of how digital is going to work for us has increased massively."

 "We did protect the organisation from the financial impact, due to an extraordinary team"

 "We thought we would be ￡6m down but our preliminary figures suggest we might finish the year only ￡2.5m down in gross income, so the team made a lot up. As I mentioned, we were right in our projections, and we made up much of the loss through new income, innovation in new sources, some things outperforming expectation and stripping out all the costs we could. The result is that our net income position at the end is not much different from where it would have been in the five year plan.

 "What didn’t happen was all the investment which was planned in fundraising, so we are starting this coming year at a lower base on some things but at a higher base on others."

"The COVID Steering group has brought about a new way of working"

 "These meetings were initially weekly and then moved to daily, with representatives from all over the organisation talking about different things that had changed or weren’t working from supply chains, finance to income generation and research. That meeting became a way of everyone getting the information quickly when the situation was changing. That way of working then translated into everything else. We’ve known that this is how you make this stuff work, and perhaps it’s something about the more virtual way of working where people can dial into things more easily or perhaps it’s to do with everyone recognising that nothing is the same. That method of working has become ingrained and that is something we must absolutely make sure we retain because there are so many benefits to us."

"I’ve had no choice but to practice vulnerable, honest leadership"

 "We’ve all talked for a long time as a sector about a language of being open, honest vulnerable, authentic leaders.

 "I think some vulnerability from leaders is massively important. I always have, but I don’t think I would have had much choice in demonstrating vulnerability this year because the reality is at points I have been vulnerable to an extent it would have been very hard to cover up."

 "I talk to the team about it, in the hope it makes it easier for them to do the same, it’s just ‘here I am, here is where you find me today'"

 "There may have been times when this has helped, and there may have been other times when it hasn’t and people would have preferred me for me to be confident in having all the answers."

 "In one sense we are all going through the same things and in another sense we are at very different places at different points.

 "Two further opposing forces are the experiences at home for our team, which have been very individual. "

 "I’m really aware that for some team members work is an important part of their social life and network, and not all of us has a separate area to work in that we can close the door on at the end of the day. Some of us have families and we’ve enjoyed the extra time to have meals together and exercise during the commute time, but I know first hand you can definitely have too much family! Some of us live on our own. Some of us have been sick, or lost family, others are fitter than ever and have had precious time with family they don’t normally see. Leading one team with such different experiences takes effort and time, and a lot of listening."

 "This year will be another year of high uncertainty."

 "Some of the people who normally support us will be slower to get back to their activities and by year three I hope we will see a return to our projected growth plans. We can see the number of people on unemployment benefit going up to incredibly high levels but also weird things like house prices going up. On the one hand it might be quite hard to get people to sign up to direct debits if they are not already supporters, but there is a whole other group of people who are cash rich having not been on holiday or travelled to work.

 "In our recent planning round in the context of uncertainty we are placing a lot of emphasis on getting our leading metrics right – the things that will give us an early indication of whether our hypotheses are coming true. For example, I am less interested in what the trusts team will bring in this year than I am in the early response rates from some of the key trusts."

"Was the extra income this year emergency funding or new funding?"

 "The other bit on income is that what we don’t know yet from all our funders is if we already have pulled forward money into this year as ‘new money’ which we would otherwise have got and will now be difficult to get again because it was emergency funding or if it’s genuinely new money that we can hope to continue getting in the future. Some trust and corporate pharmaceutical funders have already indicated the pot will be smaller this year and the competition greater."

"Good boards have come into their own during this time, while from conversations with other chief executives I know this hasn’t been universally true."

"Our Board have been exemplary through the pandemic, supporting us to put the plans in place to weather the storm, and actively working alongside us when we needed it, but giving us space too. Not asking for thousands of re-forecasts or strategy reiterations. That they have been so calm and supportive has helped me stay calm even in the face of some dark moments.

 "However, I know from talking to other chief executives this hasn’t been universally true and I think members of trustee boards that weren’t there for their organisations during the pandemic need to ask themselves if they should be trustees at all.

 "Organisations have really needed the boards to be engaged and present and thoughtful and knowing that getting an organisation to do 20 different versions of a financial model because they’re scared of what is happening is not helpful. I’ve heard from organisations which haven’t heard from their board all year, and those that have had a job keeping them off the phone so that they can get on with their work. It has been a thin line to walk but good boards have come into their own, and has been a key part of why we have responded so well during the pandemic."

"The stage is set for it to be the best it has ever been, for charities, in many ways."

 "There have been so many moments that have felt pivotal in societal progress, such as Black Lives Matter, and the response to the death of Sarah Everard. Even Captain Tom’s walk. It feels like moments of activism, financial support, energy and solidarity in response to injustices are coming more regularly and those sorts of feelings lend themselves positively to giving people active ways to participate and generate a sense of community. We are all about communities and it’s another way of identifying and having human connection with others.

 "It feels like there is more awareness in the population of the injustices and more of a sense of people taking things into their own hands and a desire for action, so for organisations that can articulate their roles in fixing injustice there’s a very fertile environment. I don’t know yet how that translates into what organisations look like and how they need to change but I think it’s something about seeing people as a whole and giving them active ways to help fix the injustice."

Charlotte Wilmot is Director of Eardley Wilmot, advising CEOs and Fundraising Directors on maximising long term sustainable fundraising income and helping organisations take a strategic approach to fundraising, resourcing and recruitment. Click here if you'd like to receive further shared experience and join the senior fundraising community.