Building meaningful relationships with major individual donors has been critical to the success of the Royal Academy of Music’s biggest fundraising appeal in its 200-year history, according to the charity’s deputy principal for advancement.
Speaking on the Third Sector Podcast, Kirsty MacDonald described the methods used by the academy to reach a £60m goal set in 2022 for a campaign called ‘The Royal Academy of Music’s Future’.
After raising more than £73m by October, the campaign’s target was extended to £100m, to be invested into facilities, teachers and scholarships for promising young musicians.
Trebling the number of fundraisers on the academy’s payroll has enabled it to forge stronger one-to-one relationships with people who love music and are in a position to donate, MacDonald said.
“We’re still a relatively small team of about 18 people in the philanthropy team. And a number of those staff, including myself, have a portfolio of people that we’re responsible for,” she explained.
“We think very carefully about how those people are matched with the right fundraiser, who really gets to know them and engage them in the life of the academy.
“In doing so, we can understand what they’re interested in supporting and hopefully encourage them to make significant gifts, sometimes over a number of years, which is incredibly important for our future planning.
“Matching their interests with the priorities of the academy has really been the main thrust of our success in recent years.”
MacDonald said that while there had been a fundraising department at the academy for about 20 years, it had lacked the necessary infrastructure until more recently.
“There is a science as well as an art to fundraising and we recognised that we needed to make sure we had all the right data and systems, due diligence and research,” she said.
MacDonald said the while the academy’s philanthropy team raised “about £1.5m” in 2015, it had “grown that to anywhere between about £12m and £18m now”.
Fostering a culture of philanthropy across the wider organisation had also paid dividends, she said.
“I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful is simply because we have been more ambitious and we’ve asked people to make bigger commitments over longer periods of time.
“And it is amazing that, as the old saying goes, if people are asked, they give. And our experience is exactly that.”
Listen to the full interview with MacDonald on the Third Sector Podcast.