The Helvellyn Foundation

The Helvellyn Foundation are very proud to have played a small part in this extremely important paper published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence. 📄 Conservation Evidence is vitally important in ensuring efficient and effective use of resources during this biodiversity crisis. As funders, we should all play a role in encouraging and supporting our partners to utilise, and build upon, this large body of evidence wherever possible. 💡 Thank you Nida Alfulaij and everyone else for all your hard work on this! And please reach out to us (or Conservation Evidence) if you'd like to learn more. You can read the full paper by clicking the link in the below post.

We recently hosted an inspiring, and surprisingly emotional, webinar with all of our The Helvellyn Foundation partners, looking at Managing Individual Donors 💡☺️💻 Firstly, some key learnings shared by our partners: 🧠 Make it about MORE than just donations. Bring people in for their passion, their skills, their knowledge, and their experience. That in itself is of value to organisations…and if funding follows then that’s a bonus! ⬆️ ’Wheel out the CEO’. It seems that donors appreciate a connection with the leaders of organisations, with one partner sharing that up to 30-40% of their time as CEO is spent on major donor relations. ❤️ Don’t be afraid to get PERSONAL. At the end of the day, you’re trying to build relationships with people. We heard about some brave examples from our partners, who had been willing to get emotional with donors, and seen the benefits. ✉️ Don’t turn down an INVITATION. Get along to as many events as possible, meet people, and get conversations started. Secondly, a reminder of how and why we do these webinars: ✅ We only run them when we have heard multiple partners talk about a topic of interest. ✅ We set up a meeting link and invite everyone, but the expertise is shared by our partners. ✅ Attendees come with questions, reflections, or snippets of advice to share on the topic. ✅ Where useful, we invite someone external to share their thoughts. This time, the brilliant Nick Bubb joined us 🦏 ✅ We take notes and share them across the partnerships (and now on LinkedIn) so that the wisdom can reach as many people as possible! Thanks, as ever, to all of our wonderful partners for sharing so openly and to Becky Holmes and Lauren Gupta for hosting. #relationships #partnership #collaboration #philanthropy #sharing #grantmaking

Great to see fellow funders like Kate Symondson incorporating similar forms to us on their website. 💡 It’s important that any charity, regardless of ‘who they know’, can get in front of funders - especially when those funders don’t request lengthy, time-consuming application forms! Increasing inclusivity in the funding sector is so fundamentally important and small changes like this can (hopefully) make a big difference to charities. #funding #philanthropy #progressivefunding #charities