The Organisation That Rediscovered Its Fundraising Voice
A $200M+ social services non-profit organisation with a stagnating fundraising program. What changed wasn’t only the charity’s fundraising strategy, it was how leadership understood the role fundraising could play. Within only a few years, they were signing off on ambitious growth targets and building a regular giving program that is the envy of many charities in the sector.
Cause: Social Services / Community Services; Faith Based Organisation
Services: Assessment/Audit; Charity Fundraising Strategy; Program Development; Leadership Coaching
The Challenge:
A program in decline with no investment mandate.
The Approach:
Diagnostic + collaborative strategy + program development.
The Outcome:
Significant program growth and a culture that now leads with fundraising.
The Situation:
Anglicare Victoria is one of Victoria’s largest community service organisations with more than a century-long history of supporting children, families and community across the state. For a long time though, its fundraising program didn’t reflect its scale, or its potential.
When Kirsty Simpson came on board in 2019, as Director of Strategic Communications & Marketing, she inherited a charity fundraising program suffering from a lack of prioritisation, investment and strategic direction.
The donor base that was shrinking year on year. And, like many organisations in a similar position, increasingly dependent on bequests – arguably the most volatile and hardest-to-predict form of fundraising income – while programs that supported the donor journey, like regular giving, were not funded to retain donors.
Fundraising was no longer at the heart of the organisation’s strategy nor was there a clear donor growth plan. This was sitting off to the side, lacking deliberate thought and disconnected from Anglicare’s broader mission.
“For an organisation of this size and reach, fundraising had only one direction it could go if nothing changed – down. The opportunity cost wasn’t just dollars; it was the programs those dollars could have actually funded.”
Kirsty came to the role with a strong background in marketing and journalism – and the self-awareness to know that fundraising was a discipline she needed to build. She reached out to Amplify Fundraising to help her understand what was actually possible and what it might take to get there.
What Amplify Fundraising did:
The engagement began with a thorough fundraising diagnostic and audit. We looked at where things stood across every program, every revenue stream and the systems, processes and culture sitting underneath them all.
The findings pointed to two clear priorities:
- Optimise. The team had real experience and commitment. What was missing was structure, segmentation, investment in best-practice techniques and a stronger connection between fundraising and Anglicare’s marketing and media campaigns. This wasn’t a rebuild – it was more of a course correction.
- Reset ambition. The assessment made a compelling case for strategic investment, modelling what genuine donor growth could look like across major gifts, regular giving and Gifts in Wills. The projections weren’t just wishful thinking, they were grounded in Anglicare’s own data and sector benchmarks. This gave Kirsty what she needed to demonstrate to leadership why investment made sense, moving from a mere pitch to a solid business case.
Working collaboratively, Paul and Kirsty co-wrote the fundraising strategy together, drawing on Amplify Fundraising’s experience as a specialist fundraising consultancy, and using their shared expertise and experience to design something realistic that the team could genuinely own and execute.
“I came into this role needing fundraising expertise I didn’t yet have. What I didn’t expect was how much we’d build it together. Paul brought the guidance, the evidence and the rigour, though the strategy was genuinely ours. That’s what gave me the confidence to take it to a board that was extremely cautious about investing in fundraising, and actually get a yes – which of course, I did!”
The Turning Point:
Prior to Kirsty coming on board and engaging Paul, Anglicare Victoria’s board had not signed-off a fundraising growth strategy.
When the board approved the new strategy and investment plan, it was seen by the fundraising team as a major turning point for them and their programs, representing a genuine shift in how leadership understood the role fundraising could play in delivering on their mission.
The pivotal factor has been presenting it in a way that the board could connect with. This, of course included fundraising metrics, but more importantly, what untied fundraising revenue could actually mean for the families and communities Anglicare served. A shift from the limited mindset of ‘we want to grow our donor base’ to something far more powerful: ‘this is how we go beyond what government funding alone will ever allow’.
The long-lasting outcome:
The steps that Kirsty and her team put in place helped to stabilise retention and led to record appeal results in the first year. Donor acquisition introduced new donors to the declining base and retention analysis told the team that the plan was working.
Over the past six years, Anglicare Victoria has increased their fundraising revenue by 51% (source: Annual reports) and their bequest revenue is now 3 times bigger than in 2018. Anglicare Victoria are now also operating one of the most ambitious fundraising programs in the state’s social services sector.
Where once they were reliant on bequests, they now run active face-to-face acquisition programs, a growing regular giving base and a major gifts pipeline – all contributing meaningfully to the organisation’s capacity to fund programs that government dollars don’t reach.
More than any single metric, the shift has also been a cultural one. Fundraising is embraced and embedded in Anglicare Victoria’s organisational strategy, understood by leadership, resourced properly and seen for what it is: the most scalable, sustainable source of untied revenue they have and a direct result of non-profit fundraising best practices that have been built to last.
For an organisation that once saw fundraising as an add-on, that is a significant shift and one that didn’t happen by accident.
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