Come to Fundraising Camp - Arts and spend a day learning, talking about and maybe even solving the issues and challenges you face in your fundraising. Learn from other arts and culture fundraisers, find out how they've dealt with similar problems, and share your experience.

Make some useful contacts and maybe even enjoy a very practical day of sharing arts and culture fundraising advice.

Think of it as those often valuable networking chat sessions you have at normal conferences but for a whole day.


Not an arts fundraiser?

Do you fundraise for another type of organisation? You are most welcome to come too. Just don't be surprised if some of the conversation focuses on the fundraising challenges faced by arts and culture organisations.

No tents involved

Fundraising Camp is a one-day 'unconference'-style event for fundraisers, the first series of its kind for fundraisers in the UK. We've run 13 since the first one in Oxford in 2013.

Our first Fundraising Camp - Arts took place in December 2014 at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

An unconference is an unstructured conference: there are no set speakers and no set topics. As a participant you are invited to suggest a topic at the beginning of the day. It could be something you know about, it could be a problem or a question you have and you want help on.

Be prepared to speak on it - not with a Powerpoint or anything like that (but let us know if you want to). When we all agree the topic sessions at the beginning of the day, chances are there will be others who can join you in the session.

Fundraising Camp is informal and relentlessly practical. No-one is coming to judge the quality of how you present. Everyone will be there wanting to improve their fundraising.

What does a Fundraising Camp look like?

Sessions

The day will be planned out between us in the first half-hour. After that, there will be two, three or four short sessions (30 -45 mins) at any one time running throughout the day.

Go to the ones that interest you most. If it's not quite right for you, you're allowed to leave and go to another session. (Try doing that at a regular formal conference!).

We encourage participants in each session to take notes of what gets shared and learned, and then for these to be shared online - as a blog post, a video, a photo, or send it to us at UK Fundraising if you prefer.

Rules of Fundraising Camp

If there are any rules, then these probably cover it:

• do join in rather than expect to hide at the back of a conference hall
   
• share what you know at the event
   
• afterwards, share what you learn from the event online e.g. via a blog post
   
• be nice to others, enjoy a different kind of event
   
• no commercial selling - only paying sponsors get to run a session about what they offer (and you don't even have to go to those sessions if you don't feel they are relevant)

Experts

To each Fundraising Camp we'll invite half a dozen or so local fundraising, business, philanthropy or grantmaking experts to help ensure we've got even more practical fundraising knowledge and experience available at the event.
 

More Fundraising Camps

This is the 15th Fundraising Camp. We plan to run five or six a year all around the UK, including in towns that don't often get a fundraising training course or conference. Can you donate a venue for one in your town in return for free places and publicity? Let us know.

Why 'Fundraising Camp'?

We were inspired to run an event like this for fundraisers by events such as Barcamp Nonprofits and MuseumCamp. These focus on the ideas, skills and experience that conference delegates themselves have, but which seldom get shared while they all listen to the speakers.

So, we called this new kind of event Fundraising Camp.

Thank you to Fundraising Camp's sponsors

Sponsors help to keep our costs down which means we can offer more lower price tickets.
 

• 
  
  
  Serving the not-for-profit and education sectors for 30 years, Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) combines technology and expertise to help organisations achieve their missions. Blackbaud works with more than 27,000 customers in more than 60 countries that support higher education, healthcare, human services, arts and culture, faith, the environment, independent education, animal welfare and other charitable causes. We offer a full spectrum of cloud-based and on-premise software solutions and related services for organisations of all sizes including: fundraising, eMarketing, social media, advocacy, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and vertical-specific solutions.
  
  For more information contact us or call us on 0845 658 8590.
  

• 
  
  The Institute of Fundraising is the largest individual representative body in the voluntary sector with over 5,600 Individual members and 470 Organisational members. The IoF aims to support these members and the wider fundraising community by:
  
  * Creating a better environment for fundraisers to raise money, through policy and support
  
  * Increasing understanding of fundraising, by being a knowledge centre for fundraiser
  
  * Enabling fundraisers to be the best they can be, by providing resources, skills development and qualifications

• 
• 
  Located within the award-winning Chatham Historic Dockyard the School of Music and Fine Art is a centre for world class research and teaching, part of the Medway campus of the University of Kent (ranked among the top 16 in the UK by The Guardian University Guide 2016). This vibrant centre of academic excellence offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Music, Fine Art and Events & Experience Design on an amazing 20 acre river-front site which incorporates a fantastic range of historic buildings, small businesses and exhibition spaces. Medway campus is part of Chatham Maritime which includes a multiplex cinema, a large retail outlet centre and a number of bars and restaurants, all within walking distance of the main campus.
  
  The Medway region itself is 45 minutes from London and has excellent transport connections with two major European cities. There are two mainline stations within one mile of the campus and Ebbsfleet International train station is just 30 minutes away and runs direct high speed services to Paris (2hrs 10mins), Brussels (1hr 50mins).

Do you also want to sponsor this Fundraising Camp? Contact Trevor Dorrell.

Directions

Here are directions and travel information for the venue.

Delegates' feedback

#fundraisingcamp @howardlake Thank you for creating such an inspirationally brilliant event! Or in fact, allowing us to! Genius.

— Paul Minett (@HomesNot) May 1, 2014

More feedback on UK Fundraising's training courses and events

Terms and conditions

By booking a place, you accept the following terms and conditions.

Videos and photographs of participants will be taken at the event and then published and you give Fundraising UK Ltd permission so to do.

Fundraising UK Ltd reserves the right to amend the details of the event as set out above.

You can cancel your registration and receive a 100% refund up to one calendar month before the event. No refunds will be made for cancellations after this time.

You can login and change the details of the delegate until the day before the event. 

Should the event be cancelled, Fundraising UK Ltd limits its responsibility to refund only the value of the ticket price paid, not any expenses you might have incurred e.g. travel or accommodation.