Since March 2020, when the first lockdown started, many of us have had to adjust to working from home. Once the Covid restrictions are lifted, a number of bosses are likely to look at a mixture of office and home working going forward. That agile way of working looks set to become the new 'norm'.

Like more than one third of UK mid-sized companies expected to reduce their office space after Covid-19, Advantage,NFP are already reducing the size of the offce in recognition of changes to support m...

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You can ‘aggregate’ (add together) donations of £20 or less from assorted donors and present them as a single monetary income item. The total donation on one line cannot be higher than £1,000. (You will need to keep evidence of the individual donations and that they are gift aid applicable).

To claim Gift Aid on aggregated donations, you don’t enter the name and address details of individual donors as this will delay your repayment claim, you can just enter a straightforward descriptio...

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Anyone using a computer or high-tech device, such as a smartphone or tablet, is at risk of unauthorised access. The repercussions can include the loss of valuable data such as emails, photos and personal information. Targets could also have their bank account details, money, or even their identity stolen.

A strong password provides vital protection from monetary fraud and identity theft.

Guessing a password is a hacker’s most frequently used method to break into your computers account. Hence,...
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Global Justice Now recently went live with a bespoke database integration. Graham Whitehouse, GJN, describes the project.

“For years, our organisation had dreamt of synchronising our online supporter data with our supporter database. During February 2021, whilst still in the depths of lockdown, this integration went live.

We have built custom data extracts from our website which John Davies from AdvantageNFP used to run daily, automated updates straight into AdvantageNFP Fundraiser. The syste...

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18^th September marks the start of the Rugby World Cup 2015.  20 nations will compete for the ultimate prize in Rugby, the Webb Ellis Cup, which was last won by New Zealand in 2011.

Host nation England meet Fiji at Twickenham Stadium in the opening game of the Tournament. The four home unions England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales will all be hoping to safely get through the pool stages and then see how far they can progress in the tournament.

With only two teams from each pool qualifying for ...

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Avoid facing fines of up to £500,000 by ensuring your charity is meeting the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) regulations.

Charities that call donors registered with the Telephone Preference Service could face fines of up to £500,000.

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is the official opt out register on which people can record their preference not to receive unsolicited sales or marketing calls. It is a legal requirement that all organisations (including charities, voluntary...

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From the 6th of April 2013 onwards, Charities and Community Amateur Sports Club (CASC) have been able to claim top up payments on cash donations of £20 or less under the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS).

You do not need to know the identity of the donors or collect Gift Aid declarations, which makes it easier to claim on donations such as street collections. You can claim 25% on cash donations of £20 or less and you can claim up to £1,250 in tax a year.

Who can Claim

To be able to clai...

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Have you outgrown the use of spreadsheets to manage your fundraising supporters and activities? Is it time to invest in a fundraising database?

Let’s look at how your organisation will benefit from a fundraising database.

Search & Filter – For example, if you want to find out how many supporters gave over a certain amount to a particular campaign. You don’t have to scan through an Excel spreadsheet to find the information. Fundraising software allows you to set up a query to extract a...

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1.       Is the System Cloud Based?

Advantage^NFP Fundraiser can be deployed as an “on premise” solution or a cloud hosted solution, Advantage^NFP Hosting.  For hosted options we use a data centre called Sentrum 4, which is located in the UK.  Nightly snapshots of the entire server are taken by default. Sentrum 4 is an extremely secure hosting facility with 24 x 7 on-site security, door access controls at site and building entrances, proximity cards to authorise access levels including man...

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April 21^st – the day Google officially launched its mobile friendly ranking algorithm. What does this mean for your website?

Firstly, Google’s new formula only affects search rankings on mobile devices (smart phone and tablets) not desktops and laptops. However, it may have a huge impact given that in March 2015, 36.4m people in the UK accessed the internet using mobile devices (source: Comscore).

The latest algorithm will favour websites that Google defines as mobile friendly, where te...

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Ensure your charity’s data that is being entered in to your Advantage^NFP Fundraiser CRM database system is up to date by using AFD Postcode Plus.  Postcode Plus delivers comprehensive address look up at lightning speed from over 29 million addresses for delivery point (letterbox) accuracy. Postcode Plus includes the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF).

If your charity or not for profit organisation has a high turnover of staff, volunteers or temporary staff, then Postcode Plus can h...

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Your charity’s management team and trustees are responsible for making sure your charity is fully covered and your insurance policy is fit for purpose.

With a rise in litigation cases, ensuring your charity has the right level of cover is essential and public liability insurance is compulsory!

But how do you know what is the right level of cover? How do you ensure your charity is covered should a claim be made against you?

Visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-and-i...

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When was the last time you cleaned your data? Did you know that data decays, on average, at a staggering rate of 20% per year?  That means a database of 50,000 records, 10,000 will be incorrect within a year. Keeping track of these changes can be difficult.

Why not have a free audit to find out how clean your data is? You can then see the quality of your data and your need to complete a data clean exercise.

So what are the benefits of cleaning your data?

Save Money! The data clean will fla...

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The Community Plus programme provides grants of up to £5,000. The scheme is available to small local UK charities or local projects of national charities with funding available to cove...

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The World Cup 2014 is nearly upon us, what are you doing to mark the occasion and raise funds for your charity or not for profit organisation?

To help celebrate and get into the spirit or the World Cup, the Advantage^NFP Team are holding a sweepstake. We will be pulling teams out of a hat and each hoping we hold the winning team.

To make it more fun and to get all our customers involved we are going to put our customers’ names in another hat and for each country pulled out we will pull a custo...

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On the 14^th April 2014 LinkedIn will switch off products & services pages on your company pages.  In replacement, LinkedIn are introducing Showcase Pages for companies.  The idea behind this is so you can ‘Follow’ specific areas of interest, brands, products, initiatives, events, news, etc. rather than just a company as a whole.

The downside is, all the time and effort you have spent building your products and services pages will all be for nothing.  You can copy and paste the informatio...

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1. Fading Facebook
As parents and grandparents set up Facebook profiles, it is no longer seen as 'cool' for young people and they move away to other social media platforms. The likes of SnapChat and WhatApp photo messaging applications, with temporary content, are seeing continued growth.

2. The Rise of Social Advertising
Social advertising is seriously taking off as they are proving to be much more effective than some traditional forms of digital advertising such as banner ads. Promoted tweets ...
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Many of you will hold events throughout the year or have places for supporters to take part in events and help raise money for your charity or not for profit organisation.

At the start of a new year, many people often make resolutions to get fit or do more for charity, so this is the time to raise awareness about how they can help support your charity and get new supporters on board.

• Provide a list of events that you are holding throughout 2014 and how they can get involved.
• Make sure you have...

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The Advantage^NFP team powered by Redbourn Business Systems recently sponsored and exhibited at the Air Ambulance Association’s National Conference in London.

Approximately 200 delegates from the air ambulance community attended the conference to engage and network, sharing ideas and building partnerships. The day followed a comprehensive agenda covering charity, clinical and operational topics.

The Advantage^NFP team had a great day meeting some of our existing customers using Advantage^NFP...

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What are you doing to celebrate Halloween and raise funds for your charity or not for profit organisation?

Themed fundraising events are a great way to encourage children to participate and get involved in a worthy cause.  Children love dressing up for Halloween (so do a lot of grown ups!) and here are just a few ideas to get everyone involved.

Nearly any idea can be turned into a spooky Halloween fundraising event. So why not start with something you are familiar with and put a ghoulish tw...

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The AvantageNFP Fundraiser Team recently sponsored and exhibited at the FSI Fundraising Conference in London. 

220 small charity delegates got the chance to hear from some amazing speakers. The day was jam packed full of informative sessions, top tips and case studies. The other suppliers exhibiting were Virgin Money Giving and Action Challenge.

AdvantageNFP had a great day meeting some of our existing customers and talked with some new charities about their fundraising CRM database require...

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The Withdrawal of the R68(i) Gift Aid repayment form happens on 30th September, so to make sure you are ready, here are your options:

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The Gift Aid Online Filing is due to go live on 22^nd April 2013.

What should you be doing?

Register for HMRC Gateway

If you have not already registered for the HMRC Gateway, you need to do this now.  For more information visit HMRC Charities Online FAQs.

Get Your Supporter Records in Order

Make sure your supporter records are up-to-date with a current address and postcode.

The donor’s forename, surname and first line of the address are mandatory fields – the title and postcode a...

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When I was first asked to participate in a “sleep out” for the homeless my response was “sure, why not”.  When I realised they planned the overnight event for February, with temperatures below freezing, I started having second thoughts.  By the time I realised the event coincided with my 47^th birthday I seriously began to wonder what I’d let myself in for!  Still it seemed one way to celebrate the passing of another year, and at least I had something to ask for as a present this y...

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Our Advantage^NFP Fundraiser Enterprise customers are already benefiting from our Advantage^NFP web modules which integrate with their websites.  These provide a platform to share information, capture mailing preferences, lifestyle information, searches and forums, and even allow for donations to be collected online, all in a secure environment with immediate updates to and from the Advantage^NFP Fundraiser database.  But for our Solo and Professional customers, why not start with the simplified...
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Advantage^NFP Fundraiser is a comprehensive fundraising, membership, alumni and marketing database solution with many features provided as standard. One area that is catered for is that of Legacy Fundraising.  We thought we’d share out top tips for legacy fundraising with you.  They are…

• You don’t have to make a direct personal ask; why not use your regular newsletter. Include a legacy item in every issue, this constant drip-feed is a great way to keep legacy giving at the front of suppo...

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What is Cloud Computing?

In layman’s terms –   Cloud computing is the use of IT resources that you do not own but are on the network; not the organisation’s network but the internet.

The ‘Cloud’ itself is a virtualisation of resources – networks, servers, applications, data storage and services – which the end user has on-demand access to.  

Cloud Computing has brought together a range of technologies that can deliver scalable tailored and virtualised IT resources and app...

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What is a Capital Appeal? A Capital Appeal is a campaign to raise a capital sum, often within a given time frame, for a specific project.  Capital appeals are frequently associated with appeals to raise large sums of money to fund the acquisition, construction or renovation of a building or other large project.

A Capital Appeal fund is often required in addition to the regular money raised by supporters every year to help fund the day-to-day running costs & services provided by your charit...

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Understanding your supporters in this ever changing environment is crucial to maximise the potential of your data and improve response of your existing database.

MOSAIC UK is Experian’s consumer classification tool which places each postcode and household into 67 types, which are grouped into 15 categories.

Each type has a comprehensive description which will highlight the probable characteristics such as which media people are more likely to respond to, purchasing trends, holiday hab...

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How do you find new supporters and more donations for your charity or not for profit organisation?  Tired of holding the same old fundraising events and activities?  These are questions that most charities and not for profit organisations face at some point.  So hopefully this will help give you inspiration to come up with new ideas.

Hosting something entirely new may appeal to a new audience of supporters.  For instance, putting on an event for children like an assault course and then g...

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Subsequent to last week’s blog, ‘Why use Social Media?’, this week we are focusing on Wikipedia Articles.  Should a Charity or Not for Profit Organisation have a Wikipedia Article?

As mentioned last week, building your ‘digital shelf’ in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and controlling as much premium space will help you gain more supporters and, in turn, funds.  So using Social Media can help you gain this space.  Another ‘digital shelf’ to add to your armour is Wik...

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Following on from the NFP Technology 2012 seminar that Steve Cast presented this week on ‘The Fundraising Fantastic Four’, we thought we would re-iterate the benefits of using social media.

One   key reason for using social media is to control as much premium space on Page 1 of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as possible. 

We found a great analogy, referred to as the ‘Digital Shelf Strategy’ by comScore, that considers the shelves in a supermarket aisle.  Just as ‘consume...

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With email marketing on the rise a growing number of not for profit organisations are collecting vast amounts of email addresses, however very often postal addresses are not provided by individuals. So how do you add a postal address to your email database?  Well it is now possible to perform an email append in reverse allowing you to add postal addresses to your database.

One of the main issues faced by fundraisers is how to segment email address data and profile the supporters within t...

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When someone signs up to an enewsletter from your organisation, what’s the first thing you send?  Do you just include them in your e-newsletter database or do you actually send them a welcome email?

Don’t forget the most important emails are the first ones you send! 

Check out this free mini-guide that details how to do this right. 

Create a welcome series - a succession of 2 or 3 simple, personalised emails that a potential supporter receives over the course of their first few weeks ...

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Reading my local paper last week I came across an article titled, ‘Could you use a Gannett grant?  Which made me think, how can I use this to help our customers locally?  So I did a bit of research to find out more.  It turns out it is not just available to my local area, but is nationwide!

The Gannett Foundation is the charitable arm of Gannett Co, Inc. owner of Newsquest Media group, who publish regional newspapers, websites & magazines.  The Gannett Foundation provides funding to suppor...

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1.  Don’t be frightened to get in touch with the funder

If you have a query regarding your funding application, you can contact the funder to discuss your concerns and application. Most funders expect this contact and often have outreach workers who will help you with the application process.

2.  Be precise

Ensure you have answered all the basic the questions: Who? Where? When? Why? What? and How? you intend to accomplish your project. You must make certain the funder understands exactly...

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The Olympic Games and Paralympic Games have a unique power to inspire all of us as individuals.  It also provides great opportunities for charities and not for profit organisations to attract more funds and raise profiles.

Has your organisation got into the spirit of the London 2012 Olympics?

Get inspired, be Proud to be British!

OK, so the opening ceremony wasn't to everyone's taste, it did go on a bit, but how else do you get 204 teams out? It was well worth the wait, what a spectacular ...

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What is Google Places?

Google Places is Google’s way of giving local organisations an upper hand. There are so many benefits to getting listed in Google Places that any charity or not-for-profit organisation who’s not taking advantage of it is really missing a trick!

Should you be using Google Places?

Add your charity or not-for-profit organisation to Google Places and you’ll discover hundreds of advantages for advertising your organisation through this free service.  There are ten...

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As reported this week in Civil Society News ‘One-third of visits to JustGiving now come from mobile devices’. JustGiving received almost two million visits to its website from mobiles last month, representing almost four-fold growth over the past year. Elizabeth Kessick, head of Insight at Just Giving states, “This increase can be explained by the growth in the number of smartphone users in the UK.”

Paul de Gregorio, head of mobile at Open Fundraising, added that charities need t...

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What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is the advertising tool Google has developed to assist you in marketing your organisation in the Google Search Engine via the use of a placed text Ad. The Ad appears when people search for phrases or ‘keywords’ related to your organisation, this is displayed as a “sponsored link”.  The system is a “pay per click” method, which means you can influence where your Ad appears through bidding for a series of relevant keywords, but you only pay if...

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We’re all familiar with the proverb of “never looking a gift horse in the mouth”, but in the case of the newly introduced Small Charities Donations Bill it would seem appropriate for small charities to ignore that advice and look carefully at what’s actually on offer.

The new bill will allow charities and amateur sports clubs to claim “Gift Aid” on individual gifts of under £20 without a Gift Aid form, meaning there is no need to collect donor’s details, up to a total value of...

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WADARS (Worthing & District Animal Rescue Services) have just signed up with Redbourn Business Systems, to implement AdvantageNFP Fundraiser at their charity. 
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This is a short micro blog post containing advice on the little things that make a big difference on your Supporter Relationship Management Database. 

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PRESS RELEASE

Hove-based Cardinal Newman Catholic School (CNCS), which has been open since 1872, chose Advantage^NFP, powered by Redbourn Business Systems, to provide its Advantage^NFP Fundraiser CRM solution.

Cardinal Newman Catholic School is a large 11-18 Catholic mixed comprehensive school established to serve the many parishes that lie on the coastal strip between Newhaven and Seaford in the east and Shoreham in the west.

Advantage^NFP is a portfolio of Not-For-Profit database solutions ...

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Planning strategically your organisation's integrated campaigns can lead to outstanding fundraising results. This week's case study illustrates the World Development Movement's Real George Osborne campaign, which generated a significant amount of new regular donors for the charity.

The World Development Movement (WDM) is a UK-based anti-poverty campaigning organisation with a worldwide reputation for tackling hard-hitting, controversial issues. WDM has been an Advantage^NFP Fundraiser custome...
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A post from our Marketing Manager.

It was a good few months ago when I came across a really good blog post on fundraising via gaming from Caroline Howes on Spring Giving. I was aware already of War Child, an Advantage^NFP customer, and their ads on Football Manager a couple of years ago, as a football gaming fanatic (and through Redbourn Business Systems’ presentation on CHASE a few years ago) however I did not fully grasp that gaming could help fundraising substantially and the huge potent...

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