#14 'digital fundraising expert' Howard Lake founder of UK Fundraising

Join Purposely Podcast to hear my latest guest Howard Lake. In this podcast Howard talks about being an unlikely dotcom entrepreneur and while his friends, family and colleagues supported his start-up mission they also admitted to ‘not really understanding what he was doing’… locked away in his home office learning HTML and developing resources for sharing on the web. While he is very happy with his contribution to the world he sites that one of his regrets it not fully realising the power and value of what he had in his hands. Had he been able to partner with someone he may able to grow faster and gain more reach. You suspect that Howard Lake the dotcom entrepreneur and digital do good Svengali could have easily been Howard Lake the dotcom millionaire… joining the founders of platforms like Just Giving say, those who cashed in on the do good tech boom. But hey that wouldn’t quite fit with the altruistic man I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing for Purposely Podcast. He also didn’t want to run a large organisation with all that brings. So who is Howard Lake… he is a digital entrepreneur and one of the most influential and well respected people working in the non-profit / charity sectors anywhere in the world. Howards specialist field is fundraising and he has been personally responsible for upskilling, supporting and motivating two almost three generations of professional and voluntary fundraisers. People responsible for raising millions of dollars / pounds. He founded UK Fundraising (fundraising.co.uk), the world’s first web resource and community for professional fundraisers in 1994 and wrote the world’s first book on digital fundraising in 1995. Howard remains in control of UK Fundraising to this day and while he uses a small team of expert contributors he is the websites only official employee. Hear how his early and formative experiences at Oxford University fuelled his passion and love for the ‘power of asking people for money’. Howard talks about his involvement with the universities RAG (first coined in Victoria times when students took time out of their studies to collect rags to clothe the poor, to more recent uses to stand for ‘Raise and Give’). He then went on to work as as a fundraiser at Oxfam, Afghanaid and Amnesty International UK in the 80s and 90s. He is passionate about the discipline and although he no longer practices fundraising himself he is a student of the ‘art and science of fundraising’ and is responsible for a number of the most popular training courses in the sector. While his focus on the website has endured for 24 plus years he is also responsible for starting and scaling other ventures in the do good space. He was co-founder of Barcamp Nonprofits and founder of Fundraising Camp, a learning event for fundraisers. His most recent venture is co-founder of Good Jobs a market place for fundraising talent that promises to deliver value for money. Importantly Howard Lake has not shied away from the issues hitting the charity and non-profit sectors due to COVID-19, in fact he has very much led from the front and as early as March 2020 (when the first lockdowns started to happen) he offered sage advice on how one can fundraise in a crisis “All fundraisers and charities are facing this problem. We need to talk to other organisations, avoid overlap, support and participate in existing networks and collaborative groups. This could be other charities, fundraising networks, businesses.” #ukfundraising #howardlake #charity #nonprofit #COVID-19 #training #development #founder #socialentrepreneur #digital #dotcom #svengali