Session: Fundraising ethics - Doing the right thing? But what is the right thing?

You’ve discovered loads of great ideas at Summer School that you could implement in your fundraising. The question is: ought you implement them?

As a fundraiser, when you go to a conference, you take away great practical advice: ‘Here’s something that will work; you should do it too.’ But do you always consider whether just because you can do it, you ought to do it?

How often do you pause to consider whether they might have unintended ethical consequences from implementing this great idea?

At the Fundraising Summer School, we have tried to embed ethics through the two-days, rather than have a ‘token’ ethics session, which suggests that ethics is separate and optional to fundraising practice.

At this interactive session, led by MacQuillin, we want you to bring to the panel the ethical dilemmas, issues and challenges you have encountered at Summer School (or those that you have been ruminating on for a long time already) so we can engage in a critical discussion around what they are, why they might be problematic, and how we might resolve them.

Ian MacQuillin

Ian MacQuillin MCIoF(Dip) is the director of Rogare, which he founded in 2014.  He’s recognised as a leading thinker on fundraising ethics having devised a new normative theory of professional ethics – Rights Balancing Fundraising Ethics. Ian has also created the new field of Anti-Donation Theory with which to better understand the negative attitudes some people hold about being asked to give to charity.

He is a member of the certification committee of the European Fundraising Association, which assesses the qualification/educational programmes of EFA members; and a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing and the AFP’s magazine Advancing Philanthropy.

Ian has worked in the fundraising sector since 2001. As editor of Professional Fundraising magazine from 2001 to 2006, he was widely acknowledged as being a key influential advocate for and critical friend of fundraising, regularly being voted into the top 10 most influential people in fundraising.