Client Overview
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Wikimedia UK is the UK charity for global Wikimedia open knowledge movement, including Wikipedia. They work to ensure people have access to reliable information, focusing particularly on knowledge equity, information literacy (including critical thinking skills), and climate and the environment.
With such broad and complex areas of work, they needed some help to identify what stories they could tell. In particular they wanted to look at how to tell these stories in ways that felt urgent, understandable and actionable. In other words, stories that would compel people to donate.
Background
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The work that Wikimedia UK does - and the impact they have - can be hard to explain. Wikimedia UK asked Fireside to help them meet the challenge of communicating this work to the general public. They liked that Fireside provided a broad range of knowledge and expertise in the fundraising sector. They trusted we could help them speak to more than one audience. They asked us to focus on the bigger picture of storytelling and communicating with urgency.
George Colbourn, Fundraising and Relationships Lead said:
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‘We wanted to refine our strategy for meeting with external people and organisations, whether funders, volunteers or donors, and give everything a shake up. We wanted to readdress our approach to fundraising, and maybe to unearth some qualities we had which we didn’t yet know we had’.
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Approach
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We took Wikimedia UK through our collaborative process in a few key steps. We held 1:1 interviews with staff members - from senior leadership, programs and fundraising - to explore their stories. We found out how stories were sourced and captured, how they were used, and what barriers to good storytelling existed. This fed into a report offering a snapshot of the current landscape and an action plan for development.Â
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We held an ingredients workshop where we dug into behavioural psychology of why people donate and then applied this to identify what key ingredients Wikimedia UK had that we could turn into irresistible fundraising recipes.
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This was followed with our recipes workshop where we examined a real-world example of a fantastic, partnership-winning story and what made it so brilliant. We then guided them to apply our carefully curated story structure, where they built two example templates for telling Wikimedia UK’s story in an inspiring and compelling way.Â
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We then worked together with them over a series of detailed and focused coaching sessions to help them establish their new ways of working, and to support them as they applied our guidance to different areas of their day-to-day work. This included making trust applications more emotional, creating their storytelling working group and kickstarting their corporate work.
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All of this combined to give Wikimedia UK practical tools they could use straight off the page, develop their story-telling, and, ultimately, to raise more money.
Results
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The main results of this work are that Wikimedia UK staff are more confident in their communications. They immediately applied the work to their trusts and foundations approach, and have started to build on the case studies gathered. Ultimately their work feels more urgent than before.
George said:
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‘It made me feel a bit more liberated to write in a different way, to communicate our message in different ways, and to be a bit more experimental.’
Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid said:
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‘Fireside have helped us to really come together across the organisation and think about the concrete difference our work makes. We’re more confident in talking about the people we reach, either in person or online, and how our work changes lives - and we’re more unified around what problems we exist to solve. We are excited to continue building on this work, using our new story-telling skills to highlight the fantastic work that Wikimedia UK does.’
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Client Insights
Katie Crampton, Communications Coordinator said:
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‘Fireside were fantastic at bringing everyone along on the journey. They made sure that everyone in the room felt heard: they never shut anyone down and took the time to make sure that everyone could really understand the benefits of what we were working to achieve.
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If you are considering working with Fireside, I would say: go for it! Come with an open mind, because the more you put into the process, the more you will get out of it. We had a really positive experience and the whole team really found huge value in this project.’
Get in touch
Want to find out how Fireside could work with you to create your emotional, logical and credible way of explaining why an individual or organisation should support your charity? Contact us today on andy@firesidefundraising.com
To find out more about Wikimedia UK please visit wikimedia.org.uk