We spent two days at the Global Impact Summit as this year’s video partner, listening to founders, funders and fundraisers talk honestly about what actually drives giving, retention and trust.
Before we get into the specifics, one theme sat above everything else, storytelling isn’t a nice extra sitting next to the fundraising strategy, it’s what makes the strategy work at all. It came through in almost every other session, the strongest fundraising and partnership ideas at the summit weren’t the ones with the most data, they were the ones told with real specificity and care. It’s basically the whole reason Laundry Lane agency, and hearing it echoed back by founders, funders and fundraisers for two straight days made us pretty proud of what we do.
Unrestricted funding is what actually lets you innovate
We Are Mobilise spoke in a session called Radical Innovation for Impossible Problems, hosted by Gill Whelan Projects, about running direct cash transfers for people experiencing homelessness, a model well evidenced overseas but barely tried in Australia. Their founders were blunt about why it worked, they’d been given unrestricted funding early, which let them build the evidence base first instead of having to prove the model before they’d even started. In a sector where most grants and gifts come tightly tied to a specific program or outcome, that’s a real case for support argument worth having with major donors and philanthropic partners. Their program started as 11 people in a pilot nobody believed in. It’s now housing thousands, generating over six dollars in economic value for every dollar donated.
Why it matters, this isn’t just one organisation’s experience, a three-year study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy tracking over 800 recipients of MacKenzie Scott’s unrestricted gifts found the effects were overwhelmingly positive, with grantees holding roughly double the cash reserves of comparable nonprofits and nearly 90 percent reporting no negative consequences at all. The evidence base for pitching unrestricted funding to donors is stronger than most fundraising teams realise.
Major gifts are relationships, not asks
Black Diamondz used its session, For The Love Of Legacy, to talk about major donor cultivation from someone who’s helped raise well over 200 million dollars across her career. High-net-worth donors aren’t usually unwilling to give, they’re simply never invited into the room. One long-term supporter, a client with no children of her own, eventually gave eight million dollars to fund a garden at a children’s hospital, after years of relationship building that had nothing to do with an ask. Real generosity, she said, isn’t measured by the size of a gift, it’s measured by the number of lives it touches.
Why it matters, sector data backs this up plainly, roughly 90 percent of nonprofit fundraising revenue comes from just 10 percent of the donor base, and donors who give consistently over five years contribute over 15 times more than one-time donors. The relationship, not the appeal, is where the real return sits.
Lead with the case, not the appeal
A theme that kept resurfacing across sessions hosted by Gill Whelan Projects and Emergency Action Alliance, that the organisations attracting the strongest corporate and philanthropic partnerships aren’t opening with how much can you give, they’re opening with what problem are we uniquely placed to solve, and inviting the funder to help solve it.
Why it matters, partnerships built around a genuinely shared problem give both sides a reason to keep investing beyond the initial sponsorship term, which matters given how often corporate partnerships lapse the moment a budget line gets reviewed.
Self-determination outperforms the traditional charity narrative
Two stories from the summit made this point better than any campaign brief could. The Remote OpShop Project told the story of a remote Northern Territory community, initially placed into a work-for-the-dole scheme with nothing to do, that used a simple Facebook donation drive to build their own art centre instead, that’s since grown into a network of 45 First Nations-led op shops, turning some of the 200,000 tonnes of clothing Australians send to landfill each year into local income and opportunity. Brodie Germaine Fitness shared the story of a youth health and wellbeing centre in regional Queensland, built on the idea that health means culture and connection, not just intervention.
Why it matters, this lines up with a growing body of research on unethical storytelling in fundraising, campaigns that reduce people to a single moment of need tend to erode donor trust over time, even when they perform well short term, while stories that show people and communities shaping their own solutions build a more durable kind of trust.
Retention starts with acknowledging the system, not just the person
UNICEF’s session, Rethinking Impact, asked a question that’s stuck with a lot of people in the sector since, ‘what’s actually left once the funding runs out.’ The answer they landed on was that a strong program leaves behind capability and knowledge, a system that keeps working, not just a good story about one person’s outcome. A separate session from eiris made a related point about digital safety, that harm usually isn’t deliberate, it’s what happens when a system scales before anyone stops to ask who it might leave out. Both sessions were really making the same argument from different angles, that the strength of an organisation’s work sits in its systems, not just its individual stories.
Why it matters, campaigns built entirely around one person’s resilience can accidentally suggest the fix is that person trying harder, rather than the system around them actually changing. Supporters who’ve been given a full, honest picture, what changed structurally, not just who overcame something, tend to trust that the change will last, and that’s what keeps them giving year after year.
Every organisation is already telling three stories
Thankyou’s keynote broke this down in a way that’s directly usable for brand and campaign strategy. There’s an origin story, the honest why behind the organisation’s founding. There’s a breakthrough story, the one that shows supporters how the organisation moved from where it was to where it’s going next. And there’s a third story most fundraising teams never think to tell, the internal narrative that shapes how staff, volunteers and board members actually behave.
Why it matters, organisations that consciously shape all three stories tend to have a much more consistent brand experience across every touchpoint, from the annual appeal to how a volunteer describes the work at a dinner party.
Consent doesn’t end when a campaign goes live
A session called What Does Ethical Storytelling Look Like?, featuring Ashani Dante, The Imperfects Podcast, Sunrise and Odette & Co, explored informed and ongoing consent from the people whose stories are used in appeals, safety planning before a personal story goes public, and genuine aftercare once a campaign has run its course.
Why it matters, a supporter’s story doesn’t stop belonging to them just because it’s now sitting in your annual appeal, and getting this right is what makes people willing to share their story with you again next time.
Pulling this together, for fundraising and marketing teams, the case for support is only ever as strong as the story behind it. Supporters don’t give to statistics, and they don’t stay loyal to a brand they can’t feel anything for.
