Futures Coaching

Giving and Getting: Positive Fundraising Trends

I love giving platform speeches (even if they are always a little scary!) and I am often asked to start conferences with Key Notes focusing on trends and the future landscape. In recent times, I've kicked off: the consumer healthcare association's (AESGP) conference in Vienna, the International Council of Shopping Centre's Conference in Prague and the International Health Forum in Munich.

I'm please to say I've been invited to present the Key Note at the upcoming Swiss International Fundraising Congress in Geneva on 28th and 29th June. I'll be presenting a challenging speech around the opportunities for fundraisers in recessionary times and how two key trends can help access the passions of donors everywhere.

Other speakers include Lord Rennard and fundraisers from Amnesty International and Médicins Sans Frontières. If you are intersted to join us, the conference website is here.

The New Retail Rulebook

This week saw the publication of a major report on the future of Britain's High Streets. It was good to note that Mary Portas's main recommendation to the government was that shops need to go 'beyond retail'. This was just one of 10 conclusions in my Retail 2020 report, written in the Spring of 2010!

Since that time, virtually all of my forecasts are in the process of coming true. So much so, my client asked me to go further and look at the implications for the sector. Called 'The New Retail Rulebook: 5 Key Lessons from the Future', this can be found here.

With so much work to be done to catch up on consumer trends, it is clearly necessary to innovate. Is there a retailer out there willing to intercept the future? 

 

Will you survive the recession only to lose the recovery?

Everyone is talking about the recession but sometimes it is difficult to see. I'm passing through Toronto and it's clean, the taxis are running, Eaton Centre is buzzing on a Friday afternoon, the hotel is filling with another busload of pumped up executives on their annual conference. Even the flight over from Paris was 80% full.

Of course, scratch the surface and the difficulties emerge. The taxi driver moans that at 4pm on a wet Friday afternoon it is ruinous to have so few customers. My literary agent tells of 25% across-the-board redundancies in the US publishing industry. Meanwhile, the TV news screams that latest US jobs report added a further 663,000 unemployed in the month of March.

So companies are in survival mode. Travel is suspended, projects abandoned, roll-out plans put on ice, teams downsized. Today, it's all about making it through and that means being tactical, hard nosed realists.

But my point is this. As a business or a brand, if you take, say, 18 months to get from drawing board to launch for your strategic and/or new product initiatives, then shouldn't you be starting to plan right now for the post recession? Because it's coming. When? Who knows? I certainly don't. But however long and deep, the recession will end, just as every other recession has ended. And you need to be ready for it.

The big question is: are you so busy surviving the recession that you will lose the recovery?

So I think brands need to start planning for the upturn NOW. This is where my second question is so important. What will the post recessionary world look like? This is just the kind of subject I'm in to. And as a futurist and trend watcher, this really is where the rubber hits the road.

And I've come to three, rather straightforward, scenarios:

1. Consumers will go back to pre recession values and behaviours

2. Consumers will find it hard to move beyond recessionary attitudes and actions

3. The Post recessionary world will be different in new and important ways

It is clear to me in the analysis that I'm doing that the third scenario is the most likely. The post recession will not be business-as-usual normal - BUT it will become the 'new normal'.

Economists start to predict what this 'new normal' will look like. According to Pimco, American unemployment was 4%, it's rising in the recession to 10% and the 'new normal' will be 8%, post recession. Growth in the US economy was running at 4% it has gone negative during the recession and the 'new normal' will be 1-2%. That's a radical new world heading our way!

But what about people and our dear consumers? What will they be thinking? What will be their new needs and motivations? Where will they be spending their money? My bet is that the 'new normal' will be very different and that some brands will emerge winners, and some will find that their target market has just migrated. New white space opportunities will emerge.

Can you see some of these changes already? Are you planning for them?