There’s an old saying in fundraising: “Good ideas don’t have copyrights.”
What works for one charity, in one place, often works for another… if you know how to adapt it. That’s what makes fundraising such a generous profession. It’s built on the belief that when one of us learns, all of us should benefit.
Few places embody that spirit better than SOFII – the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration.
If you haven’t visited it lately, you should. SOFII is one of the most extraordinary open-source collections of fundraising knowledge anywhere in the world: hundreds of case studies, creative examples, and timeless insights stretching from the earliest direct-mail pioneers to today’s digital campaigns.
For anyone serious about fundraising, SOFII isn’t a museum. It’s a living library of what works, and increasingly, why it works.
Practitioner knowledge still matters
In a world obsessed with “what’s next,” SOFII reminds us of something more important: what’s enduring.
Scroll through its archives and you’ll see that the best fundraising ideas don’t date. They adapt. You’ll see the patterns that underpin every breakthrough — human psychology, emotional truth, and the courage to connect deeply with supporters.
Take the NSPCC’s Full Stop Campaign, one of the most ambitious and successful fundraising appeals in UK history. It raised more than £270 million and rewrote the rules on how major campaigns are structured. And sustained a generation of fundraising ‘tail’ for a charity tackling child abuse.
What stands out isn’t the size of the goal, it’s the strategy. The campaign built momentum over years, not months. It was bold, data-led, and fearless in its storytelling. Fundraisers weren’t order-takers; they were trusted to be change-makers, leading the organisation’s most transformative moment.
That’s the kind of work we want every fundraiser to have the chance to do. And it starts with learning from what’s already been done brilliantly.
Learning from impact, not just innovation
There’s a dangerous myth in fundraising that innovation means “new.” It doesn’t. Innovation means useful.
SOFII’s archives prove that sometimes the most powerful ideas are decades old and still outpacing modern campaigns because they’re built on deep human understanding.
Take WaterAid’s Plastic Bag Mailing, a campaign so simple, yet so ingenious. It arrived in a plastic bag, making supporters feel the burden of carrying water. It didn’t describe the problem; it demonstrated it.
That single creative choice transformed empathy into action. No expensive tech. No buzzwords. Just emotional truth, delivered with precision.
That’s the difference between activity and insight.
The challenge inside our sector
At Fundraiser In The Room, we often meet fundraisers who feel isolated and are expected to produce miracles while being too stretched to stop and learn.
They’re reinventing the wheel every quarter because the organisation has forgotten what it already knows. Institutional memory gets lost when staff move on, budgets tighten, or data systems don’t connect.
But fundraising isn’t built on reinvention. It’s built on reflection. That’s why SOFII matters so much. It’s not there to tell you what to do next; it’s there to help you remember what already works.
Campaigns like WaterAid’s “Big Dig” show the value of combining story, transparency, and trust. The campaign didn’t just raise over £2.5 million, it invited donors into the field in real time. Supporters followed progress through blogs, videos, and daily updates from Malawi.
That’s not marketing; that’s meaning. It’s fundraising designed for emotional participation and it’s all documented, free, and waiting for the next fundraiser who needs to see it.
Learning is leadership
Knowledge doesn’t just make fundraisers better, it makes them braver.
When leaders reference evidence and not just instinct, they shift how fundraising is perceived inside the organisation. A fundraising director who walks into a board meeting and says, “Here’s how the NSPCC did it,” or, “Here’s how WaterAid built belonging into legacy conversations,” isn’t just making a case for funding. They’re modelling leadership through learning.
That WaterAid legacy project from the work behind the Commission on the Donor Experience is a perfect example. It wasn’t about an ad or a campaign; it was about changing culture. Training staff to talk confidently about legacies. Embedding behaviour change into systems. That’s what real knowledge does. It moves fundraising from a department to a discipline.
A profession that learns together, leads together
The beauty of SOFII (and the reason it resonates so deeply with us) is that it sees fundraising as a shared craft. No paywalls. No secrets. Just open knowledge, freely given, so the next generation can do better.
We believe fundraisers shouldn’t have to start from scratch. They should have access to the wisdom, evidence, and inspiration that already exist… and the space to adapt it to their world.
Because fundraising isn’t magic. It’s method. And the most powerful tool any fundraiser can have is knowledge that is shared, understood, and applied with courage.
So take an hour this week and visit sofii.org. Pick a campaign. Read it. Talk about it with your team.
Because when fundraisers learn together, they don’t just raise money. They raise the standards, the confidence, and the impact of the whole profession. And that’s the real power of knowledge.