I love this issue of the magazine – it is about celebrating the great work you do for your causes and for the greater good of the world we live in. So, it is a thrill to put nine fundraisers on the cover. Rochelle Nolan, Jeremy Bennett, Elizabeth Grady, John Groom, Phoebe Collins, Ashley Southwell, Geoff Hills, Lisa Allen, and Nick Hudson are our cover stars.
They represent nearly half our Movers & Shakers for 2022. Yes, it is a bumper year. We had a record number of nominations and whittling that long list down to 20 was hard – very hard. A shout out to my colleague Fiona Atkinson who wrangled the spreadsheet and did much of the heavy lifting.
We don’t have an Annie Leibovitz level photography budget, so that decision was easier – it was all about pixels. Our other Movers & Shakers are Natalie Gibbs, Nathaniel Links, Georgie Smith, Muriel Mallet, Dani Williams, Shane Bailey, Vanessa Byrne, Fiona Ramsay, Jono Kirk, Carrie Fletcher and TEN Women.
We are so happy to share their work in these pages and we hope you, as their peers and colleagues, are inspired by how they have approached the task of raising funds with zeal, humour, and grace. We also feature a fundraiser from across the Tasman. Claire Carruthers is FINZ’s current Fundraising Leader of the Year for her work at Wellington Free Ambulance. If you want to get the inside track on her strategy and tactics, join us at her session at Big4 in Melbourne in October.
Many of our Movers & Shakers mention impact as a deeply satisfying aspect of their work. And as you very well know, the role of a fundraiser can be challenging. Some of our Movers & Shakers mention taking care of themselves and their teams. I particularly love what Nathaniel Links had to say about a career low point: “After my first real fundraising failure where I tested a new acquisition channel, my manager said, ‘There are researchers in this building spending a million dollars to test a theory that may not work. You didn’t fail, you just gained learnings for the next time’.”
Words to live and work by.
