My second and third weeks at the K&C Foundation have seen the office attempting to look forward from the Grenfell Tower fire and move back to normal, but with around 10 cheques still arriving daily, the fire is definitely at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
I started week two continuing to work on my ‘Big Donors’ List, which would allow the foundation to plan for the future and efficiently be able to recognise those who have been especially generous and make sure that they had been thanked. The data that the foundation receives from the different mediums of donation is often cryptic and required a certain amount of detective work to make sure that donors were thanked for the correct amounts. It has been really fantastic to read all of the different ways that people have fund raised for the victims of the tower and everyone in the office often becomes slightly teary and moved at some of the letters we’ve had to read.
Many of the donors who have given to the Grenfell Tower Fund requested to keep in contact with the Foundation, so one of my main activities throughout these two weeks has been identifying donors who live in the Royal Borough of the Kensington and Chelsea and adding them to the database. Although this task did seem slightly monotonous at times, I felt good knowing that these were people who will eventually donate again to the K&C Foundation to support their other campaigns.
In week three as a break from adding to the Database, (As much as I now am a professional at ‘Advantage Fundraiser’ it was nice to have a release from adding addresses), I was asked to do some analysis of donor and recipient location of the 2015-16 Winter Warmth Campaign. This campaign raises funds so that older people who face hardship during the winter months can be helped with their heating costs and keep warm. I mapped the locations of the hundreds of recipients and donors to try and identify a trend, which did turn out as hypothesised. This map I created will be used as a visual aid to demonstrate to the trustees at their meeting in September how the campaign geographically works.
My highlight of the middle two weeks has been attending a couple of meetings with local charities with the charity coordinator, just to see how they were getting on post Grenfell and here their opinions of the schemes in place to help those in need and to gauge the thoughts and emotions of the public. I found this most useful because I was really exposed to how a charity like the K&C Foundation interacts with those they support and how the build and keep up these relationships.
I’ve also had the opportunity during these two weeks to edit things here and there on the K&C Foundation’s website. This was going to be one of my main tasks pre starting my internship here and I was grateful to learn how the foundation runs their site. One of their main priorities recently has been to keep their social media up to date, and as their has not been the manpower to do this during the tumultuous time after the Grenfell fire, this is something I hope to start with in my final week.
I am shocked at how fast my time here has gone and I cannot believe that I only really have 5 days left with the ladies at the K&C Office.