Author: Charlotte Morphet

The Last Days at the K&C Foundation

My final couple of days at the K&C Foundation has been an eventful one. Nearly 7 weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire and cheques are still coming in. What I now like to call MY cheque database is looking very hefty and it was a sad day on Thursday when I had to teach my colleague how to use it again, as I have been in charge of it for so long. A couple of very exciting donations came in this week as well- the biggest I’d seen yet! It is very shocking to have a colleague shout ‘Charlotte you have to read these numbers for me, I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.’, and to then read that EasyJet’s flight collection had raised over £200,000 for the Grenfell Tower Fund! The atmosphere in the office was amazing as we were all shell shocked at the sum!

The focus of this week has mainly been on social media and on the semi rebranding that the K&C Foundation has been undergoing. One area that the charity has tried to improve on is in the amount that they update their followers on different social platforms, and their weakest has been facebook. I helped the team to understand how to make different people admins on the page, and then undertook the role of updating all of their information and deleting anything that they didn’t want anymore. The mini rebranding has mostly revolved around a change of colour, moving from the classic blue to a magenta, or is it maroon… or is it purple? We enjoyed have team meetings about the theme and it was very funny attempting to find a name for the shade we chose! I then got to work with updating everything with this new colour- the logo, email signatures, branded letters etc etc.

The website has been another of my main focusses this week. This was going to be one of my top objectives prior to the Grenfell Tower and this final week has allowed me to get started there finally. I trawled through the pages, removing any information that was duplicated and changed layouts to make everything flow better and make more sense. The website is something the K&C Foundation is still not happy with, but I’ve been glad to contribute to an ‘okay’ interim state, until the time comes for a completely new rebranding.

This week again I have been able to sit in on another couple of meetings including one that was hosted in the Berkley Hotel in Knightsbridge- perks of the job! It has been my favourite part of my 4 weeks being able to go and listen to how the foundation liaises with businesses and other charities.

Before starting my internship I thought that 4 weeks was a long time. Turns out 20 days of work completely flies by. Working in a small team has been amazing as you can really get to know everyone and it was easy to feel completely at ease.  I am really going to miss this tiny office in Latimer Road, and although I didn’t really do anything that had previously been planned I feel like I have contributed much to the K&C Foundation and hope that my time here has been as valuable to them as I feel it has been to me.

Looking Forward with The K&C Foundation

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.

 

 

My First Days at the K&C Foundation

Before starting my 4 weeks at the K&C Foundation I had sorted a plan of action with the Foundation about how I could work with them and contribute to their existing schemes. However, this was all prior to the horrific Grenfell Tower Fire. The K&C Foundation has been instrumental in collecting funds raised to help the victims and those affected by the fire and making sure that 100% of the money donated reaches those in need. Usually in the little K&C office, there are 5 people who work and who take in under 50 cheques a month. Due to the fire this drastically changed. With thousands of donations flooding in through 5 different mediums including online and physically, they were swamped with the generosity of people globally. They had up to this point dealt with everything extremely well but obviously the staff’s usual roles were halted whilst they focused on organising the distribution of donations for the Grenfell Tower Appeal.

My first week happened to be roughly 4 weeks after the disaster. Life was just starting to get back to normal in the office, with the everyone starting to look back at their emails pre Grenfell, reorganising cancelled meetings etc etc. This however did not mean that there wasn’t any Grenfell admin left to be done, and this is where I stepped in. My first week mainly revolved around inputting the 1000’s of donated checks into the Foundation’s database, uploading CAF vouchers (which is another way for individuals to donate money), and learning how the K&C Foundation processes and keeps track of their money. What I worked on next was tackling the enormous spreadsheet of cheque donations. I divided this spreadsheet into various categories of School, Churches, Businesses, Organisations and Individuals and was able to identify the most generous of donations. I then began finding addresses and emails for donors in order to write letters of thanks from the K&C Foundation. This charity prides themselves on being personal and small enough to be able to really connect with their donors and therefore it was definitely a high priority to thank the generosity of the population. I got to have exciting trips to put in cash donations from charity buckets and go and visit ‘FRANK’ which is the franking machine using to put postage on letters.

This task took up a significant amount of time of week 1 understandably due to the thousands of people who had donated to the cause. After the cheque donations, I was taught how to update contacts in the Foundation’s database, which is a instrumental tool that they use in order to keep in contact with those that donate funds.

Having dealt with this primarily for cheque donations, I moved onto the other mediums of donation. The K&C Foundation was accepting donations not only through cheques, but also their own website, Just Giving, The Big Give and Bank transfers. I was tasked with analysing this data to find the groups of people who had donated significant amounts of money and compiling a list, so that in future weeks the Foundation can organise a function to thank these people again.

My first couple of days at the K&C Foundation have really shown to me the generosity of people. Processing multiple cheques from the same individuals shows how some humans just want to keep on giving again and again. Also being able to understand that some people have the humility to donate over £10,000 anonymously, and that they don’t donate to boost their egos and make themselves feel better, they just want to improve the lives of others, this I find amazing. I have also learnt how to work in a small office environment, and how in a small team, nothing you do is for yourself, everyone fills in to help each other where needed and no one has any qualms about being asked questions and taking on extra roles. I am very much looking forward to the rest of my time here- seeing how the Foundation normally functions on a regular basis, and how each of the roles in the office support charities and schemes in the borough.