Overview

Nominate a candidate for the Care2 Impact Award based on the criteria below.

• The winner will receive a cash award of £500, plus Care2 will donate an additional £500 to their favourite charity.
• The prize will be awarded at the ECF 2014 dinner on Thursday, April 10th in Oxford, UK.
• The deadline to vote was 15:00 (GMT) on Wed, April 10th.
• Any member of the ECF community is welcome to vote, but only one vote per person will be counted.

The nominees will be shortlisted by a panel of judges representing Care2, FairSay and two other candidates to be confirmed..

Criteria

The judges will consider four main criteria in short listing finalists.

1. Innovation. Has this person introduced valuable new ideas and approaches to the nonprofit sector?
2. Influence. Has this person’s work produced a ripple effect to influence and benefit other professionals in the sector?
3. “Impact Delta” Is there a quantifiably large difference between the “before” and the “after” of this person’s work – measurable in fundraising dollars, or the quantity and quality of advocacy victories won, or the number of citizens participating in a cause? [Note that a proportionally large impact at a small organisation is just as important as a big impact at a large organisation.]
4. Advancing The Cause. Did this person help accomplish something that advanced their cause(s) meaningfully, such as via organising or winning advocacy victories? Or by providing the funds needed to fuel campaigns that won victories?

Once shortlisted, ECF community members will be able to vote to identify winner.

Questions regarding the voting process? Please email us at [email protected]. Thanks!

Winner

Hannah Lownsbrough

As founding Campaign Director, and second staffer at 38 Degrees, Hannah fundamentally changed the way NGOs in the UK approach campaigning and movement building.

How? By demonstrating successes, in terms of (1) real world impact like stopping the govt sell-off of England's forests and many more (2) mobilising people offline in their thousands to meet MPs, like the Liberty award winning successful campaign against the Draft Communications Data Bill and showing (3) the incredible fundraising potential of highly motivated people in their tens of thousands, to fund tactics like the £300,000 donated for NHS billboard ads, as well as finance the entire organisation by small donations.

38 Degrees influence is clear, as many larger NGOs experiment with replicating the model to channel people power, like Greenpeace's mobilisation team. And Hannah was absolutely pivotal to these influential successes both in a direct leadership capacity - leading on fundraising for 38 Degrees for the 4.5 years of her tenure, and on the successful Save Our Forests campaign (see 2 year timeline and tactics) as well as many others.

It's not just the things that Hannah has done in the world - winning campaigns, mobilising millions of people, and raising millions of pounds too - it's the way she's done them.

Hannah has a brilliant mind for strategy and is a fantastic and powerful writer. But her leadership and management style is what makes her utterly unique and uniquely powerful- she's inspiring because she is so engaging, warm, funny and caring, as well as brilliant. She doesn't pay lip service to the values of the campaigns she works so hard to win - she lives those values, every day.

That kind of integrity often goes unrecognised. But it's very clear to me that it sends ripples everywhere Hannah goes, through the professional campaigning world not least via all the people who've passed through 38 Degrees orbit, and far beyond. That's real impact.

Runner Ups

Glyn Thomas, WDM

Over the past two years, Glyn has delivered innovative and impactful digital projects at World Development Movement, a number of which are worthy of particular recognition in terms of their influence on fundraising and campaigning and their benefits to the sector. Of particular note is his work on email communications strategy through which he devised and delivered a strategy to maximise the engagement of new recruits to the WDM email list from Facebook and Care2, warming up new recruits and keeping them engaged in the work of WDM, taking online actions and making first donations online before going on to make regular donations.

The result of this work was a series of strategic email communications which innovatively integrated online and offline communications and segmented and personalised online and offline comms culminating in sector-leading conversion rates of up to 16%. The work helps to highlight the importance of making digital integral to the delivery of campaigns and fundraising success and also illustrates the successful ways fundraising and campaigns can be integrated to deliver success for an organisation. Glyn's presentations on this success hugely benefit the sector in developing impactful email strategies. In addition to increased conversion rates, Glyn’s work has resulted in a more than doubling of the online fundraising income for WDM.

Glyn has also delivered creative online actions for WDM’s food speculation campaign including Bankers Anonymous and Snake game as creative ways of engaging existing supporters and recruiting new supporters. Bankers Anonymous in particular was conceived as a way of taking supporters on a journey to become more involved with the campaign and with WDM, taking gradually more involved actions before being asked if they wanted to join a local group or take another action offline, thus again integrating on and offline supporter engagement. Several WDM local groups recruited new members as a result of this. The campaign for new legislation to limit the amounts banks can speculate on food commodities was successful, with decision makers commenting on the fact the online public pressure generated had given them the mandate to push the new legislation through.

Most recently, Glyn produced an interactive documentary to engage existing and recruit new supporters to WDM. The documentary tells the story of a complicated campaign around UK banks and financial institutions and their links to coal mining in Indonesia and the impact this is having. The documentary is hugely innovative, as it incorporates for the first time ever a way for people to join the campaign and email HSBC’s CEO from within a documentary itself, and is only the second ever interactive documentary produced by a UK charity or NGO. The documentary has resulted in a fantastic conversion rate of 10% of viewers taking action and signing up to WDM’s email list. In addition, it has opened new avenues for NGOs to explain complex campaign information in an engaging, accessible and innovative way and I believe is a medium that more and more NGOs will use in the coming years. The documentary is a sector leading project, taking as it does innovative learning from the media and documentary sectors and making them wholly relevant to NGOs. The documentary has been long listed for the One World Media Award in the digital media category.

Fahma Mohamed

Fahma has shown the not for profit sector that you can engage young people successfully in campaigning, from the ground up, and, given the right tools, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to have a direct impact on a disturbing issue.

Her work, alongside Integrate Bristol, has influenced more professionals in the sector to think seriously about diversity, particularly of age, gender, race and religion.

She has had an enormous impact; ten times more than most small charities dream of. Not only in terms of numbers but in terms of political response. The massive victory she won against FGM for girls all over the UK is a giant step towards ending this brutal practice forever.

Onjali Rauf

Taking the personal tragedy and the pain of a murdered aunt and transforming it into positive action, Onjali (formally) established Making Herstory in 2012 with a single view: to bridge the gap between men and women on the ground hungry to advance the cause of women's rights but not knowing what or how to go about it, and organisations and individuals already working to put a stop to the abuse, enslavement and trafficking of women and girls worldwide.

Under the banner of "Whatever we can, whenever we can', in less than two years this self-styled mobilisation 'unit' has not only inspired hundreds of people (especially from minority ethnic groups) across England to join and contribute to campaigns they would otherwise never have heard of (from No More Page Three, Child's Eyes and Stop The Traffik to Acid Survivors Foundation, One Billion Rising and Eaves' Poppy Project), but has actively disseminated information to both individuals and local communities to show how they too can become the 'eyes and ears' of the services and the women that need their help. This is being done through a range of uniquely informal ways such as through regularly delivered Making Herstory Book & Brunch Clubs, film clubs, a debating society, themed fundraising events, and the annual Mad Hattress' Tea Party.

Having never received any funding / grants, and running Making Herstory in her spare time (from updating the website and social media sites to creating materials for all events with the help of four Trustees), Onjali has not only invested her time and energies into mobilising people on the ground on behalf of other organisations and campaigns launched by such inspirational women as Caroline Criado-Perez, Lucy Anne Holmes, Leila Qalbi Hussein and Kat Banyard, but has worked to establish partnerships with agencies and DSV service providers to use her personal experiences of the needs of survivors, for the benefit of service development. She is currently working with the Newham Council Domestic & Sexual Violence Commissioner to help highlight issues women in Asian and Muslim communities in Newham (where she lives) face, is part of the Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, and also uses her spare time to write about wider issues (from racism to the angst!) in the women's rights sector for the Huffington Post and where commissioned, The Guardian.

Being a self-defined 'Muslim feminist', Onjali is also working to challenge preconceptions of what a feminist looks like and what feminism can mean - both to other established feminists / organisations and her own / other minority communities. This in itself has led her to begin speaking at schools and partaking of wider debates around issues currently plaguing the theory / word / concept of 'feminism', becoming a Women Of the World (WOW) mentor at the Southbank WOW festivals, and speaking to smaller groups of both men and women about and the injustices being borne by women as a result of religious misinterpretations.

The greatest impact Making Herstory has had and continues to have, is the people it has come into contact with and mobilised: for these are people that rarely / had never actively sought to understand or take action on behalf of a women's rights issue. For example, following a talk with University of Edinburgh Business School professors and students in December 2012, Onjali inspired all those attending to go away and begin researching and highlighting issues of trafficking and sexual exploitation patterns of women sex workers and domestic workers in Thailand and Egypt: these findings are currently being gathered so as to help inform and establish a programme of linked works with individuals working in these fields on the ground. In April 2013, following the horrors of the Rana Plaza collapse, Onjali mobilised volunteers on the ground in Bangladesh to begin researching long-term solutions for women who had been amputated as a result of the incident. These findings - and the problems faced by Making Herstory from government clamp-down on / gagging of victims - are now being used to forge a business model specifically to assist women and girls enslaved by economic necessity into the cotton and garment industries.

'Large' movements like those above are paralleled by encouraging hundreds of people across England to:

• donate goods and money for various appeals and women's shelters (for example, in Christmas 2013, Making Herstory i.e. collected for, compiled and delivered basic 'Feel You Again' toiletry bags to three women's shelters across London and are currently collecting bedsheets for 2 St. Mungo's homeless women's shelters);
• sign petitions (No More Page Three, Keep Women on UK Bank Notes);
• support campaigns for girls education (e.g. in 2012, Making Herstory supporters were mobilised to send in pictures of their support of the 'I Am Malala' campaign, and attend 'Girl Rising' screenings at BAFTA);

Rachel Collinson

Rachel's worked with dozens of local, national and international campaigns and fundraising drives, from small charities to big household names, she's been able to use her experience to diagnose ill websites, help charities communicate better and in a nut shell she's able to really help and advise charities on how they can change their supporters' experience. She is amazingly creative and high energy, always looking to over deliver.

Rachel is a huge supporter and influencer of the ECF community and was also one of the organisers of the second UK Campaign Bootcamp and helped inspire many women and minority campaigners to start coding, some for the first time!