For the latest episode of the Safe Bet Show, Martin Lycka sat down with Arthur Paikowsky, President of the International Centre for Responsible Gambling, as he revealed that fundraising has become increasingly driven by technology.
Paikowsky also disclosed how the ICRG, formerly known as the NCRG, has evolved in recent years and how the standards of excellence in fundraising involve interacting with people.
Analysing the future of fundraising, he stated: “In a lot of industries, everybody’s looking for the next best thing, the next big idea. And I have to tell you, I’m pretty old school when it comes to this, because if you find something that works, and it worked in the first 10 years of my career and the next 10 years of my career and so on and so forth.
“I’m going back to the well. I keep doing what I do best. In fact, I had a conversation yesterday with an extremely well-known senior executive in the field. And he said to me, I learned a lot about fundraising from you. To me, that’s a tremendous compliment. And what he was really saying is, in the course of a relatively short time, which is about three years, less than three years that I’ve been affiliated with the ICRG.”
He added that being a veteran in the industry holds positive and negative connotations.
“When you deal with people that are younger than you, it mostly sort of falls on the two extremes”, stated Paikowski.
“The one extreme is and this is the bad extreme is you’re a dinosaur. You’re yesterday’s news. You don’t use technology the way we do because we grew up with it. That’s the one side. The other side is you’re respected and revered for the knowledge and the accomplishments that you’ve had over almost now.”
Additionally, the continued leveraging of technology has resulted in donor fatigue according to Paikowski.
He said: “When you talk to people in the fundraising world and you say how many of these hits do you get on your computer every single day [and] somebody’s asking you for money? And how many then do you respond to in a positive way? The answer is almost always, I get a lot and I don’t respond to any of them.
“And so I think actually what I’ve tried to explain when I’m given an opportunity to talk about the state of fundraising today versus the way it was decades ago, is that all this is really doing is creating donor fatigue, and that’s a bad thing.”
