Fundraising
Innovation Toolkit

'Innovation' is a term associated with jargon, complexity and a lot of misassumptions. If you ask Google, you’ll get over 300 million search results with thousands of definitions.

So, what is innovation?

Let’s start with what it is not.

It’s not lightbulb moments, sitting in a dark room waiting to be hit with a spark of genius. It’s not walking around in socks, throwing post-it notes at a wall with zany ideas about the future. And it’s not just shiny, brand new products to show off to the world (though we’re definitely not against those!)

Instead, innovation is a process of defining a problem, coming up with a solution, and then developing, testing, and refining it.

It’s structured, logical and evidence-based method for turning new ideas into commercial successes..

Innovation can be small - such as making continuous tweaks to improve something we’re already doing. Or it might be bigger - like creating a new fundraising product to target a new audience.

But whatever the application, it’s important to realise...

Innovation isn’t just for people with innovation in their job title.

It’s part of everyone’s role in helping SJA to improve our work and expand our impact.

We interpret innovation as: ​

'evolving existing and developing brand new ways to generate income to support our mission’ ​

It’s not just the shiny new stuff and it's not just for people with innovation in their job title - it's part of everyone's role.