Adrian Beney

Good fundraising is like visiting a great garden. You want to see the flowers and the trees, the fruit and the vegetables. Although there’s a tool shed somewhere, it’s not what you came to see, even though you know that without the tools there would be no garden.

This how fundraising should be – the money is just the means by which our clients do what they do to make the world a better place. We all need to keep our focus on the garden, not the tool shed.

Areas of expertise

Regular giving; cases for support; audits; feasibility studies; Gift Aid; training and coaching; prospect management; fundraising policy development; data and databases; automation of boring, repetitive processes; universities old and new; museums and libraries; environmental, scientific and religious causes.

More clients

15 Russell and 94 Group universities on the Regular Giving Benchmarking project; Council for Advancement and Support of Education; Church of England Pensions Board Charitable Funds; De Montfort University; Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust; Everyman Theatre, Liverpool; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Giggleswick School; Glasgow Life/Friends of Glasgow Museums; HEFCE; Institute of Fundraising; Institute of Physics; Keble College, Oxford; London School of Economics; University College London; University of Sussex; Traidcraft.

Before More

Degree in physics, interspersed with being a fishmonger; Students’ Union Vice-President during the Miners’ Strike; “headhunted” into my first fundraising job by an extraordinarily visionary College Principal who made fundraising easy, then 16 years establishing and growing the University of Durham’s Development and Alumni Relations Office; fundraising for everything from astrophysics to one of the UK’s first World Heritage Sites.

Outside More

Lay Member of Chapter (trustee) at Durham Cathedral, playing an active role in the governance of an institution which combines faith, education, music, art, tourism and heritage; making some time for family, sailing, photography, using my pilot’s licence… and gardening.