Italy: Manuela Sorrentino

Manuela Sorrentino has a degree in Literature and Foreign Modern languages at the Cattolica del Sacro Cuore University and a MBA at the Open University in UK. She has been inside the fundraising world for more than 12 years. Nowadays she is the Marketing and Fundraising Director of Action aid Italia. She is also member of the Italian association for fundraiser, Assif  

What is the impact of the individual fundraising for AA Italy?
Concerning the 2006 Balance Sheet , the donations made from private donors impact of about 94%-95% on the total of our fundraising .The corporate donations impact only of 3%.

How many Italian donors does your organization have, now?
If we consider also regular donors, therefore with our programme of long-distance adoption, thy are about 150,000 people.

 

Who are your donors?
Well, for our programme of long-distance adoption more than half of our donors are female, married with an average age between 25 to 65 years old. Mostly of them have a medium level of education and they live mostly in the North of Italy.

However, during the last 5 years we have registered a general increase in the number of donors. Even if we have seen that it is more and more difficult and expensive finding new donors, probably because the number of organisations that have long-distant adoption project is increased, too.

What did you do for attract new donors?
We have changed our way of payment. More than half of our donors now use the RID system (a direct interbank payment). We introduce it for about three years because we have seen that a payment by transfer was not the right choice to support our ling-distance adoption programmes, that required a constantly and regularly commitment of 300 Euros yearly. With a credit transfer system payment was common for donors skipping payments, that of course was a problem for our project.

 
Anything else that you decide to change in the relationship with your donors?
We use mostly online communication system, our website first of all.
In 1993 we used more often offline media campaigns such us direct mail, posters and coupon.

 

In your opinion which is the future for fundraising?
Online. Online and in general social networking are getting more and more important to reach a wide range of audience about our projects.
Now, we have just launch a campaign against hunger free rights, where it is possible sign the online petition and getting involved into the cause through cyber activism.

 

To find out more visit http://www.hungerfree.it

 

See also other interviews:

– Athla Onlus: Ferdinando Orlando
– WWF: Paolo Giganti
– Cesvi: Daniele Fusi