Let’s Celebrate Purity’s 5-year Anniversary! 

 

Five years ago today Purity opened it’s doors and we made our first phone call – by our head coach Tania to a Greenpeace supporter which (of course) ended in a pledge – this call was the result of a frantic month behind the scenes and the start of something wonderful.

When I look back to that time, and the frantic 6 weeks prior to that, when we were securing funding, premises, a dialler platform and IT kit, it feels like only yesterday. We were galvanised into action after Pure Fundraising sadly closed its doors when Pure’s three main clients asked me if we, as a team, had thought about setting up a new agency ourselves. It was a move they would support fully – and something they really did, for which I was, and remain hugely grateful. But we couldn’t have done this without the strength of the whole team who so believed in what we were doing and were passionate about being able to continue to raise funds for amazing causes.

We sat down and planned out what we wanted to be, and more importantly, who we wanted to be as an organisation: this was to be providing the highest quality ethical fundraising, to be nurturing our team and fostering a culture of respect and support.

To say the last five years have been a rollercoaster is an understatement – we have weathered the storm by surviving being a new start business, moving premises twice, and then suddenly Covid and having to pivot overnight to running a remote-working environment. And then more recently, the challenging staffing crisis that has affected not just us, but so many businesses around the UK and beyond.

Our operation has changed beyond recognition as a result, and I would be lying if I didn’t say that we are still adapting to those changes every day. One thing that we vowed at the start was to be completely transparent with our clients, and I fully believe that having that transparency when we have gone through difficult changes or faced challenges has been a key to our success and strengthened those relationships – we work with our clients as true partners and we value those relationships.

Our evolution around products and services has been an organic and natural process, borne out of the extensive knowledge and experience our team has accrued over many years of running so many successful fundraising campaigns.

Initially, we started out as a telephone-only agency, calling only for donor development campaigns for our clients. However, very early on we started acquisition calling and this has become a major part of what we do now, alongside all the donor development and stewardship campaigns.

As we grew, we quickly realised that being able to provide a more multi-channel offering was beneficial in so many ways – more cost-effective for the charities, but also often more successful than when employing several agencies to cover the various campaign elements. Working with our client’s trust in us, we trialled our own integrated campaigns and found the process can be more joined up and the insight that we have from speaking with supporters every day can inform continued strategic and tactical development over the campaign’s timeline.

In 2021 we launched our Digital and Consultancy divisions, and we are now working with clients to provide end-to-end multi-channel campaigns, where we manage the process from start to finish and design and implement a robust supporter journey.

This is such an exciting development and I don’t think five years ago we ever thought this would be where we are. But it makes so much sense! I know our clients are loving the joined-up approach that we can offer – from design to implementation of a campaign through to final analysis, insight and reviews of the results, all of which then inform decisions for future campaigns.

None of this story would have been possible without the amazing team we have at Purity – we have retained the majority of that original founding team and gained many more team members along the way. We now have 28 back-office staff and 140 fundraisers, all of whom continue to show pride and commitment to quality and ethics in everything we do. We have retained the culture of support and continue to build on that – I am regularly moved when I receive wonderful emails from fundraisers and team members about what it means to be part of the Purity family.

This makes me immensely proud of what the team has achieved and I look forward to continuing to develop Purity and our team in the years ahead.

For me, five years in, I want to say a massive thank you to every single Purity team member, current and past (they may leave, but they will always be part of the Purity family!), to all our awesome clients, for whom we love fundraising for, to the lovely supplier partners we work with, and to all those supporters we speak to who have pledged an incredible £45 million over the last five years!

I am humbled to work in this sector and to work with some of the most amazing people every single day.

Helen Mackenzie

Founder and Chief Executive