Founder & lead practitioner
Kevin Durham
A fundraising strategy is only worth what it does when it meets four hundred people, a late-running dinner and a bad PA. Kevin spent twenty years learning to read rooms before he ever wrote a fundraising plan — which is why the plan survives the room.
and still on the mic
The short version
Kevin’s first charity event was in 2005, on stage alongside Annie Lennox. Before that, and for some years afterwards, he worked in television: presenting for Fox, Warner and Universal, interviewing the likes of Tom Hardy, Reese Witherspoon and Robin Williams, and working as a comedy film actor and producer.
He has since raised over £10 million for charitable causes across the UK, Europe and the United States — including a single evening in Monte Carlo that raised over €1 million, and a run of events that finished at double their target or better.
None of which is the point. The point is what it taught him: that a room tells you what it needs, and that almost nobody is listening.
From reading rooms to designing them
Twenty years in front of audiences produced a conclusion that eventually became this business.
The rooms that raised the most were never the rooms with the best lots. They were the rooms where somebody had thought about the evening — what was asked for, when, and in what order. And the rooms that underperformed had almost always been assembled from parts, by suppliers who each did their bit and left.
So the work moved backwards, from the microphone into the months before it. The auctioneering did not stop; it stopped being the product.
He also built the platform
Most people in this industry sell software they did not build, or run events using somebody else’s.
Kevin built the Generosity Works platform himself — the bidding, the pledges, the Gift Aid capture, the regular giving, the offline event server that keeps working when the venue’s wifi does not. It exists because running real events kept exposing things the available tools could not do.
That is not a side project. It is the argument in working form: every mechanism in it is there to capture generosity as a gift rather than as a purchase.
The strategy leads. The auctioneering proves it.
Let’s talk about your number.
A conversation about your event, your room, and what the night should be raising.
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